Yaa Gyasi’s novel “A Supreme Kingdom”. Review – culture

In the search for consolation, God is not always the best person to talk to. And his kingdom is not that easy to find, notes Gifty, who has been writing “Dear God” letters for years and attending a very evangelical church in Alabama with her mother. She lets Jesus “save” her, and yet her brother dies of a heroin overdose. Nevertheless, the mother is depressed in bed. Still the father is gone. So which kingdom should come?

Gifty is the first-person narrator in “A Supreme Kingdom”, the second novel by the Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi. If you zoom out far, it can be interpreted as a search for some kind of kingdom. Although this is a noticeably old-fashioned term in countries where there have been no monarchs for a long time, or where there have never been any. “Homo sapiens is the only animal that believes it is transcending its realm,” writes Gyasi. The only animal that believes it can transfer its current state to another, higher one. Gyasi’s assumption is that there exists a higher kingdom, at least as a place of longing, a place where all pain is overcome.

When the religious kingdom has had its day, the world of science, constructed as an alternative, comes, where the king who has the facts is king. As a PhD student at Stanford, Gifty is researching how reward mechanisms work in the brains of mice and what this has to do with addiction. “I had exchanged the Pentecostal movement of my childhood for this new religion, this new search, knowing full well that I would never know everything.” Faith and science are neither eternal antagonists nor mutually beneficial principles, but only attempts to deal with trauma and loss.

The tension is clear and in this novel time and space are also limited

Perhaps Gyasi also sees the kingdom geographically, depending on your perspective in the USA or in Ghana, where Gifty’s family comes from and where they don’t feel they belong. Again and again the idea of ​​a queen kingdom emerges, a place where black scientists can simply be scientists. In any case, what is certain is that where Gifty and her mother are, it is not, this kingdom.

Yaa Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and lives in the USA, became famous in 2016 with her first novel “Homecoming”. In it, she tells a two-century story of slavery in Ghana and the wounds that will continue to be the legacy of future generations. Gyasi is good at making tensions tangible. Present and past, Ghana and the USA, belief and doubt, external or internal imprisonment.

With “Heimkehr” it worked in a natural and thrilling way, each chapter is a complex yet coherent portrait of a figure and a time. All are the product of the decisions of their ancestors and the prevailing balance of power. In “A Supreme Kingdom” she reduces time and space to a family of the present, but strives for a similar complexity.

The narrator tries not to have to get too close to her life

The story begins when Gifty returns from the lab one day to find her mother at home, silent and deeply sad. Starting from this moment, Gyasi fans out the family history in several flashbacks. How the mother came from Ghana, how the father followed and at some point couldn’t stand it any longer in America, how the brother Nana grew up to be a basketball talent, became addicted to drugs after an injury and died. How the hypocritical evangelical church shakes its head at it. How at that moment the facade of Gifty’s mother collapses and the depression breaks out.

In numerous passages Gyasi writes more scientifically and essayistically than in literary prose. Instead of depicting problems in scenes, the author lets her character Gifty reflect on them from the outside. She gives a lecture on the subject of depression: “I am professionally interested in anhedonia because it is about behavior that strives for reward, but personally I have never experienced it to the same extent as with the subjects I study.” On addiction, “A lot of people drink and don’t become alcoholics, but others take a single swig and a switch flips and who knows why? The only sure way to avoid addiction is to never try a drug.” That’s how matter-of-fact someone speaks whose brother died of drugs. The fact that, as a neuroscientist, she researches on the subject of addiction, of all things, seems transparent and somewhat flat in terms of kitchen psychology.

This distancing is an evasive maneuver of the first-person narrator in order not to have to get too close to her own life. In doing so, the author deprives the reader of the opportunity to draw their own conclusions. Too much has been explained. It is perhaps Gyasi’s stylistic attempt to transcend language, if you will, away from the emotional to the analytical. Just as Gifty wants to gain insights with her mouse experiments, with which the person susceptible to addiction can be made less susceptible in the long term. Want to improve him. A kingdom above sickness.

Gyasi does not do justice to all the issues raised, the space of fiction is too crowded with religion and hypocrisy, science, depression, illness and social ostracism, poverty, addiction, family, racism in Ghana and the USA. Ideas for at least three books. Gifty is sandwiched between all of this; following her inwardly on her overstrained retreat is therefore not easy, Gyasi too indecisively sets the focus of her story.

Only the figure of the mother is drawn with the psychological acuteness with which Gyasi also created her figures in “Homecoming”. “She was a very matter-of-fact woman, not exactly cruel, but close to it,” says Gifty. Pragmatism also takes her from Ghana to Alabama, where she attends the first church that she can come to, the very white evangelical “First Assemblies of God Church”. The mother thinks there is no racism if you don’t talk about it. Nor does she “believe” in mental illness. When the son becomes addicted to drugs, she worships it with all her might, God will judge it. God does not judge anything. She withered away, deprived of all her beliefs, what a sad and fascinating woman.

It comes as no surprise that the sublime kingdom of whatever kind is not easily accessible to the characters. For Gyasi, the key to felt salvation in the end does not lie in the rituals of faith or in the accuracy of science, but, if at all, in the possibility of breaking free from it all and looking inward.