Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is the story of a young scientist named Gifty, who looks to religion, science and writing to find meaning for the pain she experienced growing up.
Gifty is a sixth-year candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford School of Medicine, where she’s studying reward-seeking behavior in mice. Her research design entails getting mice hooked on a sugary drink and then putting them in a cage in which pressing a lever will randomly give them either some of the drink or an electric shock. Gifty wants to know if the mice can learn to restrain themselves from pressing the lever to avoid the shocks. And indeed, some can. But to Gifty, the most interesting ones are the ones whose addiction has become total. Those “who can’t stop pushing the lever, even after being shocked dozens of times.” These are the mice that Gifty studies to find out why they can’t stop pressing the lever and if there is anything she can do to change that.
Narrating in the first person, Gifty is reluctant to admit that her interest in studying the neural circuits of addiction stems from her personal history. But when she takes in her mother, a pious Ghanaian who is suffering from severe, debilitating depression, we learn that Gifty’s brother Nana was a gifted high school athlete who became addicted to opioids and died of a heroin overdose after a physician prescribed him OxyContin following a sports-related knee injury. Gifty’s determination to discover the scientific basis of addiction is in many ways her attempt at understanding why there is so much pain in her family. And whether there’s a way to avoid it.
Much like the protagonist of Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi grew up attending the Pentecostal evangelical church in Alabama. In an interview with the New York Times, the author says that she left the church as a teenager when she realized that the (predominantly white) church in Alabama, “was itself a weapon formed against me and the people I loved and, not to put too fine a point on it, justice and truth.” For Gyasi, the experience of leaving this community was a lonely one. She tried turning to literature for guidance on how to make sense of it only to find that few novels (except ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ by James Baldwin) dealt with faith and evangelism seriously.
This experience of leaving the church is at the heart of Transcendent Kingdom. Instead of turning to literature for answers though, Gifty, the novel’s protagonist, turns to science.
The main triumph of Transcendent Kingdom is Gyasi’s elegant prose. She shows in a very nuanced and very personal way how both religion and science have helped and hurt her characters. Religion has given Gifty’s family comfort and community, but it has also been used to discriminate against them, to make them feel like they are somehow less worthy of God’s blessings. Science has also been both a gift and a curse. As a successful scientist, Gifty might one day understand how to prevent, and even cure addiction. And yet, it is that same scientific knowledge that has been abused to develop highly addictive drugs, like OxyContin, the opioid analgesic that Nana overdoses on.
Gifty’s struggle to reconcile these two sides of her—the scientific and the spiritual—reflects a contemporary debate about this tension. When she was growing up, Gifty was surrounded by “people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith.” As a Ph.D. student, she is now among “scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak.” Her peers often remind her that religious belief and scientific thinking are “diametrically opposed.”
As Gifty reveals more and more about her childhood, the familiar tension between religion and science takes up a central place in her narrative. Throughout the novel, Gifty vacillates between the two paths to make sense of her grief. She points out that humans are the only animals who can ask “what’s the point of all this?” She marvels at how “our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion.” What is powerful and perhaps so attractive about religion is that it can be comforting when the answer is as simple as: “because God deemed it so.” But what happens when one loses faith and science is too limited to explain? Or as she says, what do we do “if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?”
Gifty ultimately decides that “this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false.” Even as she’s on the way to becoming a successful scientist, she says that both religion and science have been valuable paths for her, but that “ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.”
Alas, this is where the novel lost me. At this point, Transcendent Kingdom can be read to suggest that religion and science are equally worthwhile means of understanding. Or rather, it might suggest that both fail and that they fail in the same way.
I disagree. Sure, it may be that these days we place too much faith in science’s promise to solve our problems (e.g. to solve climate change). Moreover, many of us often defer to scientists not because we understand the underlying science behind a problem but because we trust the scientific integrity of the people behind it. It is also true that religious narratives might be able to speak to human needs—for communion, for transcendence—in ways that scientific theories can’t hope to satisfy.
But what Gifty doesn’t discuss is that the scientific method urges us to keep questioning. Religious doctrine doesn’t (or at least hasn’t historically). The scientific method demands that its methods and results be continuously scrutinized and that its hypothesis be verifiable and falsifiable. It is because of the scientific method of observation and experimentation that we know much of what we know about the world, including how diseases spread, how our immune system works, and how addiction and depression work. And when science does give us answers, we arrive at them through understanding. Religious belief, on the contrary, requires that we accept it without question. It belittles the need for understanding.
Towards the end of the Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty says that, although she would never be able to admit it to her colleagues or audience, she has concluded that “at a certain point, science fails.” There are questions that we cannot answer, and so, those questions become little more than guesses or philosophical ideas about how things should be, she says.
Of course, there’s some truth to this. Despite how much science has advanced, there’s still so much we don’t know: how did life begin? What is consciousness? Are we alone in the universe? How do we beat antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Will we ever cure cancer?
The problem with Gifty’s conclusion in Transcendent Kingdom is that even when science seems to fail at answering our questions, it still triumphs. As Gifty herself says, many times “we don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on.” Slowly, over time, we do find answers. We make progress. We gain understanding.
That said, what this novel does do beautifully is add another solution to Gifty’s problem of finding meaning through science or religion: art. When we can’t find meaning in religion or science, humans turn to the art of the written word. Gifty writes in her journal. She says, “I wrote about how writing itself made me feel closer to God and how my journal was a particularly holy act, given that it was the Word that was with God, that was God.” She later says how she became disillusioned with this idea, but what the author, Yaa Gyasi, leaves us with is the possibility that the novel itself is how she finds meaning.
In this blog, we turn to literature too. We read stories and we take notes in the margin because stories, as we’ve so often said here before, are ultimately about who we are, where we come from, and what it all means. And what science and literature allow us to do, as Gyasi says through Gifty, is to persevere. “Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
What do you think? Grab yourself a copy of Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi and tell me what you thought about it in the comments.
Discussion questions for Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
- How do you understand the title of the novel in relation to the story?
- Parts of the world—like Western Europe—have experienced a decrease in religious observance and yet, many people still identify as Christian. Do you think religion is becoming extinct in places like Europe?
- In what ways has science replaced religion as a source of comfort for humanity?
- Do you think there is a place for faith in science? Do scientists need faith in their work? And do you think we place “too much” faith in science?
- Religion is concerned with the question of being “good,” of having the “right” thoughts. How do you understand the relation between morality and religion?
- Gifty reflects on how neuroscientists never speak about the soul. She says they equate “the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain.” Do you think the mind has replaced the soul in the modern day ethos? Has mindfulness become our modern-day religion?
- What do you think is Gifty’s motivation for her research on addiction? Why does she feel so much shame around Nana’s addiction?
- Gifty privately considers her work in the lab as holy—“if not holy, then at least sacrosanct.” Do you think Gifty’s faith and sense of connection to God make her a better or worse scientist?
- Have you experienced any personal tension between religion and science? How have you reconciled it?
- At one point, Gifty cites a study of schizophrenics in India, Ghana and California, which found that while the Indian and Ghanaian subjects in the study tended to hear kind voices, the Californian schizophrenics were usually “bombarded by harsh, hate-filled voices, by violence, intrusion.” Thinking about this, do you agree with Gifty’s mother when she says that depression is a “Western” illness? Do you know how depression is seen and handled in different cultures?
- What did you think about the novel’s ending?