Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

“A real Christian is the one who can give his pet parrot to the town

gossip.”

The funny thing about the phrases that my mom picked up is that she always got them a little wrong. I was her bleeding heart, not a bleeding heart. It’s a crime shame, not a crying shame. She had a little southern accent that tinted her Ghanaian one.

In college, I’d read Walden because a boy I found beautiful found the book beautiful. I understood nothing but highlighted everything, including this: Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

I wanted to make him uncomfortable, or maybe just to transfer my own discomfort to him, and so I kept staring.

I’ve always found that traffic on a bridge brings everyone closer to their own personal edge. Inside each car, a snapshot of a breaking point, drivers looking out toward the water and wondering What if? Could there be another way out?

“Cleanliness is godliness,” she used to say. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” I would correct, and she would scowl at me. What was the difference?

For a long time, most of my life, in fact, it had been just me and her, but this pairing was unnatural. She knew it and I knew it, and we both tried to ignore what we knew to be true—there used to be four of us, then three, two. When my mother goes, whether by choice or not, there will be only one.

He used to hang around her mother’s food stand, joking with my grandmother about her stubborn Fante, coaxing her into giving him a free baggie of achomo, which he called chin chin like the Nigerians in town did. My

I could picture the movie montage of us, the days spelled out at the bottom of the screen, my outfits changing, our actions the same.

I went home and asked my mother if this was true, and she told me to keep quiet and stop bothering her with questions. It’s what she said anytime I asked her for stories, and, back then, all I ever did was ask her for stories.

and if there was hunger, it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another.

tro-tro

But walking around with my father, she’d seen how America changed around big black men. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months.

She wanted to summon him out of his funk, and to do so, she knew she needed to swim out of her own.

In high school my grades were so good that the world seemed to whittle this decision down for me: doctor. An immigrant cliché, except I lacked the overbearing parents. My mother didn’t care what I did and wouldn’t have forced me into anything.

She was never the kind of parent who lied to make her children feel better.

Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house.

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. 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. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

Some days when I got home from the lab I would go into my room, my mother’s room, and tell her all the things I’d done that day, except I wouldn’t say them aloud, I’d just think them.

I told her about Ama Ata Aidoo’s book Changes, in which the character Esi says, “you cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that to the best of your knowledge, there is not, and never was any word or phrase in that society’s indigenous language which describes that idea or item.”

memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of

being around to be judged.

Yes, she’s insufferable, but she’s ours and so we must suffer her.

She had a habit of

sticking her tongue out when she poured things. Years later, in the bathroom pouring soap into a dispenser, I’d caught myself in the mirror making that same face and it had startled me. The thing I feared, becoming my mother, was happening, physically, in spite of myself.

I suspect that this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be.

that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.

He smelled like vetiver and musk and the jojoba oil he put in his hair. Hours after I’d left him, I would find traces of those scents on my fingers, my neck, my breasts, all those places where we had brushed up against each other, touched.

It felt illicit to read about all of that flesh—breasts like fawns, necks like ivory towers—in the pages of this holy book.

I almost never let a “y’all” slip from my lips, and when I did Raymond seemed to savor it like a drop of honey on his tongue. That word used sparingly, thoughtlessly, was the only remaining evidence of my Alabama years.

It should have been obvious to us. We should have seen it coming, but we didn’t see what we didn’t want to see.

If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound. And what a wound my father leaving was.

We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body.

Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but

utterly vacuous way of people who think it’s important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?

It was easy enough to not do anything wrong or say anything wrong. But to not think sinfully? To not think about lying or stealing or hitting your brother when he comes into your room intent on torturing you, was that even possible? Do we have control over our thoughts?

I could control one layer, the most readily available layer, but there was always a sublayer lurking. That sublayer was truer, more immediate, more essential, than anything else. It spoke softly but constantly, and the things it said were the very things that allowed me to live and to be. Now I understand that we have a subconscious life, vibrant and vital, that acts in spite of “ourselves,” our conscious selves.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Here is a separation. Your heart, the part of you that feels. Your mind, the part of you that thinks. Your soul, the part of you that is.

It breaks my heart now, to see that face, to recognize the lie of masculinity sitting atop the shoulders of a young child.

I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop,

There was a kind of “more is more” attitude toward religion at my mother’s home church. Bring on the water, the Spirit, the fire.

She buried our umbilical cords on the beach of her mother’s sea town like all the mothers before her, and then she took her firstborn to be blessed. More is more. More blessing, more protection.

In college I took a poetry class on Gerard Manley Hopkins to satisfy a humanities requirement.

“Hopkins is all about a delight in language,” she said one day. “I mean, listen to this: ‘Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.’ He’s taking so much pleasure out of the way these words fit together, out of the sound of them, and we, the readers, get equal pleasure reading it.”

My mother had made bofrot, puff-puff, balls of fried dough, and before long all of the children were engaged in an all-out war, the bofrot as our weapon.

“What’s the point of all of this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?

People would pay a lot of money to someone who could turn the brain into a sieve, draining out all of that now-useless knowledge—the exact way your ex liked to be kissed, the street names of the places you no longer live—leaving only the essential, the immediate.

There are so many things I wish I could

forget, but maybe “forget” isn’t quite right. There are so many thing...