Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

“Look at what God made. Look at what I made,” she said in Twi.

She almost never admitted to racism. Even Mr. Thomas, who had never called my mother anything other than “that nigger,” was, to her, just a confused old man.

The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay?

“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.

complete and utter attention, attention without compromise.

More treacherous still, perhaps, is the fact that it is the mother, of all people, who is ignoring the baby, not a sibling or a father.

The thing I feared, becoming my mother, was happening, physically, in spite of myself.

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

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.

But to not think sinfully?

She didn’t trust washing machines. She didn’t trust dishwashers either.

When she spoke Twi to me, she was her mother-self, stern and scary, warm.

she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

If the brain makes it possible for ‘us’ to feel and think, then what is ‘

my mother rarely talked about the past.

I am angry that she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don’t see her that way either.

couldn’t imagine living the way she lived, free, like an exposed wire ready and willing to touch whatever it touched.

she suffered and she persevered, perhaps in equal measure.

But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given

more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.