Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

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.

Like many Americans, I knew very little about the rest of the world.

I trembled, and in the one second it took for the tremble to move through my body, I stopped believing in God. It happened that quickly, a tremble-length reckoning. One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly, toward an ever-shifting bottom.

“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.”

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?

“I don’t believe in mental illness.” She claimed that it, along with everything else she disapproved of, was an invention of the West.

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.”

Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, stalking me, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley.

but 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.

wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. 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.

“If you find it difficult to pray, why don’t you try writing to God instead? Remember, everything we do is prayer.

“Such waste,” my mother said whenever she came to a game to find the sidelines littered with wedges, little land mines of uneaten fruit, of privilege. My family was always attuned to such waste: chicken left on the bone by diners too polite to eat with their hands, crusts cut off of sandwiches for children who took only a single bite and left the rest.

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.

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?

was a good, pious child, committed to not sinning, and the definition that our pastor gave confounded me. 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?

Black girl sin number one: getting your hair wet when it wasn’t wash day.

His willingness to play into Nana’s game was itself a sign that he saw God as a kind of prize that only some were good enough to win. It was like he wanted Hell for those villagers, like he believed there were people for whom Hell is a given, deserved.

And the part that bothered me most was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people P.T. believed deserved Hell were people who looked like Nana and me.

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

It was neither the first nor the last time at Harvard that I would feel as though I was starting from behind, trying to make up for an early education that had been full of holes.

We were the only black people at the First Assemblies of God Church; my mother didn’t know any better. She thought the God of America must be the same as the God of Ghana, that the Jehovah of the white church could not possibly be different from the one of the black church.

that day when she first walked into the sanctuary, she began to lose her children, who would learn well before she did that not all churches in America are created equal, not in practice and not in politics.

I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be.

“I think we’re made out of stardust and God made the stars,”

“Yeah, but it’s the way you learn about right and wrong that’s so messed up,” the first man said. “I felt so guilty all the time because no one ever actually sits you down and says, ‘This task, of being blameless in the eyes of God or whatever, is impossible. You will want to have sex, you will want to lie, you will want to cheat, even when you know it’s wrong,’ and just that desire to do something bad, for me, was crushing.”

That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.