Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

there was no war in my mother’s 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. A simple hunger, impossible to satisfy.

I dreaded hearing the worship leader’s warbling soprano every Sunday morning. It scared me in a familiar way. Like when I was five and Nana was eleven, and we found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Nana scooped it into his big palms, and the two of us ran home. The house was empty. The house was always empty, but we knew we needed to act fast, because if our mother came home to find the bird, she’d kill it outright or take it away and drop it in some small stretch of wilderness, leaving it to die. She’d tell us exactly what she’d done too. She was never the kind of parent who lied to make her children feel better. I’d spent my whole childhood slipping teeth under my pillow at night and finding teeth there in the morning. Nana left the bird with me while he poured a bowl of milk for it. When I held it in my hands, I felt its fear, the unending shiver of its little round body, and I started crying. Nana put its beak to the bowl and tried to urge it to drink, but it wouldn’t, and the shiver that was in the bird moved in me. That’s what the worship leader’s voice sounded like to me—the shaky body of a bird in distress, a child who’d grown suddenly afraid.

Then, my whole body felt raw, all of the time, like if you touched me the open wound of my flesh would throb. Now, I’m scabbed over, hardened.

My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, 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.

The fact that he wanted to be with me at all made me feel like I was getting away with some con.

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.

She didn’t trust washing machines. She didn’t trust dishwashers either. “When you want something done right, do it,” she would often say.

I started to see the ridiculousness of that idea, the idea of a refined and elevated American poverty that implies a base, subhuman third world. The belief in this subhumanity was what made those posters and infomercials so effective, no different really from the commercials for animal shelters,

I held my breath and counted to three, waiting for the urge to say something mean to pass.

According to a 2015 study by T. M. Luhrmann, R. Padmavati, H. Tharoor, and A. Osei, schizophrenics in India and Ghana hear voices that are kinder, more benevolent than the voices heard by schizophrenics in America. In the study, researchers interviewed schizophrenics living in and around Chennai, India; Accra, Ghana; and San Mateo, California. What they found was that many of the participants in Chennai and Accra described their experiences with the voices as positive ones. They also recognized the voices as human voices, those of a neighbor or a sibling. By contrast, none of the San Mateo participants described positive experiences with their voices. Instead, they described experiences of being bombarded by harsh, hate-filled voices, by violence, intrusion.

“Inscape,”