Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

My guess is that it wasn’t just Nana’s body that couldn’t sit still. He had a mind that was always thrumming. He was curious, intense, often quiet, and when he asked a question there were a hundred more lurking behind it. This constant striving for exactness, the right position for his legs, the right thing to say, was what made him someone who could shoot free throws for hours on end, but it also made him someone who had a harder time changing the narrative—getting from a negative self-statement to a positive one. When he said, “I don’t give a fuck what he thinks,” he said it in such a way that it was abundantly clear to me that this was precisely what he cared most deeply about. And because Nana cared deeply, thought deeply, I imagine that these were the kinds of negative statements he would reconstruct if he were to have watched a video of himself playing basketball or simply living his life. It didn’t hurt his game any, but it hurt him in other ways.