41 pages • 1 hour read
Transcendent Kingdom
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Chapters 46-PostscriptChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 46 Summary
In this chapter Gifty starts working from home to be closer to her mother. She also discusses the nature of addiction and its connection to human ingenuity and curiosity. Gifty suggests that human beings are the only animal “that is willing to try something new, fun, pointless, dangerous, thrilling, stupid, even if we might die in the trying” (336). In other words, it is the desire to take risks, which also leads to addictive behavior, that distinguishes us as human.
Chapter 47 Summary
Chapter 47 consists of a journal entry from Gifty. It is connected to the discussion of risk-taking behavior in the previous chapter. Gifty describes how, as a child, she had a competition with her friend, Ashley, to see who could hold their breath longest underwater. Gifty ends up holding her breath for so long that she passes out and nearly dies before being woken up by Ashley’s mother.
Chapter 48 Summary
Gifty contrasts her own experiences, particularly the fact that she did not drink until the second year of college, with those of her brother, who was constantly having parties and drinking, noting, “I have always been slow to recklessness, afraid of danger and of death” (341). When Gifty does have her first drink, she ends up bonding with another student from a nearby dorm named Anne. They develop an intimate and partly romantic friendship, and they experiment one time with magic mushrooms together. However, their friendship is undermined when Anne insists that Gifty tell her stories about her past.
Chapter 49 Summary
Gifty recalls how she had nightmares for a week in high school, three and a half years after her return from Ghana. She used to wake up drenched in sweat but could neither control nor remember her nightmares. To deal with them, she starts talking to her dead brother. She asks him questions, and her mother reveals that she talks to Nana, too, all the time.
Gifty explains to Anne in college one night that Nana died of an overdose. Anne reacts by crying all night, something that infuriates Gifty and leads her to permanently break off their friendship.
Chapter 50 Summary
One day in the lab, Han asks Gifty out for dinner. She is pleased and excited, but the invitation makes her think about her relationship with Raymond and how it started to break down. At the heart of their problems was Gifty’s unwillingness to talk about her family with Raymond or let him meet them. She had met his family, but she kept postponing letting Raymond her mother. In fact, when he proposed a trip to Ghana, in part so that they could visit her father, she lied and said she would go when she had no intention of doing so.
Chapter 51 Summary
Katherine, Gifty’s friend from medical school, has been asking if she can come over to Gifty’s flat. Finally, Gifty relents, and Katherine visits her. She feels slightly embarrassed about her austere apartment and about the fact that her mother is still lying in bed when Katherine arrives. Nevertheless, she is grateful for the company and starts to open up, telling Katherine about the journal she used to keep.
Chapter 52 Summary
Gifty has reached the end of her research. She has found that “we could get an animal, even that limping mouse, to restrain itself from seeking reward by altering its brain activity” (376). In other words, Gifty was able to stop the mouse from pressing the lever for the Ensure and therefore “cured” its addiction. This realization provokes a feeling of awe in Gifty and causes her to draw a comparison with the religious feeling in her childhood of being “touched” by God.
Chapter 53 Summary
Gifty is writing up her paper on reward-seeking behavior. She finds the process fulfilling. At the same time, she discusses the final breakdown of her relationship with Raymond. She admitted in her journal to lying to him about the Ghana trip. Raymond found and read her journal and confronted her. This led to an argument in which Gifty did not apologize and to Raymond leaving her for good.
Chapter 54 Summary
Getting home from the lab one day, Gifty discovers that her mother is not in the apartment. Gifty calls Katherine to help try and find her, and they trawl the local area in Katherine’s car. Finally, they find Gifty’s mother swimming in water near the side of a road in her pajamas. Gifty takes her home and washes her in the bath. There, her mother tells her, “Don’t be afraid. God is with me” (390). Once her mother is asleep, Gifty goes for a drive on her own, north towards San Francisco.
Postscript Summary
It is the future, several years after Gifty’s mother left the apartment that evening. Gifty is now living in New Jersey with Han, with her own lab at the University of Princeton. Her mother has died, and Han was beside her when it happened. Gifty explains that Han is the first person to truly understand her past and her obsessions. However, he does not understand her continuing connection to religion, despite her not technically believing in God. This strange link is encapsulated by the fact that she often returns to church and stares at the figure of Jesus.
Chapter 46-Postscript Analysis
When Gifty is talking about her evangelical upbringing and how she now feels embarrassed by it, her friend Katherine retorts that “it’s beautiful and important to believe in something, anything at all” (371). This comment irks Gifty. She associates the sentiment with “faux spirituality.” In this view, “God” can be anything and everything and is valid in so far as he brings a vague gloss of meaning or wonder to the world. According to Gifty, this reasoning is wrong. For God to have meaning, or bring meaning, he must be something specific and literal. He must have a definite meaning, transcending personal speculation and what one would like him to be; rather, he must be rooted in the words of the bible. In turn, our belief in him should be based in a specific tradition’s or church’s interpretation of those words.
This reaction seems to imply a dichotomy for Gifty regarding belief: Either you believe in the literal, biblical God and he is the most important thing in your life, or you do not believe at all. Gifty’s reflections seem to rule out spiritual halfway houses. They rule out any sort of comfortable pantheisms or agnosticisms, which demur from conviction about God but hold open the possibility that he is working through nature or human beings or the beauty of a sunset. This dichotomy has obvious consequences for Gifty herself. Since she has given up on the first form of belief, following Nana’s death, it should follow that she does not believe in God at all. Indeed, there are times when she accepts precisely that logic.
Al the same time, especially towards the end of the novel, there are moments when she seems to entertain a non-literal and non-orthodox religiosity. For example, when talking about first observing neurons firing via fluorescent proteins, she exclaims, “In my lab, this sanctuary, something divine” (360). She also connects touching her mice with the feeling, as a child, of being touched by God. In both cases, God, or the divine, is held to reside in her research, and in the world. Pantheism, and the idea of God as a vague force flowing through everything, looks to have resurfaced. Such sentiments are also evoked when she says that her mice, the mouse’s food, and even Black women’s hair are “blessed.” At the end of the novel, she talks about rejecting “transcendent planes” but understanding “transcendence, holiness, redemption” in people (397).
The final paragraph of the novel provides a further clue as to what Gifty has decided regarding religion and spirituality. Sitting in the church and staring at an image of Jesus, she says, “I never pray, never wait to hear God’s voice. I just look. I sit in blessed silence, and I remember” (397). It is possible to read Gifty here as having rejected any appeal to the supernatural. This is indicated by the fact that she has given up on trying to communicate with God. As she says, she never prays and never waits to hear a divine voice guiding her. Instead, she has transformed the Christianity of her childhood into something immanent. That is, she has replaced belief in a transcendent God, and the hope of salvation outside the immediate moment, with the simple power of personal contemplation. Her religion has become a meditative practice in which she seeks quiet and silence, rather than the mysterious voice of another, to become more deeply aware of herself and the world around her. In a sense this is a re-awakening and evolution of the journal writing she did before Nana’s death. It is a practice of becoming engaged with, and reflecting on, one’s experiences. However, it is one that no longer needs the ear of God, or indeed anyone, to be redemptive.
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