Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
In Chapter 1, the protagonist and narrator, Gifty, an American woman of Ghanaian descent, says that “whenever I think of my mother, I picture a queen-sized bed with her lying in it” (3). This is because her mother spent a great deal of time during Gifty’s life in bed, depressed. The first time this happened was when Gifty was a girl. The second time was when she was a graduate student.
Gifty was sent to Ghana, her mother’s country of origin, when she was 11, while her mother recovered. Gifty describes an incident that happened when she was in Ghana, where her auntie, with whom she was staying, pointed out a “crazy” person in the street.
Chapter 2 Summary
The second period in her life when she sees her mother depressed in bed, Gifty is working as a PhD student in neurobiology at Stanford University, where she is doing research into addiction by experimenting on mice. Pastor John, the pastor from her hometown in Alabama, calls Gifty to say that her mother has not been attending church and is likely having another depressive episode. Gifty therefore asks her mother to stay with her. Telling this story now, Gifty recalls how thin and gaunt her mother was when she picked her up at the airport and how they drove to her apartment in near total silence.
Chapter 3 Summary
After her mother falls asleep, Gifty goes to check on her mice in the laboratory where she works. She discovers that her two test mice have been fighting and that one is wounded. This discovery causes her to break down in tears in front of her lab colleague, Han. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror trying to regain her composure, she feels like she has “a million selves, too many to gather” (14). In the present, Gifty explains how, even though she had been sharing the lab with Han for several months, they hardly did more than say “hi” to each other.
Chapter 4 Summary
Chapter 4 includes three journal entries written by Gifty when she was a child, each addressed “Dear God” (16). In the first, she asks God where his exact location in the universe is. In the second she talks about how her mother, “The Black Mamba,” moves very slowly and quietly when she is angry. Her brother, “Buzz,” does impressions of her. However, he has ceased doing impressions of the “Chin Chin Man,” their father. In the third entry, Gifty asks God, “If you’re in space, how can you see me, and what do I look like to you?” (17). Gifty is fascinated by questions about the nature of God.
Chapter 5 Summary
Gifty tell the story of how her mother and father met in Ghana. He is nicknamed the “Chin Chin Man” because he calls achomo, a fried West African street food made of dough, “chin chin” as the Nigerians do, when hanging around Gifty’s grandmother’s food stand. They try for a long time to have a child, but after thinking it will not happen, and following three days of fasting and prayer, Gifty’s mother becomes pregnant. Nine months later she gives birth to Nana, Gifty’s brother. Wanting to give him the best chance in life, she applies for the US immigration lottery. She manages to win and moved, with baby Nana, to Alabama, with the Chin Chin Man to follow shortly after.
Chapter 6 Summary
Gifty talks more about the secret journal she kept, which was addressed to God. Some of the entries are about her mother being overly strict, or about pleasant times spent with her brother. However, there is also a disturbing entry about a time when her brother smashed the television and punched a hole in the wall. She reveals that these acts related to a heroin addiction from which Nana suffered and ultimately died.
Gifty also talks more about her PhD research into the reward-seeking behavior of mice, which involves getting them addicted to a supplement called Ensure then experimenting on them.
Chapter 7 Summary
Gifty reflects on the initial experiences of her parents when they moved to America. Her mother gets work as a carer for an elderly man named Mr. Thomas, who is persistently racist towards her. Work is harder to come by for her father, and he is subject to racist attitudes, especially when going into shops. In the end, as Gifty says, “Homesick, humiliated, he stopped leaving the house” (38). Her mother finds some consolation when she discovers the local evangelical church, which she starts attending.
Chapter 8 Summary
When Gifty is 15, her mother finds OxyContin, an opioid painkiller, inside the light fixture in her brother’s room. This is when they discover he has a drugs problem. Years later, after Nana’s funeral, Gifty stops believing in God. In her narration, she describes a party she recently went to at the apartment of her colleague Han. She is awkward at such events and wary of drinking alcohol.
Chapter 9 Summary
Gifty recounts how her father got employment as a janitor at a day care center. The children there love him, and he pretends to be a giant tree-man. He tells Nana the same story, and their mother resents this closeness between father and son. Gifty also reminisces about an ex-boyfriend named Raymond. He was a PhD student in literature and was one of the first men she met who was genuinely interested in her work.
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
Gifty begins to tell her family’s story in these first chapters. The explicit reason Gifty gives for her mother’s wanting to emigrate seems naïve: “She had a cousin in America who sent money and clothes back to the family somewhat regularly, which surely meant there was money and clothes in abundance across the Atlantic” (20-21). The fact that one cousin can send back clothes and money “somewhat regularly” hardly means that everyone in the United States is rich. It certainly does not mean that an immigrant is guaranteed wealth there. Her reasoning may also seem superficial. Given that they have a home and a community in Ghana, it appears foolish to gamble that for unspecified, and uncertain, material advancement in America. However, the stated reason may have just been a rationalization. As Gifty says, her mother was “wild inside” (5). Behind the explicit economic motivation was a deeper, more ineffable, desire to strike free on her own, to find somewhere new, to take a risk—and to do this to honor the providence that had so miraculously answered her prayers with a son.
Whether Gifty’s risk paid off is up for interpretation. In one sense, the events described early on in Transcendent Kingdom seem to answer with a resounding “no.” For one thing, as black immigrants in the 1980s and early 1990s, the family is still excluded from much of the opportunity and wealth of American society. Gifty’s mother must take on lowly paid work as a carer for an abusive employer, earning a mere $10,000 a year. Meanwhile, her father is persistently overlooked for work because of his race, ending up with a janitor’s job that barely covers the cost of his transport. Then there is the issue of racism itself. As Gifty says of her mother, “She almost never admitted to racism” (37), yet she is continually subject to racist slurs by the old man she looks after. It is even harder for Gifty’s father. Along with discrimination in the job market, he is subject to ubiquitous racist attitudes and prejudice. As the narrator explains, three times in four months he is accused of stealing in Walmart and suffers the indignity of being searched in a side room of the store.
The immigrant dream is shattered. This is manifest in the Chin Chin Man returning to Ghana, which occurs chronologically early in the events of the novel but which Gifty recounts in a later chapter. Gifty’s brother is an even deeper blow to the family. Given that the move was inspired by a wish to give him more opportunity, his descent into self-destructive addiction is unbearable for their mother. In his addiction and death, she directly witnesses the destruction of her hopes for a better future. Her breakdown and depression are, at least partially, a response to and symptom of this loss. The bed serves as metaphor for this change in her character: Her inability to escape from her bed represents a symbolic refusal of the desire for adventure that first motivated her move from Ghana. It represents a radical re-affirmation of the need to remain in one place, and the fear of punishment for not doing so.
However, everything is not in vain. Although her mother does not acknowledge it, Gifty is a vindication of her mother’s “wild” desire to risk moving to new shores. Rather than being crushed by the outsider, immigrant experience she has inherited, she channels it into intellectual form. This is first manifest in her journal and messages to God. Later in life, it takes shape as her brilliance in scientific research and her investigation into the neuroscientific roots of addiction.
Moreover, the very trauma of her upbringing provokes the redemptive journey of self-discovery pursued in the text itself. Gifty quotes a line from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: “not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are” (9). In other words, loss and disorientation are necessary to self-understanding. It is the loss of her brother, father, and then mother to depression that causes Gifty to try and unravel who and what she is. Conversely, a life of well-adjusted contentment rarely provokes serious introspection. The alienation inherent in the immigrant experience, taken with Gifty to an extreme, allows her to see herself and others in a deeper way. In this sense, she continues her mother’s spirit of adventure. She is a continuation of the desire for risky experiments and proof of their worth.
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