Chapters 37-45Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 37 Summary
Gifty talks about the final days of Nana. He starts to steal things from their mother, first her wallet and checkbook, then the car and dining room table. He also flies into rages and breaks things, punching a hole in the wall and smashing the television. He is so aggressive that Gifty and her mother barricade themselves in Gifty’s room with a chair against the door. Then one seemingly normal day after he has been gone only one night, a police officer shows up at the door to tell them that Nana overdosed on heroin in a Starbuck’s parking lot. After this, Gifty says, “I didn’t write anything in my journal that night or for many years thereafter” (265).
Chapter 38 Summary
Gifty discusses her relationship to sex and how she lost her virginity. As she says, “For years I hadn’t been able to reconcile wanting to feel good with wanting to be good” (268). Nevertheless, she loses her virginity at a social mixer in New York the summer after she graduates college. She enjoys the experience and sees the man again, despite still having feelings of guilt and shame around sex.
Gifty also comments on Nana’s funeral. Her mother is distraught and wants a traditional Ghanaian service. Gifty is upset that Pastor John ignored the issue of Nana’s addiction in his speech at the funeral. She feels that neither he nor any of the people there knew Nana.
Chapter 39 Summary
This chapter explores the start of Gifty’s mother’s breakdown. Following Nana’s funeral, and a parallel funeral held for him in Ghana by his father, Gifty’s mother takes time off work. She also starts taking more of the sleeping pill Ambien, which makes her slightly unhinged and cruel. On one occasion, she tells Gifty that she only wanted Nana, and not her.
Chapter 40 Summary
Gifty reminisces about the times following her mother’s retreat into bed and depression. She is left not only to look after her disconsolate parent but also to do all the cooking and cleaning. Her mother’s perpetual sleep causes Gifty to reflect on the biblical story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. One day she finds her mother comatose in the bath, having almost overdosed on Ambien.
Chapter 41 Summary
After her mother’s attempted suicide, Gifty goes to stay at Pastor John’s house while her mother is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Gifty refuses to go to church while at Pastor John’s and rarely speaks. When her mother returns after two weeks and they return home, her mother apologizes to Gifty and says it will “never again” happen. While her mother recovers more fully, Gifty is sent to stay with an aunt, Joyce, in Ghana. Joyce is different from Gifty’s mother, both physically and personality wise.
Chapter 42 Summary
Staying in Ghana in a town called Kumasi with her aunt, Gifty notes the differences between the type of evangelism there and that practiced in Alabama. There is a literalism and an energy to it in Ghana that is not present in Alabama. For example, the pastor in Kumasi speaks as if demons were real and among the congregation.
Gifty asks to see her father, who lives in the same city, and a visit is arranged. When confronted with the fact of her mother’s attempted suicide, the Chin Chin Man simply ignores the issue. Gifty spends the rest of the time at his house in silence.
Chapter 43 Summary
To more of Gifty’s journal entries are shown. They are both accounts of positive experiences with her brother. In the first, Nana makes Gifty feel better by saying that a girl who has made fun of her clothes has “a place in hell with her name on it” (316). In the second, she describes how her brother gave her a standing ovation when she played the part of a lost lamb in the school nativity play.
Chapter 44 Summary
Gifty discusses her mother’s depression and how, a few years after Gifty’s return from Ghana, she started to open up about it. They first discuss the anti-depressant medication she took and how it did not work. When Gifty asks her why she did not ask the doctor to change the medication, her mother replies that she was afraid of being “shocked.” That is, she was afraid of being subject to electro-convulsive shock therapy. This memory leads Gifty to reflect on the fear some people have of psychiatric care and the negative stereotypes surrounding it.
Chapter 45 Summary
Gifty’s mother asks to see where she works. This is a shock to Gifty, but she takes her to visit the laboratory. She is relieved that none of her colleagues are there to see her mother, and she feels ashamed of this thought. Inside the lab her mother is interested in the mice and picks one up to stroke it. She asks if the experiments ever hurt the mice, and Gifty responds that while trying to be as humane as possible, they sometimes cause the mice “discomfort.” This connection between her mother and the mice leads Gifty to think about how her mother is a distinct, ultimately unknowable, person to her.
Chapters 37-45 Analysis
Gifty says of Jesus’s miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead that while she can understand that he could do it, she “didn’t understand why he would” (288). Part of the reason for this puzzlement, for Gifty, is related to the fact that in doing this Jesus would “steal the thunder” of his own resurrection (289). However, there is a deeper concern. It is the worry about the kind of existence Lazarus would have after he had been woken. Would he be able to participate in the flow of life, able to age and die, again? Would he only be the shadow or impression of life? It is the worry that having already experienced and cheated death, when raised he would be a kind of “vampire,” never fully allowed to die, but never a true participant in the living world either.
This idea plays a powerful symbolic role in Transcendent Kingdom. The notion of the “vampire Lazarus” is a crucial metaphor not only for the aftermath and effects of Nana’s death on Gifty and her mother, but for his continued presence and influence on them. Despite having died, Nana continues to live on in their grief. The trauma of his death is a millstone that goes on coloring and affecting almost every aspect of their lives, from their dysfunctional mother-daughter interactions to Gifty’s PhD subject to her inability to form lasting relationships. Indeed, it is her unwillingness to talk about Nana, and her resentment when pushed by others to do so, that ultimately dooms her attempts at deeper interpersonal connections. This is seen first with Raymond, then with Anne. In this way Nana is like a vampire in another respect. His memory sucks the blood, in the form of life, joy, and hope, from Gifty.
Nana’s death turns Gifty’s mother into a sort of vampiric Lazarus as well. She has a breakdown and starts to suffer from severe depression, one symptom of which is anhedonia. This, as Gifty notes, is “the psychiatric term for the inability to derive pleasure from things that are normally pleasurable” (312). Activities such as eating, reading, and interacting with others are experienced as empty or alienating. As such, life itself is voided of value. Gifty’s mother continues to go through the motions and is technically alive, but it is a living death. It is a life without movement, texture, or purpose. It is a life spent perpetually half-asleep, in bed.
This transformation is all too apparent to Gifty. When her mother drives home after her suicide attempt and time in the psychiatric hospital, she resembles a different person. As Gifty says, “I felt like I was in the car with a stranger, an alien from a planet I didn’t care to visit” (300). Her mother, like Lazarus, comes back from the dead, but she loses herself in the process. Gifty experiences a loneliness “worse than any loneliness I had ever felt before” (286). Her mother is still with her, but they do not share the same world.
This trauma continues to haunt Gifty in the present. This fundamental dislocation from the woman she thought was her mother, and the sense of loneliness it precipitates, sets about a feeling of isolation that she struggles to ever surmount. Her difficulty in forming friendships or romantic attachments is just one symptom of this. It means there is always a part of her that is alone. This is true even when she is with people whom she is close to, like Katherine, Anne, or Raymond. It is also a self-perpetuating condition, exacerbated by Gifty’s desire to keep the part of her life related to Nana and her mother secret. Such an attitude makes deeper connections with others, or a process of personal healing, difficult. It also finds intellectual expression in her solipsistic world view. This is the view that other people, outside of ourselves, are ultimately unknowable. It says that we can only ever truly know our own consciousness and thoughts. Such a view is doubtless convenient for someone who feels fundamentally alone, but it may serve as an excuse for not opening oneself up to others and not stepping outside the prison of psychologically or philosophically imposed self-sufficiency.
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