Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Over the summer I read Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel about the legacy of slavery that ranges over several generations. Last night I finished her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, which is the story of one family, and focuses mainly on one character, Gifty, and to a lesser extent her older brother Nana and their parents. Much of the story is told through Gifty’s recollections of her childhood, and snippets of the the diary she kept. Because it’s a novel that takes place in Gifty’s thoughts, it isn’t a narrative tale; although Gifty eventually fills in much of her life’s story, her thoughts, like anyone’s, jump around.

As in Homegoing (and in Gyasi’s own life), Gifty’s family story begins in Ghana. But the book opens with Gifty’s childhood visit to Ghana to stay with her aunt. Even though we eventually learn that there is so much more to her mother, Gifty tells us in the first sentence, “Whenever I think of my mother, I picture a queen-size bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room. For months on end, she colonized that bed like a virus, the first time when I was a child and then again when I was a graduate student.”

Gifty then recalls what led to the overpowering depression her mother experienced, the losses she faced, the ways America did not live up to the dreams her mother had when she entered a lottery to emigrate, causing her father, embarrassed and unsettled by racism and poverty, to visit Ghana and never return. “For a long time, most of my life, in fact, it had been just me and her, but this pairing was unnatural. She knew it and I knew it, and we both tried to ignore what we knew to be true – there used to be four of us, then three, two.”

Gifty’s athletic brother Nana, several years older than she is, is the next to go, when he gets hooked on OxyContin after an injury and cannot overcome his addiction. His overdose changes Gifty’s life even more tangibly than her father’s abandonment. Always an achiever, a child who yearns to be good by her mother’s and her evangelical church’s standards, she finds solace in math and science because of their certainty. As a graduate student, she has returned to a less certain world. What makes the brain work as it does? How much is science and how much is will? And what can science do to shape that will? Her experiments with mice and pleasure-seeking regions of the brain, she hopes, will prevent other little girls’ brothers from dying of an overdose, but shame and fear of being taken less seriously prevent her from sharing.

Gifty recalls,

“In the book of Matthew, Jesus says,”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Here is separation. Your heart, the part of you that feels. Your mind, the part of you that thinks. Your soul, the part of you that is. I almost never hear neuroscientists speak about the soul. Because of our work, we are often given to thinking about that part of humans that is the vital, inexplicable essence of ourselves, as the workings of our brains . . . . There is no separation. Our brains are our hearts that feel and our minds that think and our souls that are.”

Her work, she sees, is the same thing she was concerned with as a child: how much control we have over ourselves. “I am looking for new names for old feelings,” Gifty thinks. But her heart, in childhood and in adulthood, is the last thing she thinks about; it’s almost as if the trauma of her shattered family, compounded by racism’s psychological and economic tolls, piles up like bricks around Gifty’s heart. But the work she is doing gives her a kind of peace from the tensions of heart and mind, soul peace:

“The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I have never, will never, tell anyone that I sometimes think this way, because I’m aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing, but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”

This deep thinking about mind and soul, neuroscience and faith, permeate Gifty’s story and make her who she is. And make this novel so much more than just the story of an immigrant family. It’s also beautiful — Gyasi’s writing is just a pleasure to read.

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Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer

I’d read parts of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer with my student success class last spring in the modules on vocation, specifically the chapter called “Now I Become Myself.” My students were impressed with Palmer’s wisdom in statements such as “What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been!” and “Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”

Around the time I used this with my class, a friend told me this is a favorite book of his, so I intended to give it a full reading. I had actually checked it out of the library once before and had been too busy to read it. The same thing happened over the summer. This time I swore I’d read it all the way through and made it my “lunch book” — keeping it at work and reading in the sun or in my office each day after I ate.

How glad I am that I kept trying. Palmer’s wisdom is humble and humane and true. He generously shares his own missteps and fears in the service of helping readers avoid their own, or embrace them as the case may be:  “Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations — projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves — and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.” Yep. Ouch. Another gem: ” . . . there is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does — maybe more.” Not something that’s easy to accept.

But this isn’t just a book about seeking one’s vocation. Palmer writes searingly about his descent into depression and his way back to wholeness: “One begins the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one’s selfhood and resisting things that do not.” And acknowledges how painful, slow, and difficult this is: “Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection — it deprives one of the relatedness that is the lifeline of every living being.”

He also expounds on leadership: “These leaders possess a gift available to all who take an inner journey: the knowledge that identity does not depend on the role we play or the power it gives us over others. It depends only on the simple fact that we are children of God, valued in and for ourselves.” And extolls the benefits of “inner work . . . like journaling, reflective reading, spiritual friendship, meditation, and prayer” and the importance of community: “Community doesn’t just create abundance — community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.”

In these times this passage will be one I return to frequently: “‘Be not afraid’ does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find fear abounding. Instead the words say we do not need to be the fear we have. We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fear is multiplied.” Amen.

This is a brief book, around 100 pages, and small enough to fit easily in a coat pocket or purse or desk drawer. It merits reading and re-reading, and inwardly digesting. It would be a great book to journal with, or to discuss in a small group.

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Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

The adult formerly known on this blog as Teen the Younger (who will no longer be a teen later this month) suggested we get Furiously Happy: a Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson and both read it. As you can imagine I can’t pass up a suggestion like that even though I have stacks of books waiting for me around here.

As I was reading it I posted on Facebook that the most important takeaway is that people living with depression and/ or anxiety have brains that are lying to them. That resonated with me – honestly there is not a damn thing their loved ones can say when that is happening. The lies are too loud. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell the person you love them and are with the them, you just can’t expect it to make any difference in the moment. That is both disturbing and reassuring.

I still feel that is the most important takeaway. Which makes me glad I read Furiously Happy even though I don’t think it’s necessarily my kind of humor or a topic I want to spend any more head space on than I already do. But it helped put words to some things I’ve been thinking about.

Last week I saw a story on Facebook that had been published in our local paper, about the parents of a recent suicide victim, and about how he was upset about a breakup but otherwise they had no idea and how he’d been talking about things he looked forward to doing and then killed himself. The article and the post both mentioned wanting to help prevent other families from going through this and other people from committing suicide. I get that desire. I really, really do.

But I think assuming that prevention is a matter of just saying the right thing is a lie, too, that people not living with mental illness but near it tell themselves. And it’s just as dangerous as the lies Lawson writes about. We can help people with mental illness know they are not alone. We can help them see there are options in the world, but we can’t help them see themselves in those options — yes, therapy can often give people tools to try to see, and medicine can potentially help thwart some of the lies enough to help therapy work, but ultimately, no one can stop someone else’s brain from lying. I think, and maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me, they can only be a steady presence for the person with mental illness, when their brains are lying or when they are not, and hope the person says they need help shutting out the lies when they get too loud.

In that way Furiously Happy isn’t totally bleak, because Lawson gives people a view into what that’s like, and provides hope for people who read her work thinking they alone feel as horrible as they do. Letting people see her life, Lawson says, led to affirmations that people were with her in her struggle, but also to  “thousands and thousands of people creeping to the edge and quietly admitting, “Me too. I thought it was just me.” It’s something we humans are very good at, especially at this time and place — we have the delusional view that our experience is unique, especially if it’s bad. Lawson helps people through her blog and her books see that other people are suffering but are also living. That’s great. But I think about that young man and his parents in my town, and I am sure, based on the story they told in the paper, that they did that too — let him know he was not alone, and that people had suffered and lived through what he was experiencing. The lies in his brain were too loud, too insistent for him.

And that’s what I hope science will figure out someday — how to keep the brain from ever lying so badly in the first place.

 

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Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

I read Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh to fill the “a graphic novel or comic book” square on my book bingo card. And because my daughter finds some of it hysterical and some of it wise. And a young, smart colleague at work said it was one of the most helpful things she’d read when a friend was depressed, because it helped her see what that was like. And I am simultaneously admiring and jealous of bloggers whose work is published in books — Hyperbole and a Half was (and still is) a blog before it became a book.

When I brought it home, my daughter wanted to read two sections to me — I LOVE being read to, and I can’t even think of the last time that happened. She chose “The God of Cake,” and “The Party,” and by the time she got to the end of each she was laughing so hard she could barely catch her breath and was almost in tears, and that made me ridiculously, thoroughly happy.

I read the rest myself but she frequently came in and asked where I was and commented.

My take? Both my daughter and my young smart colleague are correct — it’s hysterical, and wise, and helpful. It’s also scary and maybe even a little painful. “Identity Part One” and “Identity Part Two” are so packed with observant insights into human nature and the philosophy of the self — or  is that just my identity, thinking I’m smart and wanting to feel special by saying things like that? Eek.

In “Depression, Part Two,”  Brosh writes (and draws), “And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it’s just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit.

I don’t know.

But when you’re concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like.”

Wow. This is hard, funny, amazing stuff and I loved it, even when it made me uncomfortable. Tonight as I was looking at the blog, I read a comment that said “Oh my….this sort of hurt to read yet, I feel oddly connected to you.”  Yes. That, exactly. And bonus points because you make my daughter laugh.

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