Transcendent Kingdom

“I had a million selves, too many to gather.” 

Gifty thinks this facing the mirror after breaking down in tears in front of her lab partner, Han. This was ostensibly because she had discovered one of her test mice was injured from fighting, but her comment here reveals a deeper worry about her lack of a coherent identity.

“If you’re in space, how can you see me, and what do I look like to you?” 

This is from one of Gifty’s early journal entries directed toward God. In one way this reflects a childish curiosity with, and confusion about, the nature of God. It is also connected to a deeper concern about what it means to be seen in the eyes of others.

“She almost never admitted to racism.”

Despite working as a carer for someone who subjected her to racist abuse, Gifty’s mother rarely spoke about racism. This was perhaps because she considered her employer, Mr. Thomas, to be merely a deranged old man. It might as well have been because of a desire not to see herself as a victim or inculcate that attitude in her children.

“Nana was the first miracle, the true miracle, and the glory of his birth cast a long shadow.” 

Gifty contrasts the circumstances, and retelling, of her own birth with that of her brother’s. Nana was the first born and the favorite of their parents. As such, Gifty, even from birth, was living in her brother’s shadow.

“She was stone faced, staring at her father in his casket with an unmistakable look of contempt.” 

Gifty recalls the behavior of Mr. Thomas’s daughter at her father’s funeral. To Gifty’s mother this seems to show an unacceptable lack of respect. As such, she makes her family get out of the car on the way home and pray for the errant daughter. On a broader level, it raises the question of whether respect for parents should be unconditional.

“Belief can be powerful and intimate and transformative.” 

Gifty says this in response to the criticisms of religion launched by her classmates at Harvard. They claim that there is no reason to believe in God and that religion has been responsible for wars and sexual repression. Gifty still holds an emotional connection to the Christianity of her childhood, which makes her seek to defend it.

“I felt a strange sense of kinship with Hopkins every time I read about his personal life, his difficulty reconciling his religion with his desires and thoughts, his repressed sexuality.” 

Gifty is obliged to read the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to fulfill a humanities module requirement at Harvard. She does not share the same enthusiasm as her teacher for his poetry. However, she empathizes with the problematic status religion occupies in his life and, like Gifty, with his desire to come to terms with it.

“I would have been embarrassed to talk about Nana’s addiction with Han.” 

Gifty reveals to Han that she had a brother who died. However, she is unwilling to discuss the cause of his death because she still feels a certain degree of shame about what happened.

“For a copy of Nana’s thoughts, from birth to death, bound in book form, I would give absolutely anything.” 

Gifty is reflecting on the fact that she did not know Nana very well in his final years. She struggles to understand what drove him to continue his self-destructive addiction and what he was experiencing at the time. Her wish for this in book form reflects a desire to control and intellectualize Nana’s traumatic experiences.

“God wants you to wait.” 

The girls of Gifty’s church are forced to attend a day-long seminar about the virtues of abstinence after some of them are found to be pregnant. The woman leading this, Miss Cindy, explains that sex before marriage is a sin and the equivalent of breaking a promise to one’s future husband. This experience clouds Gifty’s understanding of sex, and she struggles for years afterwards to enjoy it.

“I thought he was half-asleep, dreaming the sweetest of dreams.” 

Gifty describes her impression of Nana when he was lying on the couch, high from opioids. On one level it reflects a naivety about drug use that she should associate it with pleasant dreams. On another level it is quite an astute way of understanding opioid addiction and how it takes the user into a different, dream-like world.

“[E]very time you listen, the drugs work a little less and demand a little more, until finally you give them everything and get nothing in return.”

This is Gifty’s description of the effects of opioids. At first, they create a euphoric high by flooding the brain with dopamine. However, over time more and more must be taken to create a similar effect, and the damage to the body and brain increases.

“I hated Nana so completely. I hated him, and I hated myself.” 

Gifty ends up hating Nana because of the suffering he puts her and her mother through. This is not just in terms of his aggressive behavior, stealing, and vanishing for days at a time. It is also because of the social stigma and shame associated with his addiction, and of having an addict in the family.

“I didn’t write anything in my journal that night or for many years thereafter.” 

Following her brother’s death by heroin overdose, Gifty decides to abandon writing in her journal. This signifies two things in her life. First, as her journal was addressed to God, it indicates the renunciation of Christianity and her faith. Second, it suggests an unwillingness to continue reflecting on her emotions and life.

“I was accustomed to being alone but this, this false aloneness, was so much worse than any loneliness I had ever felt before.” 

Gifty is describing life with her mother after the death of Nana. Her mother now spends most of her time in bed, distraught. Being with someone who is totally alienated from the world and oneself is worse, she suggests, than any other type of loneliness.

“Thinking about Lazarus has always led me to think about what it means to be alive, what it means to participate in the world, to be awake.” 

Even as a child, the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead puzzled Gifty. She wondered what kind of existence he would have once reanimated. There is a parallel here between Lazarus and her mother, who exists in a kind of living death, not participating in the world.

“They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes.” 

Gifty talks about people who deny that addiction is a disease of the brain. She suggests that such individuals are motivated by a certain moral agenda. Namely, they want to see themselves as good, for not having succumbed to drug addiction, and addicts as morally bad or weak-willed.

“I would never know her.” 

After her mother comes to visit her place of work, Gifty reflects on their relationship. She surmises that there will always be a gap in their understanding of each other because they are fundamentally different people. Here Gifty gives expression again to her solipsistic view of relations with others.

“Perhaps it would be simple if we weren’t human, the only animal in the known world that is willing to try something new, fun, pointless, dangerous, thrilling, stupid, even if we might die in the trying.” 

Gifty wonders why some people become addicts and others do not. Part of the answer, she suggests, lies with the nature of risk-taking behavior. Human beings in general, and especially certain humans, are naturally inclined to seek new pleasures in spite of, or at times because of, the risk doing so poses to their lives.

“I think it’s beautiful and important to believe in something, anything at all.”

Gifty’s friend Katherine says this when Gifty discusses her evangelical upbringing. The sentiment is supposed to express an admiration and respect for Gifty’s past faith and the role faith plays in people’s lives. However, Gifty is irritated by such talk and associates it with a lazy and insipid spiritualism.

“God had failed me then, so utterly and completely that it had shaken my capacity to believe in him.” 

This is after the conversation with Katherine. She looks back to why she stopped believing in God. This was because he ostensibly did nothing to help save Nana from his addiction and left her family to endure the trauma of his death.

“[W]e could get an animal, even that limping mouse, to restrain itself from seeking reward by altering its brain activity.” 

Gifty sums up the findings of her PhD research. By injecting a virus into the brain of a mouse addicted to Ensure, she got it to stop pressing the lever that released the supplement. She believes this will have important implications for addiction in humans.

“Don’t be afraid. God is with me; do you hear me? God is with me wherever I go.” 

These are Gifty’s mother’s last words in the novel to Gifty. This is after Gifty finds her swimming in water beside a road after her mother left the apartment. These words seem to suggest that Gifty’s mother has finally discovered some kind of peace or closure.