​Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. She is the author of two novels, Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom. Both are brilliantly crafted. She works multiple timelines as well as anyone in the business. Homegoing follows two sisters and their descendants from eighteenth century Ghana into the early decades of the twenty-first century. One sister is enslaved and carried to North America. The other remains in Africa. The sisters’ stories are laid out in the first two chapters. Each ensuing chapter jumps forward a generation, with chapters alternating between the descendants of each sister. The novel moves forward at a sure and steady pace, and there are enough threads drawn between chapters to keep the reader oriented within the overarching story of a family’s history and the history of Africans in America. It is an excellent book for discussing the ongoing impact of slavery and how trauma gets communicated from one generation to the next into the present day. Transcendent Kingdom is narrated by a neuroscientist named Gifty who was born in Ghana and grew up in Huntsville, going to her mother’s Assemblies of God church, adoring her older brother Nana, and ultimately taking responsibility for the care of her mother when her brother becomes addicted to OxyContin after being prescribed the lethally addictive opioid for a sprained ankle. Nana dies of a heroin overdose and Gifty goes to Harvard and pursues graduate and postgraduate degrees researching the neurological roots of resistance to pleasure-seeking and the nature of addiction. 
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If I was ever to talk to Yaa Gyasi about her writing, I would like to ask her why she didn’t have Gifty say more about how the doctor prescribed the OxyContin that messed up Gifty’s brother Nana and led directly to his addiction and death. I would ask her why she didn’t get more into the role Purdue Pharma played in misleading doctors into thinking that OxyContin wasn’t addictive. Nana didn’t seem like he was headed towards addiction before that doctor visit. Maybe those are the questions of a white person. Maybe Gifty (or Gyasi) didn’t get into that because it is just one more obvious example of the callousness and disdain with which white power and capitalism treat Black lives.

I’d also like to ask Gyasi how she would feel about being considered an Appalachian writer. She grew up in Madison County, Alabama, which is included in the federal definition of Appalachia. In Homegoing, she writes about an incarcerated Black man made to work in the coal mines as part of his sentence during the early years of the twentieth century. And Lord knows, there is a lengthening shelf of Appalachian books dealing with the opioid crisis, and Transcendent Kingdom would fit right in on that shelf. I don’t know how much Gyasi enjoyed growing up in North Alabama. It seems like it was pretty rough on Gifty. In Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty’s mother’s white church didn’t deal well with addiction and had a number of racist members. Gyasi might not want to identify with the region. That would not make her different from many other people who grew up in the mountains. Whether she claims that identity or not is her choice, and more power to her, but for readers who want to know what life is like in the southern mountains, who want to experience fine literature that has its roots in these mountains, Yaa Gyasi should be on one’s list.

Hubert is in his sixties now. His partner Tildy is dead. He lives on top of Long Ridge. He has grown fogbound and disgusted with himself. Here are some pictures of him I found in my notebooks. 
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I wrote this for and read it at The Arnow Conference In The Humanities at Somerset Community College in Somerset, Kentucky on April 7, 2022. I appreciate them asking me to do it.
 
It is a heady time to be in the humanities business. We have never been so relevant nor so close to extinction. The emergence of critical race theory as a wedge issue has turned elections, gotten people fired, threatened lives. The renewed zeal for banning of books discussing gender, race, and sexuality has turned teachers and librarians into some of the most controversial figures in our culture. Are we who traffic in the humanities guardians or destroyers of civilization? Are we good? Are we evil? Like the protagonist of the 2008 superhero film The Dark Knight, are we the heroes our culture deserves, but not the ones it needs right now? I feel as close to Batman in this moment as I am likely to get. I am happy and terrified to be here.
 
Let us begin this evening with an excerpt from The Dollmaker, a novel by Harriette Simpson Arnow, published in 1954. The following is an abridged version of a scene between Gertie Nevels—the tall, artistic, mountain woman who is The Dollmaker’s protagonist—and Mrs. Whittle, Nevels’ son Reuben’s homeroom teacher in an overcrowded school in wartime Detroit. 
Here we go:

​​​From An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United Statesby Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: 
 
“The United States did nothing to halt the flow of squatters into Cherokee territory as the boundary was drawn in the [1791 Treaty of Holston]. A year after the treaty was signed, war broke out, and the Chickamaugas, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe, attacked squatters, even laying siege to Nashville…. The settlers organized an offensive against the Chickamaugas. The federal Indian agent attempted to persuade the Chickamaugas to stop fighting, warning that the frontier settlers were ‘always dreadful, not only to the warriors, but to the innocent and helpless women and children, and old men.’ The agent also warned the settlers against attacking Indigenous towns, but he had to order the militia to disperse a mob of three hundred settlers, who, as he wrote, out of a ‘mistaken zeal to serve their country’ had gathered to destroy ‘as many as they could of the Cherokee towns.’ [John] Sevier and his rangers invaded the Chickamaugas’ towns in September 1793, with a stated mission of total destruction. Although forbidden by the federal agent to attack the villages, Sevier gave orders for a scorched-earth offensive…. In squatter settlements, ruthless leaders like Sevier were not the exception but the rule. Once they had full control and got what they wanted, they made their peace with the federal government, which depended on their actions to expand the republic’s territory. Sevier went on to serve as a US representative from North Carolina and as governor of Tennessee. To this day, such men are idolized as great heroes, embodying the essence of the ‘American spirit.’ A bronze statue of John Sevier in his ranger uniform stands today in the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol.”
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I reckon the third novel in the Canard County trilogy is coming out March 2021. It's called POP. I had a bunch of leftover illustrations. I'll post some of them here. Or at least one. Here it is.