On reading Yaa Gyasi

​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.