Illness, Intimacy and Care in Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom (2020), is an intimate portrayal of grief, care, and mental illness. The story is centred on Gifty, a 28-year-old African-American neuroscience PhD student who, during one of her mother’s depressive episodes, becomes her care-giver. The mother’s haunting presence in Gifty’s neatly organised life brings back memories of her absent father, her brother’s struggle with addiction, and her mother’s suicide attempt, traumatic events which forced Gifty to care for her family at a young age and which became the motivation behind her research on reward-seeking behaviours. Drawing on Joan Tronto’s (1993) ethics of care and Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) Black feminist thought, in this article I discuss the ways in which Gifty’s experiences of caring for her loved ones and their struggles with mental illness affect her relationships with family, friends and colleagues, and with herself. I argue that these experiences, particularly regarding the mother-daughter relationship, are central to Gifty’s growth as a character; at first reserved and callous, Gifty is led to realise that, to take care of those she loves, she must let herself be taken care of

Biology · Kingdom · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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