This plot would suffice but “Transcendent Kingdom” takes on more than just the research into optogenetics. She seeks to block “the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior.” Then, to put it simply, and Gyasi doesn’t, she injects different chemicals to see if the addiction can be reversed. Gifty explains how she anesthetizes the mice, then shaves their heads and drills away the skull, exposing the brain. (Gifty herself refers to a college course involving books “of generational trauma among diasporic communities” and I realized that in just the past few weeks I have reviewed volumes of short stories about Cameroonian Americans and Zimbabwean Americans, so there is definitely such a genre.)
As a husband and father figure, he leaves everything to be desired. Her father, called here the Chin Chin Man, abandoned them and returned home, leaving his family to face financial hardship and racism in America without him. Gifty herself is altered, through loss and shame, forever.
The pain of this inexplicable tragedy drives Gifty’s mother into a depression so dark, so complete, that she cannot get out of bed for days at a time and may herself die of grief. The addiction absolutely controlled his life and then killed him. We are told of his descent, his attempts at recovery, his treatments, his relapses. This work is not an abstraction for Gifty.Īfter a perfectly ordinary ankle injury playing basketball in high school, her beloved older brother became addicted to prescribed Oxycontin, then heroin, then overdosed. Her experiment involves first getting mice addicted, so they will endure any pain to keep getting their reward - in this case, rather ironically, the healthy drink Ensure - and then finding a way to stop the addicted mouse from seeking his pleasure.
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