The reverberations of this abandonment and Nana’s heroin overdose are felt throughout Gifty’s life. While Gifty’s mother is determined that America is the key to her children’s success and happiness, her father’s yearning to go back to his roots in Ghana leads him to leave his wife and children behind. Through Gifty’s parents, Gyasi examines both the immigrant dream of America and the conflicting desire for home, family, and tradition. The narrative moves between Gifty’s childhood and teenage years, where legends of her absent father’s greatness abound and Gifty’s star-athlete brother Nana is her superhero, to the present, where the characters of Gifty’s past are starkly real and complex. In Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty, a neuroscience PHD student born into a Ghanaian family in Huntsville, Alabama, grapples with the loss of her father and brother and the echoes of an evangelical upbringing in a white Pentecostal community.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |