![]() ![]() ![]() “Whenever I think of my mother,” she narrates, “I picture a queen-sized bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room. We first meet Gifty through an unnerving memory of her own. She is allowed all her preoccupations, small and big she is a Black immigrant-type character who contains multitudes - and in today’s world, this remains a very good and relevant thing. However, she is more than the sum of these delineated parts in Gyasi’s superbly written novel. “The young African immigrant must locate herself along three divides: the first between blackness and whiteness the second within blackness, between native and foreign the third between African and American.” These are the words of Nigerian-Ghanaian writer Taiye Selasi, and they offer us some insight into the life of Gifty, the protagonist at the pulsing center of Yaa Gyasi’s much anticipated second novel, “Transcendent Kingdom.”īorn to Ghanaian immigrants in Huntsville, Ala., Gifty does indeed straddle these divides, fraught as they are with issues of race and belonging. ![]()
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