RaveThe Dartmouth... both accessible and urgent ... With its many quietly shifting parts, Transcendent Kingdom showcases the complex elements of Gifty’s identity to bring visibility to the immigrant consciousness in America ... The novel deftly intersperses Gifty’s adult voice with snippets of her childhood journal, allowing the reader to remain fully invested in both her youthful religiosity and her contemporary skeptical empiricism. Moving through both time and physical space, the tensions of science and religion begin to tighten, propelling the narrative with a pace that novels of such scope rarely possess ... a soaring, individual work of fiction: Gyasi can seemingly hold all truths, all withs and withouts, in a single narrative. Isn’t that, Gyasi seems to be saying, the task of an immigrant in America — to hold complex, contradictory truths about belonging, home, and memory? ... What is brilliant about Transcendent Kingdom, besides the clear and sweeping prose, is that its existence addresses young Gifty’s shame in her multifaceted identity as a Black immigrant by acknowledging and recounting her past ... Gyasi’s narrative provides an act of seeing, a kind of visibility, to the narrative of Black immigrants in America. The novel thus acknowledges Gifty’s identity, sees the enormity of her life and her experiences and through recitation of those experiences, exhibits care and interest in her story ... By giving readers a character grappling with conflicting identities, we are able to fully appreciate the complexity of our world. Through Gifty we can see that there is no in-between when it comes to identities; there are only the stories that we are familiar with, and the stories that we are not. By giving readers Gifty, Gyasi broadens the stories American readers are used to, providing representation for Black immigrants where it is so desperately needed ... In providing a platform to narratives that represent fully the lives of those who appear to be on the fringes of America, Gyasi allows readers to engage in an act of seeing that places Gifty’s story in the middle of our literary consciousness, right where it should be.
