Culture Diary: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s first book, Homegoing, was my favorite book of 2017, and one of my favorites ever, honestly. Here’s what I had to say about the book when I read it:

It’s common, these days, for novels to switch points of view from chapter to chapter, bouncing around so much you sometimes get a feeling of whiplash. With Homegoing, you don’t stay with any one character for more than a chapter, but it didn’t bother me because it’s the structure is integral to the story that Gyasi tells. Effia and Esi are half-sisters, born in different Ghanaian villages to different fathers, never known to one another. They each go on to live staggeringly different lives — Effia married off to a British slave trader and Esi captured as a slave, held captive in the dungeon of the very castle Effia lives in. Each chapter of the narrative cascades from the stories of these two women, chronicling the experiences of each subsequent generation, Effia’s branch in Ghana, and Esi’s branch in America, where they’ve settled as a result of slavery.

For me, this book illuminates how much more deeply slavery penetrates our culture, as well as global history, than the stories we learn in school about the Underground Railroad and plantations. I was fascinated by the complicated history behind the Ghanaian tribal wars and the way those battles fed the slave trade — it’s rare…