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Chapter 43
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Transcendent Kingdom, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Religion
Self-Discovery, Identity, and Individuality
Addiction, Depression, and Control
Trauma, Caretaking, and Intimacy
Summary
Analysis
While Gifty was in Ghana, her mother healed in Alabama. Her anhedonia persisted, but her time in the psych ward seemed to have helped her other symptoms and she started going back to church. Gifty begs Pastor John for updates over the phone, but he only has superficial information, like what her mother wore to church.
As Gifty’s mother recovers, she returns to her primary community, which is the church. Yet, the support she receives there is superficial. Pastor John doesn’t seem to have any sense of how she’s actually doing. Gifty’s mother, at home, is as isolated as Gifty herself is, far away in Ghana. She already established in an earlier chapter how far-flung the Ghanaian community in America was. After Nana’s funeral, they largely disappeared from her and her mother’s lives again. But the funeral also emphasized how different Gifty and her mother were from the rest of the church community, showing their decreased ability to provide Gifty’s mother with any real support in Gifty’s absence.
Active
Themes
Gifty understood that her mother needed healing, but not what she needed healing from. She had only heard people use “depression” as another word for “sadness.” Learning about major depressive disorder in college helped her to understand her mother better, and she used her classes as an excuse to ask her mother about her experience in the psych ward.
As a child, Gifty didn’t have context to understand her mother’s depression. In part, this has to do with her mother’s resistance to Western medical ideas, and in part it has to do with her church’s evident inability to understand or have compassion for it. In this way, Gifty discovers another hole in her education when she gets to college. But this also affords her an opportunity to talk to her mother about her experiences.
Active
Themes
While she was committed, Gifty’s mother was supposed to take medicine and talk to the doctor. She took the meds there but stopped after she was released because she didn’t feel like they were helping. She didn’t want to tell the doctors they weren’t working because she was afraid they would shock her. Electroconvulsive therapy has a bad reputation from the “wild west” days of neurology, when experimental protocols were common and ethics were loose. Often, shocks were used to control patients who neither asked for nor needed treatment but were considered abnormal by society. But electroconvulsive therapy can work and is still used as a last resort for intractable depression.
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Themes
When she returns to practice, Katherine’s patients will be looking for last resorts. Her research involves experimental vagus nerve stimulation, which is helpful but, like DBS, is poorly understood and imperfect as a therapy.
Active
Themes
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Eventually, Gifty’s mother surfaced from her depression. The last time Gifty went to church in Ghana, she felt like the pastor’s sermon was directed at her personally, out of frustration over her refusal to come accept healing at the altar. He said her mother’s healing was a miracle, although “those in the West” might see it as coincidence. He shouted that when God says to rise, the people RISE. Gifty sat still and stared at him, unwilling to believe that her mother had really risen, like Jesus and Lazarus.
Active
Themes
At the airport in Ghana, Aunt Joyce wrapped Gifty into an enormous hug. Gifty realized that her aunt reflected what her mother could have been—happy, assured, proud—under other circumstances. Joyce told Gifty she was proud of her, then put her on the plane back to America. After this “feast of love,” Gifty was starving for whatever her mother had to give, including the smile she offered when she got Gifty from the airport.
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