Previous
Chapter 7
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
As a child, Gifty thought she would grow up to be a dancer, a worship leader, a preacher’s wife, or an actress. She suspects her mother would have preferred worship leader, but she changed her mind on that career when she was old enough to go to the adult service and the singer’s warbling soprano voice made her uncomfortable.
When Gifty mentions her childhood aspirations, it becomes a bit easier to see how she feels her adult self is totally different from her childhood self: nothing like a scientist is on her early list of dream careers. It’s an early marker of difference between them that Gifty thinks her mother would have liked her to be a worship leader, when this was the potential career she crossed off her list first.
Active
Themes
It reminded her of the baby bird she and Nana found when she was five. It had fallen from its nest. They brought it home, even though their mother would have unsentimentally left it to die. Gifty held the trembling bird while Nana got milk to feed it. The singer’s voice reminded Gifty of the bird’s trembling.
The worship leader’s voice reminds Gifty of the baby bird, which in turn symbolizes her unacknowledged need to be cared for and loved. This subtly suggests an early intuition that the First Assemblies of God Church would be incapable of fulfilling Gifty’s needs or answering her search for meaning. The siblings found the bird when Nana was still alive and was still a caretaker for his younger sister. Its unavoidable death after falling from the nest foreshadows how brief Gifty’s experience of being cared for and protected will be.
Active
Themes
Next, Gifty planned to be a preacher’s wife, and prepared by offering to pray for her friends’ pets. One was a dog named Buddy, who was being threatened by a neighbor after he tipped over a garbage can and accidentally revealed the man’s secrets. In her living room, Gifty laid hands on Buddy and asked God to give him a spirit of peace. His continuing survival showed her the efficacy of her prayers.
Active
Themes
When Nana was 15, their mother was cleaning his room and discovered hidden pills. Years later, at his funeral, she told Gifty that she blamed herself for not doing more. Gifty refused to comfort her, although she should have, because she felt angry and guilty, too. In the space of one tremble on that day, she stopped believing in God. When she was 15 herself, her biology teacher kindled her love of science. At the time, she felt that the teacher’s platitudes about the compatibility of faith and science were ridiculous, but now they are comforting. Especially the idea that people don’t know what they didn’t know; science helps humanity experiment and explore until it illuminates one more tiny light in the dark.
Active
Themes
Get the entire Transcendent Kingdom LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
This reminds Gifty of the Naked Egg experiment she did in middle school to learn about osmosis. Because her mother complained about having to buy corn syrup, Gifty asked the teacher for some. But this mortified her mother, who worried that the teacher would think they couldn’t afford it. Watching the egg absorb colored water, all Gifty could think about was her mother’s tantrum over the corn syrup bottle. Gifty thinks that her life with her mother was (and still is) an experiment testing whether they will be okay.
Active
Themes
In the present, Gifty and her mother aren’t talking. One night, when she goes to a party at Han’s house, she approaches her colleague, Katherine. She’s wary around Katherine, whom she feels overshares. Katherine reminisces about her psychiatry practice, which she misses because she loved seeing people get better. Gifty knows that her mother didn’t get better through therapy; she distrusted it and rejected mental illness as a Western invention.
Active
Themes
Still, Gifty remembers that not long after the Naked Egg experiment, her mother climbed into bed and refused to get up. Only 11 years old, Gifty made her food and learned to clean the house. When she found her mother in an overflowing bathtub, she felt betrayed, since she thought she was doing a good job.
Active
Themes
In the present, Gifty thinks about how she went into neuroscience because it is such a hard subject. After Nana’s addiction and her mother’s depression, she wanted to prove that she had no mental weakness. She was “a self-righteous child,” who used to pray for classmates she considered sinful and who lacked empathy for “small things” like friends’ breakups.
Eventually, her mother’s depression had “healed through prayer,” but her mother was like a broken bone that hadn’t been properly set, no longer strong or straight. In the present, Gifty goes home after the party to discover that her mother has been out of bed. Gifty thinks that they’re doing okay.
Active
Themes
