Yaa Gyasi - Transcendent Kingdom

“Yeah, I’m just a little stressed. I want to get this paper submitted before the end of the quarter, but I can’t seem to make myself work on it these days,” I said. I stared out at the palm trees as a quick wind blew through their branches, causing the fronds to sway.

Katherine nodded at me, but her gaze didn’t change. “Okay,” she said softly. “I hope you’re taking good care of yourself.”

I nodded, but I didn’t even know what it would mean to take good care of myself, what that would look like. The only thing I was managing to take care of was my mice, and even they had had their bloody scuffle just weeks before. Me, my mother, my mice—we were all a little scuffed up, but trying in whatever ways we knew how. I thought about the winter day my freshman year at Harvard when I’d finally walked into counseling and mental health services to ask for a SAD lamp.

“I think it’s the weather. I just feel kind of sad. Not all the time,” I said to the receptionist, though she had only asked for my name. When she handed me the lamp, she asked if I wanted to start seeing a counselor. “Freshman year can be tough,” she said. “You’re far from home, your classes are more rigorous than they were in high school. It can be helpful to talk to someone.”

I hugged the lamp to my chest and shook my head. The rigor, the toughness, I’d wanted those things.

17

My sophomore year at Harvard was particularly brutal. The magic of my SAD lamp had worn off and I spent much of that winter trudging to class through snow that came up to my waist. I’d taught my mother how to make video calls on her computer, and so sometimes I would call her, thinking I would tell her how unhappy I was, but then her face would greet me on the screen, confused and annoyed by the technology, and I’d lose my resolve, not wanting to add my burdens to her own.

To make matters worse, I was barely hanging on in my Integrated Science course. I did fine on the homework and tests, but the course had a project lab component that required working in small groups, and every day, as I sat mutely in class, I watched my participation points plummet.

“The class would really benefit from hearing your thoughts,” my professor would sometimes write on the top of my assignments. Later, in my dorm room, I would rehearse the kinds of things I might say, telling my reflection about all of my project ideas, but then class time would roll around, and my professor’s eyes would fall on me and I would clam up. My small group started ignoring me. Sometimes, when the class split up to work on our projects, my group would form a circle with me on the outside. I’d shoulder my way in or, more often than not, wait for someone to notice.

Most of the semester passed this way. Yao, who had established himself as the leader of our small group, would order everyone around, doling out our assignments for the night and shutting down any of the ideas proposed by women. He was tyrannical, misogynistic, but the rest of the group—Molly, Zach, Anne, and Ernest—were easygoing and funny. I enjoyed being around them, even though they merely tolerated me.

Zach was the clown. At five foot two, he was shorter than both Molly and me, but he used his humor and his intelligence to fill up whatever room he was in. Most days he spent half of our group time trying out little bits on us as though we were judges on a stand-up comedy reality show. It made it hard for us to know when he was being genuine or when he was setting up an elaborate joke, and so, though he was funny, everyone approached anything he said with some amount of discomfort.

“I passed by these dudes in the quad who were handing out little orange Bibles,” Zach said one day.

“They’re so pushy,” Molly said. “They practically shoved one into my pocket.” Molly was both smart and striking, but she was often dismissed because her voice, with its lilting, questioning sound, made people assume they could ignore anything she had to say.

“If they touched you, you could scream sexual harassment,” Ernest said. “I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time someone used Christianity as a cover-up for sexual assault. This is Boston, after all.”

“Oof, harsh, dude,” Yao said. He turned to Zach. “Did you take the Bible?”

“Yeah, I took it and then I climbed onto John Harvard’s lap and just started waving it around shouting ‘GOD DOESN’T EXIST! GOD DOESN’T EXIST!’ ”

“How do you know God doesn’t exist?” I said, interrupting their laughter.

They all turned to face me. The mute speaks? their faces said.

“Um, you’re not serious, are you?” Anne said. She was the smartest one in our group, though Yao would never admit it. Before this, I’d sometimes catch her watching me, waiting to see if my silence harbored brilliance, but now she looked at me as though I had finally confirmed her suspicions that I was a complete idiot, a mistake of the admissions process.

I liked Anne, the way she would sit back and listen to the rest of the group fumble before swooping in at the last second with the right answer, the most clever idea, leaving Yao grumbling and huffy. I was embarrassed to have earned her ire, but also, I couldn’t help myself. I doubled down. “I just don’t think it’s right to make fun of other people’s beliefs,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but believing in God isn’t just ridiculous, it’s fucking dangerous too,” Anne said. “Religion has been used to justify everything from war to anti-LGBT legislation. We aren’t talking about some harmless thing here.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. Belief can be powerful and intimate and transformative.”

Anne shook her head. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” she said, and I shot her a killing look.

“Opioids are the opiates of the masses,” I said. I knew what I sounded like. Wild, crazed.

Anne looked at me as though I were a lizard molting before her very eyes, as though she was finally seeing me, some spark of life. She didn’t press.

Yao cleared his throat and moved the group on to a safer topic, but I had already exposed myself. A backwoods bama, a Bible thumper. I thought of the religious student groups on campus that spent some of their days hanging up flyers in the dorms’ common rooms, inviting people to worship. Those flyers had to compete with the hundreds of other flyers, for dance marathons, Greek parties, spoken-word shows. They didn’t stand a chance. And, though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much? We have to get through this life somehow.

My outburst broke the dam, and after that day I started speaking up more in class. My grade recovered, though my small group didn’t bother hiding their disdain for me. I don’t think any of my ideas were ever taken seriously until someone else repackaged them as their own. After all, what could a Jesus freak know about science?

18

I have been saved and baptized in the Spirit, but I have never been baptized in water. Nana was baptized in water as a baby at my parents’ church in Ghana, where they have a more capacious attitude toward the rules and conventions of Protestantism than most American Pentecostal churches have. There was a kind of “more is more” attitude toward religion at my mother’s home church. Bring on the water, the Spirit, the fire. Bring on the speaking in tongues, the signs and wonders. Bring on the witch doctor, too, if he cares to help. My mother never saw any conflict between believing in mystics and believing in God. She took stories about vipers, angels, tornadoes come to destroy the Earth literally, not metaphorically. She buried our umbilical cords on the beach of her mother’s sea town like all the mothers before her, and then she took her firstborn to be blessed. More is more. More blessing, more protection.