Kukuwa Ashun
Interview with Yaa Gyasi
Three years ago, when I first completed Yaa Gyasi’s stunning debut novel, Homegoing (Knopf, 2016), I found myself thinking about one of my favorite scenes in this epic narrative. In the second-to-last chapter, we are introduced to Marjorie, a keen high school student who finds solace in the presence of Mrs. Pinkston, one of the only Black, female English teachers at her school. One day, Mrs. Pinkston notices that Marjorie is reading Lord of the Flies and asks what she thinks about the book. When Marjorie responds that she likes it, Mrs. Pinkston immediately asks, “But do you love it? Does it feel inside you?” The thirteen-year-old girl shakes her head, confused about why her teacher would be asking such a peculiar question, and Mrs. Pinkston laughs in return. When I read the last line of Homegoing, something stirred inside me. It reminded me of the sensation I felt after reading Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly or Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner for the first time. Immediately, I heard Mrs. Pinkston’s voice: “Does it feel inside you?” That’s it, I thought. That’s the feeling.
Gyasi’s newest novel, Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf, 2020), was just as irresistible as her first and evoked that same sentimental shift inside of me when I reached the last page. Gyasi constructs this unique, innovative storyline that chronicles twenty-eight-year-old Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford School of Medicine. Gifty’s study is a crucial investigation that extends beyond the parameters of her lab; her exploration of reward-seeking behavior in mice also interrogates religion, mental health, faith, and unwarranted stigmas against her Ghanaian family in rural Huntsville, Alabama. In this novel, Gifty’s past tribulations—told through anecdotal flashbacks and childhood journal entries addressed to God—illuminate her desire to constantly ask questions in the face of uncertainty. While Gyasi was working on this novel, she briefly spoke about these critical modes of investigation in her conversation with Courtney Martin and Zadie Smith at the Obama Foundation Summit in 2018, saying: “What I’m always attempting to do in my work is to feel as though I’m being deeply interrogative.”
Gifty’s household is stunned with traumas that stymie the promise of an easy, accessible life in America. I can recall a myriad of stories about immigrants who leave their homelands in order to pursue the “American Dream,” but what happens when these expectations are disrupted by a father who abandons his family, a brother who overdoses, and a suicidal mother who refuses to acknowledge her depression? What happens when the only Black family in a community is subjected to racism in professional, academic, and social settings? How does a young Black woman resist the suffering that has engulfed her family while also actively examining the repercussions of loneliness and addiction in her scientific studies? Transcendent Kingdom is another testament to Gyasi’s ability to create a compelling, timeless narrative that restructures and interrogates familial dynamics in the face of trauma.
Yaa Gyasi, thirty-one, was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama. In 2007, she attended Stanford University, where she majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Gyasi obtained her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow. When she was twenty-six, Gyasi’s highly-acclaimed novel Homegoing won several accolades, including the
National Book Critics Circle John Leonard First Book Prize, the 2017 PEN/ Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, and the American Book Award. Ta-Nehisi Coates selected Gyasi as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honorees in 2016 and proclaimed that “Homegoing is an inspiration.” The novel was also a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Award, the Goodreads Choice Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the British Book Award. Gyasi was named a Best Young American Novelist in 2017 by Granta and received the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin during the fall of 2018. Most recently, she was the recipient of the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature alongside writers Jenny Xie and Edwidge Danticat.
On a Friday afternoon in March, as the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States called for public school closures and social distancing measures, Gyasi and I got on the phone from our respective homes in Brooklyn. In the interview below, the award-winning author discusses the importance of representation in her work, the value of research, and her sophomore novel, Transcendent Kingdom.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m incredibly honored to be in conversation with you in the midst of this whirlwind of a pandemic. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. How are you?
YAA GYASI: I’m okay. I’m hunkered down in Brooklyn and trying to make sense of what the next few months will look like.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: We all had our own respective ideas about how this year would play out, and actively practicing social distancing wasn’t one of them. How are you finding peace of mind through this time?
YAA GYASI: Not too much has changed in terms of my day to day since I already work from home. I’m actually a little better prepared for this kind of thing in some ways. I have a puppy, so I’m just trying to take care of her. I’ve been trying to get books from some of my favorite independent bookstores who are certainly having a hard time right now. I’m still finding ways to maintain a sense of community while seeing far fewer people than I would normally be seeing.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’ve been taking some of my favorite books and rereading them over again. Are there certain books or mediums you turn to in order to refocus your energy?
YAA GYASI: I’m definitely reading all the time. In the past few weeks, I haven’t reread a book, but I’ve been continuing to read authors that I know and like. I read the new Lily King novel, Writers & Lovers.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I remember watching one interview where you briefly discussed Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and how reading that novel allowed you to view writing as a trajectory you wanted to seriously pursue. This stuck out to me because I also read that novel for the first time in high school and, ever since discovering Ms. Morrison’s worlds, I realized there are so many ways for Black people and communities to come alive on the page. Can you talk about your experience writing stories that represent various facets of Black people within Ghana and diasporic communities?
YAA GYASI: Sure. When I first became interested in writing, I was still really young. The first short story I ever wrote, when I was seven, was for the Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest. Back then, all of the reading that I was doing (particularly the assigned reading) featured characters who were white, and the books were written by white men. I majored in English in college and got my graduate degree in creative writing, yet I still found there was this lack of representation. One of the things that really struck me about Song of Solomon was that it was the first time I was ever assigned a book by a Black woman in my educational career, which is insane. Just imagine: I’m seventeen, in my last year of high school, heading to college—it was absolutely not the right time for it to be my first time reading a Black woman. That book was a silent validation that writing was something I could do with my life, even if nobody that I knew was doing it and nobody had ever given me overt support in wanting to do it. Toni Morrison was this other woman that I could point to who had done it and done it so beautifully and so brilliantly. I was completely mesmerized by that book. It was the first time in my creative life that I gave myself permission to fully accept that this was what I wanted to do.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How does writing characters with roots embedded in Ghana help you personally bridge the gap between this binary of not feeling “Ghanaian enough” but also not feeling “American enough”?
YAA GYASI: When I started writing more seriously in college, and even in the first part of graduate school, I never set anything in Ghana. I didn’t feel as though I had a handle on Ghana; I didn’t feel like it was mine to write about. I had this timidity around it because of the way I had grown up. People often ask if Marjorie from Homegoing is like me, but one of the major ways she isn’t is she has a deep connection to Ghana. She goes back every summer, she knows her grandmother very intimately—I didn’t have those kinds of relationships or that bridge back to Ghana. In Homegoing, I came at my subject with an academic standpoint. I went back to Ghana on a research fellowship and that was giving me this external validation that I could write about this country that, ostensibly, I should know intimately. Realistically, I didn’t. It took me many, many years to give myself the permission to attempt capturing Ghana. Even once allowed that permission, I was always second-guessing myself as to whether or not I was representing it well. At the same time, one of the things that Homegoing taught me, and one of the things the book seeks to amplify, is that diaspora is something that belongs to all of us. That concept in itself—diaspora—is a way of thinking to your family and thinking to your identity. I think that’s what made me feel comfortable writing Homegoing.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I am very much inspired by authors leaning toward their cultures even if they feel a bit estranged from it. Speaking of Homegoing, I recommend this book to everyone I know.
YAA GYASI: Thank you!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Of course! I finally got my copy of Homegoing back from a friend recently and took the time to reread it in preparation for our conversation. Moving between these spellbinding storylines took me back to reading it for the first time in 2017. The prose, the breadcrumbs you leave as readers travel through Effia and Esi’s lineage, is done so gracefully, especially when we realize how symbolic the elements of water and fire are in these pages. You said Homegoing stemmed from your research fellowship. Where did the inspiration for your new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, come from?
YAA GYASI: There are two ways to answer that question. I like to set my work aside before I go back to revise it, just so that I can give myself some space to see it more clearly. So, after I finished the first draft of Homegoing, I set it aside and wrote a short story that I really liked. I liked the voice of it and it felt completely different from Homegoing, which I’d spent years thinking through. It felt fresher somehow. It’s a story about a woman, who is a Gerard Manley Hopkins scholar, taking care of her mother. I finished it and was able to get it published in Guernica. Then I returned to Homegoing and eventually sold it. The Homegoing craziness took off, so I just forgot about that story. I was working on a different second novel, but it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I’d reached a dead end. Even though I was dutifully returning to it every time I got the chance, I didn’t feel really inspired by it.
Meanwhile, my best friend from Alabama, who at the time was getting her neuroscience PhD from Stanford, had a big paper that was about to be published. I was very excited for her and asked her to send it to me. I started reading it and realized I didn’t understand any of it. At all. It struck me that here was this person who I loved very deeply doing this work that was completely illegible to me, which felt kind of crazy. I asked if I could go visit her lab and she said yes. That day, she performed a surgery on her mice, explained the process of optogenetics, and talked about her work more colloquially. I always knew she was working on addiction and depression studies, but I didn’t really know what that meant. Getting to walk around the lab was the practical starting point of Transcendent Kingdom. But once I started to write it, I also remembered that short story I had written and its voice, which had felt very captivating. I wondered if there was a way to put those two elements together. That was the beginning of Transcendent Kingdom.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What other research did writing your novel entail?
YAA GYASI: It took a lot of research. It was so different from the way I researched Homegoing. It was a different muscle. I always say that Homegoing was really wide but shallow; I needed to know a little bit about a lot of different time periods and historical points. Whereas, in this new novel, I just wanted to know as much as I could about one very specific facet of neuroscience, which was optogenetics. Thankfully, I had this primary source of a person in my life who I could ask these relevant science questions. She would send me scholarly articles or just answer my questions outright if they were simple. That really helped. There’s a fair amount of science in it, but my approach was to never let it overwhelm the reader. That helped me to keep the research from overpowering the story.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: There is a beautiful balance between Gifty the scientist and Gifty the daughter throughout the novel. At the end of chapter nine, I remember how Gifty talks about her research question from a broad, scientific point of view before simplifying the language and making it a more intimate, personal question. If readers felt anxious by the mechanics of scientific terminology, then they could turn to the question that appears right underneath: “Could it [optogenetics] get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?” How rewarding were the moments when you discovered a new bit of research that you wanted your characters to also explore?
YAA GYASI: Really rewarding. If you write books that involve research, I think those moments are the best. It’s when suddenly the research opens up and it’s a new pathway of work to travel down. That’s what you’re hoping for every time you turn to a research text—that it will inform the book directly. That’s always a pleasure for me.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Religion, science, and mental health are themes that inform certain character conflicts: Gifty is studying addiction and depression behavior in graduate school, Nana dies from a heroin overdose, and Gifty’s religious mother is suicidal. How did you know which challenge to delegate to each character? Did you always know that you wanted her mother to go through this, and not Gifty herself, as a PhD student?
YAA GYASI: That’s a good question. I was just using a layperson’s description of my friend’s work as a guide. The way she’d talk about it to me and to other non-scientists was that she studied addiction and depression. It was almost as if I was using a writing prompt you would get in school. Write about a woman who studies addiction and depression. I wanted to see the ways these two things could play out in that woman’s personal life. I’m not quite sure why I made the decision of Gifty’s mother and not Gifty, but I think it had something to do with being able to understand why Gifty would want to study it so deeply and also why she would be able to have a vantage point that others might not have.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Transcendent Kingdom also tackles familial trauma, addiction, science, and faith through active modes of interrogation and questions. There are moments when the narrative asks these scientific questions about optogenetics that we discussed before, alongside personal questions like, “If the Earth is round, then is God real?” I was wondering what the initial template for this book looked like when you started to put all these questions together.
YAA GYASI: One of the cool things about talking to scientists about their work, at least the ones I talked to, is how much more comfortable they are with living in this space of the unknown, or the interrogative, than one would expect. My image of the scientist—particularly from the culture that I grew up in, which can be distrustful of science—was one where it’s this rigid discipline filled with people who are certain about everything. In fact, the people I talked to were the opposite because they were so comfortable with uncertainty. They were questioning everything or attempting to question as much as possible. It’s what allowed their work to move and to breathe. That felt like something that mapped nicely with how I think about fiction writing, as well—that it’s this process of trying to see something more clearly that can’t really ever be seen. In that way, I think fiction is a process of interrogating as well. When I was writing this book, something that I was trying to keep myself open to was that it was essentially going to be a book that asked a lot of questions, a book that was comfortable existing in space that was mostly uncertain, with a character who was often uncertain. That can be a difficult place to write from, but it also felt truer to how I understand the world.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Right. When you talk about cultures that are distrustful of science, I think of my parents and how I actively have to ask them to stay inside during this pandemic. Over WhatsApp they’re sending these messages, and I keep repeating, “Y’all need to stay inside. Please.”
YAA GYASI: Oh yeah. [Laughs] Exactly. You and so many people are going through that very thing. Like, please pay attention to the experts.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: [Laughs] That’s my own internal battle that I’m dealing with. But how do you think this process of interrogation is different from Homegoing?
YAA GYASI: For Homegoing, I don’t think I felt the same need to sit in a space of uncertainty. Homegoing felt a lot more structured. I’m not really a writer who outlines things ahead of time, so Transcendent Kingdom wasn’t structured in that way. I knew fairly early on with Homegoing that I wanted to cover a certain amount of years, have a certain number of characters, touch specific points in history. It felt more directed, in a way, than Transcendent Kingdom. With Homegoing, I saw the end from the beginning. I had very little clue at the start of Transcendent Kingdom where I would end up.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking of structure, I’m so fascinated with how you navigate this story. Gifty’s diary entries reveal scenes that the reader sometimes sees explored in greater detail later on. Other times we don’t see those scenes. The first time we read about Nana, we’re in Gifty’s diary, but she has codenames that we don’t really understand at first.
YAA GYASI: Right.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: We get another journal entry during one of Nana’s rages. You say you don’t typically plan for structure, but did you originally plan for entries to appear sporadically throughout the novel?
YAA GYASI: Yeah, that happened from the very beginning. I knew that I wanted the book to have these entries woven into the rest of the story. The moments you just mentioned, the introduction of Nana through code names, I don’t think that was in the first draft. There were sporadic journal entries, but that specific one that appears toward the beginning wasn’t there in the first draft.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How did you figure out what would be revealed through these entries versus what Gifty narrates in the present action?
YAA GYASI: [Laughs] That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a good answer to it. The journal entries are a space that deal exclusively with Gifty’s younger years, so perhaps I was using them as an opportunity for Gifty to explore what she may have been feeling between ages five through eleven.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I noticed they appeared when Gifty would be reflecting about her younger self, especially when she used code names like The Black Mamba, Chin Chin Man, or Buzz. These were intimate.
YAA GYASI: Right.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Gifty thinks no one would know who she is talking about when it seems so obvious.
YAA GYASI: Very obvious.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It was done with such a childlike mindset, which I enjoyed. During the revision process, when did you know the first draft was finished?
YAA GYASI: With Homegoing, it was easier because I had this timeline in mind, and the end necessarily had to be in this present moment with these final characters. For this book, it wasn’t as clear. I think it’s one of those things that you learn to feel out over the years. I should mention that I’m not the kind of writer who writes hundreds and hundreds of more pages than she needs, then goes back and cuts. I can’t revise like that. Usually, the first draft is as tight as I think I can make it. Almost always the people that I end up giving it to—my agent, my editor, my friends who are readers—give back notes about making it longer. I never hear that I need to cut things. Usually I’m going by feel for the first draft, with the knowledge that I’ll have to go back and fill things out. When I can’t see the thing clearly anymore and I think that I’ve done all I can? That’s the first draft.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It’s so hard to finish the first draft.
YAA GYASI: If you write on the computer, you can constantly be revising as you write the first draft. That can be really dangerous for a lot of writers who get stuck in the process trying to revise as they write. Though I still write on my computer, I always try as best I can to get to the end of a draft without going back and tinkering with things that have already been written. That helps.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m so driven by completion. In graduate school, it’s much easier to workshop short stories rather than larger pieces and feel a sense of completion. How did you navigate that in your time while in Iowa?
YAA GYASI: One thing that makes it easier to workshop short stories is that your classmates can see the whole thing. Which sounds simple, but it’s not, right? It matters to people to be able to hold an entire story, especially in these contexts where the writer is expected to not say anything. If you’re workshopping part of a novel, if people don’t have pages forty through three hundred, that makes a big difference in terms of how they talk about it. At Iowa, a couple of the professors would let you workshop novels, and I did take part in a “first chapter” workshop, and that was helpful. For the most part, I workshopped short stories, and I was writing short stories alongside Homegoing. Every semester, except for the first one, I would workshop at least one chapter of Homegoing, but the chapters of Homegoing were nice to workshop because most of them stand alone. Trying to workshop Transcendent Kingdom would’ve been a lot harder.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How generous can the workshop setting be for a writer who wants to see their work come to light?
YAA GYASI: It can be incredibly generous. It’s one of those spaces that depends on the people who are in it with you. You’re all creating the class together. One thing I knew going into Iowa—because I was an English major with a creative writing emphasis and had done a lot of workshops before—is that you learn pretty quickly that not everyone is for you. You find the people who are talking about your work in a way that really clicks with how you think about your work. Those people are invested in making the book the best version of the book that you want to write, not giving you feedback about the book they would write. Differentiating those kinds of people is a skill that hopefully you learn while in an MFA program. It’s a skill that will carry you far because, once you do find the people who are the right readers for you, those are the relationships that will hopefully last a lifetime.