41 pages • 1 hour read
Transcendent Kingdom
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Chapters 28-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary
Gifty buys some Ensure, the substance she gives her mice, from a nearby shop to try as an experiment for both her and Han. The experience is underwhelming but causes Gifty to think about her brother. She reveals to Han that he became addicted to opioids and died of an overdose. She looks back to the first time she saw Nana high. He looked like he was “dreaming the sweetest of dreams” (211). Six months into his addiction, and two and a half years before his death, Gifty musters the resolve to ask him what being high feels like. He responds by saying that it feels like all the thoughts and anxiety have been removed from one’s head.
Chapter 29 Summary
The Sunday night after Nana’s accident, Gifty asks to be taken to church when her mother is heading out for her night shift. After a dull sermon, Pastor John asks, as he usually does, whether anyone will come down to the altar to “give their life to Christ” (214). At that moment Gifty has what is often referred to as a “religious experience.” As she says, “something came over me, filled me and took hold” (215). She feels the touch of God and walks up to the altar, where Pastor John puts his hand on her forehead. She believes that God is with her at that moment.
Chapter 30 Summary
Young Gifty enjoys the feeling of being saved. In particular, she likes the sense of superiority it gives her in relation to her classmates, and even teachers. However, this pleasure is diminished when a classmate who is rumored to have shown her breasts to a boy reveals that she, too, has been saved.
Gifty volunteers when her church gives soup to the homeless or raises money by selling fireworks. Doing this, she meets Ryan Green, an obnoxious older boy who, she later finds out, is her brother’s drug dealer. At church Ryan puts on a performance of being pious. Gifty wonders whether heaven would allow someone like that in.
Chapter 31 Summary
Gifty discusses how her brother’s addiction worsened. She reflects on the change it brought about in him and asks, “he, who had always been in motion, how could he now be so still?” (224). She recalls the time when Nana went “cold turkey” and had withdrawal symptoms from the drugs, sweating profusely and soiling himself. She remembers the humiliation he suffered when, as a 16-year-old boy, he had to be bathed again by their mother. Finally, she remembers the death of her mother’s employer, Mrs. Palmers. This frightened Gifty because it seemed like a harbinger for Nana’s death.
Chapter 32 Summary
There is a deep shame associated with her brother’s addiction. This manifests itself when one of Gifty’s friends is barred from coming to see her after church on Sundays. There is also the shame of having to look for Nana when he goes missing for days on end because of his addiction. On one occasion Gifty and her mother find him passed out in a public park in broad daylight. Gifty reflects on how the trauma of this experience pushed her into doing research on the topic of addiction.
Chapter 33 Summary
After Gifty and her mother pick up Nana from the park, her mother strikes him in the face several times until Gifty gets in the way and is accidentally hit. The next day, after some phone calls, it is arranged for Nana to attend a 30-day rehabilitation program in Nashville. This program involves daily prayers and meditation practice. Gifty recalls the relief and joy she felt at seeing her brother again and at eating at a fast-food chicken outlet with him the evening of his return. Just 14 hours later, Nana relapses.
Chapter 34 Summary
Gifty discusses the nature and effects of opioids, like heroin. They work by operating on the “reward circuits” of the brain, releasing dopamine and causing feelings of intense pleasure. This pleasure leads the user to feel that the opioids, like food and sex, are essential to survival. However, the more one uses them, the less effective they become at inducing this feeling. This goes on until, as Gifty says, “you give them everything and get nothing in return” (246). Over time, they cease to give the user any positive sensations except for the temporary reprieve from the pain of withdrawal.
Chapter 35 Summary
Chapter 36 Summary
This chapter looks at the effects of Nana’s struggle with addiction on Gifty and her mother. After Gifty writes her journal entry asking God for Nana’s death, she feels shame. However, this feeling is connected to a deeper shame caused by the attitudes of her church congregation to what is happening. Far from sympathy or support for Nana and Gifty’s family, they are judged, and the church, including Pastor John, turns its back on them. This is encapsulated by one incident in which Gifty overhears two members of the congregation talking about Nana and suggesting “their kind” (252), meaning Black people, have a proclivity for drug use. Gifty also recalls many of the people from her church booing Nana when he plays badly in one of his final basketball games. These incidents, and the feeling of being betrayed both by her church and by God, combine to cause Gifty to abandon her faith.
Chapters 28-36 Analysis
Gifty says of Nana, when he was in withdrawal from opioid abuse, that “He looked like walking, breathing misery” (225). He is constantly sick, sweating profusely, and soiling himself. This physical pain is then compounded by the psychological trauma and humiliation suffered by having to be washed in the bath again by his mother. However, the effects of withdrawal, and the fact that one ends up continuing to take opioids simply to avoid them, are only one cost of this addiction. This type of drug, whether as a painkiller or in the form of heroin, has several other destructive effects. Opioid use can cause brain damage, coma, and the infection of heart lining and valves. It can also result in death from overdose, as in the case of Gifty’s brother.
Moreover, there is a deeper psychological and social cost attached to the drug. Opioid addiction, as with many addictions, takes over the user’s life. Normal functioning, in terms of work, family, or social life, is subordinated to the need to acquire the drug. Who or what a person was before becomes lost, with crime often becoming a means to feed the habit. Family or friends of the user often leave or are forced to suffer because of the latter’s problem. This is what occurs with Gifty and her mother. They endure the stress and pain of seeing Nana change, of having to pick him up after his binges, and of his destructive aggression when he is coming down from a high. On top of this, they suffer the shame and stigma of being associated with his addiction. Their church community shuns them, and parents bar their children from playing with Gifty. This is in part why Gifty wishes Nana would just die. As she says, “I hated Nana so completely. I hated him, and I hated myself” (253).
Given all this, the questions Gifty tries to answer in connection with her brother are: Why do people continue to use? Why, even after experiencing the consequences first-hand, and after having gotten themselves clean, do they relapse? Why did he return to heroin just 14 hours after getting out of rehab? Part of Gifty’s explanation is neurobiological. When opioids are taken, she says, “your brain is flooded with dopamine” (246). This creates a feeling of intense pleasure, which then forges a strong link in the brain between the action of taking the drug and the anticipation of pleasure or “reward.”
Still, she is also aware that this explanation, in itself, is insufficient. Even if opioid use is associated with the production of dopamine in the brain, and dopamine production with pleasure, it leaves several questions unanswered. First why is it so pleasurable? Second, what is it about this type of pleasure that is so addicting? Many activities, such as listening to music, exercise, and meditation, are also linked to dopamine production, yet none have the same addicting effects of opioids. As such, to address these questions, it is necessary to try and understand the drug from the perspective of the user. Gifty does this tentatively, and symbolically, by trying the Ensure supplement to which her mice have become addicted. This, though, has little effect.
More significantly, before he died, Gifty asked Nana what heroin use felt like. His answer is that it feels “like everything in my head just empties out and there’s nothing left” (212). This response hints at something more disturbing about the source of the opioids’ power. It is not so much that they are pleasurable because, for an unspecified reason, they cause dopamine production. Rather, their use leads to dopamine production because we find it pleasurable, and the reason we find it so pleasurable in the first place is for the very same reason we find it destructive—that is, because it frees us from ourselves and the world. We are freed, albeit temporarily, from the burden of consciousness, and this is experienced as a great relief. Gifty experiences something similar with her “religious experience” in the church. She says, “Something came over me, filled me and took hold” (215). Her experience of being touched by God mirrors the intoxicating loss of self experienced by the heroin user. In both cases, the “Transcendent Kingdom” that is offered is therefore hard to shake.
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