Kingdom

At first glance, the novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi seems to be about animal optogenetics study carried out by Gifty, who is a gifted researcher with two papers in Nature and one in Cell.

As I go through the chapters, arranged in a back-and-forth structure, the story turns out to be more than a neural circuit experiment for the reward-seeking behaviour of mice. Gifty is one of three black PhD candidates in the entire American medical school, and one of five women in a laboratory of twenty-eight. Unsurprisingly, she has a hard time to overcome the stigma and self-doubt as a black immigrant from Ghana. 

And that's why I think the word Kingdom comes to appear in the novel's title. Her family are the only black people at the church. Gifty can't figure out why her kindergarten classmate says black people can't be princess, why black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, and whether black people are biologically more given to drugs or crime. 

Gifty is puzzled – so much so that she has to check if the God of America is the same as the God of Ghana.