Barbara Kingsolver is an acclaimed author and winner of multiple literary prizes. I have always appreciated her works because they are very different in terms of topics addressed. The Poisonwood Bible, one of her best-known works, is very much a case in point.
The novel begins with a scene of a woman leading her four daughters into a lush jungle setting for a picnic. The language in this opening section is exquisite and immediately the reader is drawn into the story.
Meet the Poisonwood Bible family
This is our introduction to Orleanna Price, wife of Baptist minister Nathan, and their four daughters: Rachel (the oldest), the middle twins Leah and Adah and the youngest Ruth May. The story begins in Belgian Congo in 1959 just as the country is beginning to seek independence.
Nathan has accepted a calling to minister in a jungle mission in the village of Kilanga and has uprooted his family from small-town Georgia to the heart of the jungle to do the Lord’s work. He combines a dangerous mix of excessive zeal, patriarchal views on the family unit and a hubristic belief in the superiority of his Christian faith and his Western culture.
Teenage narrators add youthful insights
The bulk of the narration of the family’s time in Kilanga village is shared amongst the three older daughters.
Rachel, 15, is wistful at the loss of teenage romance in the US. Kingsolver has fun with her voice, as Rachel attempts to write in a very adult way and makes some hilarious malapropisms. I particularly enjoy her observation that “maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony”.
Leah, 14, the most devout daughter, is largely sympathetic to her father’s efforts. Her twin Adah, largely non-verbal in speech, is a much more loquacious writer, and comments acerbically on her father’s inept efforts as well as anything else she observes and considers ridiculous.
Nathan’s catalogue of errors
The first part of the novel documents the gradual fracturing of a family ill-equipped to operate in such an alien environment. The Rev. Price makes a catalogue of disastrous errors in his first few months. A lesson in how (not) to win friends and influence people occurs when the villagers kill a goat to have a feast on the day of their arrival. Asked to give thanks at the welcome feast he launches into a fiery lecture on the immodesty of bare-breasted women.
His plans to show the locals agriculture go awry. Planning to show them vegetable gardening and despite warnings from locals, he tries to cut back a poisonwood tree and receives blisters and serious inflammation as a result. His ‘model garden’ is intended to provide food and show the locals how to grow subsistence crops. However, while his garden grows profusely, nothing flowers or fruits and he eventually realises that there are no African pollinators suited to his North American vegetables.
His proselytising is equally inept. He dreams and preaches about full immersion baptisms in the river, though the locals will not enter a river with crocodiles. He misunderstands the importance of inflection in the local language (Lingala), and ends each sermon saying (he thinks) “Jesus is wonderful”, unaware that his pronunciation actually means “Jesus is poisonwood”.
Stranded in Africa, the family fragments
The lives of the Prices are forever changed in a number of crises, the turning point in the book. The worsening security situation in the country, with widespread unrest in the nation’s quest for independence, leads to the ultimate breaking up of the family and a descent into poverty. The family undergoes a period of having to scavenge, barter and forage to put even inadequate food on the table.
The second half of the book is all narrated retrospectively. Both Orleanna and the three daughters give periodic updates on what has happened to them and their progress after the great split. The common thread is that rather than impacting Africa, the story demonstrates how Africa has heavily influenced and changed their own lives through their experiences.
It’s worth noting in passing that Kingsolver’s descriptions of the colonial machinations underpinning the civil unrest are very realistic.
The Poisonwood Bible is an object lesson in the failure of colonialism
The book is a brilliant metaphor for the hubris that many may display in the ‘developed world’ about places like Africa. The Rev. Price especially, and his family too, begin their stay with considerable hubris about their ‘superiority’ over the locals and are progressively humbled by their experience.
On re-reading, I also paused to ponder about recent Western attempts to introduce their preferred forms of democracy into Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Having worked extensively in the Middle East, I have learned that the people there begin from very different positions about the need for democracy.
The tale is an object lesson in a failure to impose an alien culture on an ancient local wisdom and the perils of an obstinate and unbending belief that you are right in the face of evidence.Kingsolver’s writing is at times exquisite and her voicing of Rachel and Adah in particular is outstanding, capturing Rachel’s vanity and Leah’s acid observations with great clarity. Kingsolver’s descriptions and ideas are in many ways like Africa itself: a rich, sprawling, fertile abundance of landscape and cultures. The Poisonwood Bible is a wonderful book which will bear many re-readings, and for me Kingsolver’s greatest masterpiece.
