Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Fisher

Barbara Kingsolver's national bestseller The Poisonwood Bible paints an intimate portrait of a crisis-ridden family amid the larger backdrop of an African nation in chaos. Critics and readers alike have acclaimed the novel as the greatest achievement of one of America's foremost living authors. Examine how the tragedy of the Price family mirrors the political unrest in the Congo, how the novel views religion and marriage, and how Kingsolver reconciles the demands of art with her belief that writing should support a political cause.

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

Abby

Maybe once upon a time I was a little jealous of Leah and Adah, being twins. But no matter how much they might get to lookirng and sounding alike, as grown-ups, I could see they were still as different on the inside as night and day. And I am different too, not night or day either one but something else altogether, like the Fourth of July. So there we were: night, day, and the Fourth of July, and just for a moment there was a peace treaty.

Finally she said, 'After Ruth May you were my youngest, Adah. When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up. That is the bedtime story my mother made up for me. It was not a question of my own worth at all. There is no worth. It was a question of position, and a mother's need. After Ruth May, she needs me most. I find this remarkably comforting. I have decided to live with it.

Mother gripped my hand so tightly I understood I had been chosen. She would drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act as a mother. I think probably it was.

T ELL ALL THE TRUTH but tell it slant, says my friend Emily Dickinson. And really what choice do I have? I am a crooked little person, obsessed wwith balance.

I guess you might say my hopes never got off the ground.

Then I thought with astonishment, Why, Ruth May is no longer with us! It seemed very simple. We were walking along this road, and she wasn’t with us. 

With no men around, everyone was surprisingly lighthearted. It was contagious somehow. We laughed at the unladylike ways we all sank into the mud. 

If you are the eyes in the trees, watching us as we walk away from Kilanga, how will you make your judgment? Lord knows after thirty years I still crave your forgiveness, but who are you? A small burial mound in the middle of Nathan's garden, where vines and flowers have long since unrolled to feed insects and children. Is that what you are? Are you still my own flesh and blood, my last-born, or are you now the flesh of Africa? 

Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her Own.

 Nelson drew his knife and knelt to help me with the tedious work of cutting through the tendons and peeling back the pelt. I felt mixed up, grateful, and sick at heart. Nelson had ridiculed Gbenye's aim by calling him nkento. A woman.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

I'm sure Father resented his own daughter being such a distraction. It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.

Tata Ndu turned directly to Father and spoke to him in surprisingly careful English, rolling his r's, placing every syllable like a stone in a hand. "Tata Price, white men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking, he said. "The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.”

The great old kapoks and baobabs that shaded our village ached and groaned in their branches. They seemed more like old people than plants. 

In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself ina care- fully chosen bush, and went out to seek the faces of his nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words - dangerous to the safety of the world! - from a roomful of white men who held in their manicured hands the dis- position of armies and atomic bombs, the power to extinguish every life on earth. 

And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling under- neath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.

Though I didn't deserve it, I warnted to rise to heaven remembering something of beauty from the Congo.

How is it different from Grandfather God sending the African children to hell for being born too far from a Baptist Church? I should like to stand up in Sunday school now and ask: May Africa talk back? Might those pagan babies send us to hell for living too far from a jungle? Because we have not tasted the sacrament of palm nuts? Or. Might the tall, thin man rise up and declare: We don't like Ike. So sorry, but Ike should perhaps be killed now with a poisoned arrow. Oh, the magazines would have something to say about that all right. What sort of man would wish to murder the president of another land? None but a barbarian. A man with a bone in his hair.

She liked herself best in darkness, as do I.

I may be a preacher's daughter, but I know a thing or two. And one of them is, when men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.

Sllip emas. There is no stepping in the same river twice. So say the Greek philosophers, and the crocodiles make sure. Ruth May is not the same Ruth May she was. Yam Htur. None of us is the same: Lehcar, Hael, Hada. Annaelro. Only Nahtan remains essentially himself, the same man however you look at him. The others of us have two sides. We go to bed ourselves and like poor Dr Jekyll we wake up changed. 

Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! for Jesus will make you itch like nobody’s business. 

If I die I will disappear and I know where I'll come back. I'll be right up there in the tree, same color, same everything. I will look down on you. But yọu wont see me.

Sometimes I dream it is father she's marrying and I get mixed up and sad. Because then: where is Mama?

truly a masterclass in showing that a book can be both politically charged, and emotionally moving. 10/10

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

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