I don’t think I’ve ever read two books by the same author, back to back, before. I’m not sure why. Maybe it's because some books deliver an emotional intensity that I find both exhilarating and exhausting, and I feel the need to recover by reading something mindless, like a plot-driven mystery or a memoir by George Bush. Or maybe it’s because once I’ve read a book that I really admire, I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed with the next; afraid my admiration for the author will be undermined. Like most of us, I treasure my illusion. Well, where Barbara Kingsolver is concerned, I need’t have worried. Once again, as with ‘The Lacuna,’ I filled a legal pad with quotes that I read again and again. With luck, I’ll find a way to slip a few of them into this review.
‘The Poisonwood Bible,’ is the story of a Southern Baptist missionary family, Nathan and Orleanna Price and their four daughters, who travel to the heart of Africa to spend a year at a remote mission in the jungles of what was, in 1959, the Belgium Congo.
This novel consists of seven “Books,” each beginning with Orleanna’s account, followed by her daughter’s contemporaneous account of their years spent in the Congo, and of their lives since. Each tells of many of the same events in her own distinctive voice.
Orleanna’s ruminations – lamentations, really – are written years after her return from Africa at her secluded cottage on a Georgia Sea Island. There, she struggles to make sense of their African experience – to understand how she had let Nathan lead her family to Africa, of how little she understood about Nathan and the Congo beforehand; of her failure to recognize the dangers that cost the life of one of her daughters and the dissolution of her family. Of her flight from Africa and her life since, she writes movingly, “As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me.”
You only have to read the following description of the jungle on the opening page to be drawn deeply into Kingsolver’s story. It is both evocative of the Congo and portentous.
(My advice to any reader of ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is this: after reading each of the seven “Books,” reread this first chapter.)
“Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.” (Italics mine)
As is characteristic of her prose, Barbara Kingsolver’s descriptions of the natural world are spellbinding. Further down the same page, we are made to understand that, while Orleanna is leading her four daughters along a jungle path, she is in no way in control of events that transpire or understands how she and her daughters happened to be there in the first place. Speaking as if observing herself from afar, she writes,
“The mother … watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate. Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way.” (Italics mine)
While sitting on a stream bank, her children playing around a bend, Orleanna writes,
“A beautiful animal stands on the other side of the water. They look up from their lives, woman and animal, amazed to find themselves in the same place. He freezes, inspecting her with his black-tipped ears, from the gentle hump of his shoulders … Finally he surrenders his surprise, looks away, and drinks. She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water’s skin, as if he were lapping from her hand.”
This most rare and delicate forest creature, this okapi, a “horseish gazelle, relative of the giraffe” and this pale, white woman, as rare a sight as the okapi, calmly observing each other from across a stream.
Thinking back on her life years later, she writes,
“I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband’s confidence and the undertow of my children’s needs.” … “I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them…”
“What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself?”
“Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same. There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?”
This is the question that consumes her since her exodus from the jungle.
Thus begins Orleanna’s struggle to make sense of the devastating experiences that would indelibly brand her for life. Orleanna’s begins as a seventeen-year-old wife, on what appears to her to be a predictably happy path that quickly spins beyond her grasp in unexpected ways, overrun by an overwhelming force, the “riptide of her husband’s confidence.”
Here’s how it all began: It’s the Depression. Orleanna is living in a town called Pearl, near Jackson, Mississippi with her father, an eye doctor. Along with her girlfriends, Orleanna attends a religious revival led by Nathan Price, a handsome, young, red-head, itinerant Baptist minister. “We threw ourselves at Jesus with our unsaved bosoms heaving,” she writes. Nathan took an immediate interest in Orleanna and “fell upon my unclaimed soul like a dog on a bone. He was more sure of himself than I’d thought it possible for a young man to be, but I resisted him.” After weeks of courting and equivocation, Orleanna’s Aunt Tess tells her, “You’re a-feeding him anyways, child, why not go on and marry him if that’s what he’s after.” Whether or not that was what he was after, they married. Then the war began.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, “half the men in all this world were pledged to a single war, Nathan included.” Nathan volunteered to be a Chaplain but was sent to infantry training in Paris, Texas, instead. From there he was sent to fight in MacArthur’s army in the Philippines where, just a few months later, he is injured and, dazed, is picked up wandering on the beach by the crew of a PT boat.
“From a Hospital bunker on Corregidor Island he wrote me a cheerful V-mail letter about his salvation by the grace of God,” Orleanna wrote. “That was the last I would ever hear from the man I’d married.”
While Nathan is recuperating, his unit is massacred. In Orleanna’s words,
“Through the tunnels of that island fortress came wind of a horror too great to speak aloud—whispered litany that would take years to be fully disclosed to the world, and especially to me. It would permanently curl one soldier’s heart like a piece of hard shoe leather.” (Italics mine)
This is the genesis of “The Poisonwood Bible,” the closest we come to an understanding of the demons that possessing Nathan, gradually transforming him into someone possessed by a myopic Christian dogma—a madness. It’s the closest we come to a sympathetic portrait of the man whose single minded religious fervor becomes a fever from which he never recovers. It is also the point at which Orleanna’s imagined life took an abrupt turn towards the incomprehensible.
Discharged from the Army early, Nathan returns home to Mississippi a changed man and resumes his Baptist ministry. He had changed from “one who could laugh, … call me his ‘honey lamb,’ and trust in the miracle of good fortune…” to one who angrily scolded her when she tried to touch him “teasingly” … “Can’t you understand the Lord is watching us?” Years later, after giving birth to four girls, including one set of twins, Orleanna declares, “I cannot believe any woman on earth has ever made more babies out of less coition.”
Nathan and Orleanna settle in Bethlehem, Georgia where they spend the next fifteen years. It is at this point that their African story begins. In 1959, Nathan volunteers to become a missionary in the Congo for a year. Whether because they judged the Congo politically unstable or Nathan too unbending, the Southern Baptist Mission League advised against their going, (a detail Nathan keeps to himself,) and so they went. The family packed up all they could carry and traveled to Kilanga, a remote village on the Kwilu River in the heart of the Congo. Their daughter Leah says it best: “We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.” The humorous descriptions of what they brought with them captured perfectly the giddy excitement and anticipation of a travel adventure into the unknown.
They struggled to keep their luggage below the allowable weight limit. Then someone from the Mission League told them there was a weight limit for luggage, but not for what they could carry on their person. Leah tells us, “We struck out for Africa carrying all our excess baggage on our bodies, under our clothes. Also, we had clothes under our clothes…. the other goods, tools, cake-mix boxes and so forth were tucked out of sight in our pockets and under our waste bands, surrounding us in a clanking armor.” … “My Father,” she continues, “was bringing the Word of God—which fortunately weighs nothing at all.”
They are utterly unprepared for life in the Congo, which, without running water, electricity, gas or any of the conveniences of home, imposed the most primitive conditions on the family. Quickly, their bleached flour spoils, their vegetable garden planted with seeds from home, fails miserably, and even the hammer they’ve carried from Georgia turned out to be useless, since there were no nails in the jungle.
There is also the historical backdrop that is key to understanding this novel. Within six months or so of their arrival, in the face of increasing unrest, Belgium grants the Congo it’s independence and holds elections. Fearing danger, especially for whites, the sponsors of their mission, Mr. and Mrs. Underdown, fly in from Stanleyville to urge Nathan and his family to leave. Nathan refuses, ignoring the danger to his family and stubbornly holding on to his delusion that he is saving souls. In the face of Nathan’s refusal to leave, the Mission League withdraws its meager financial lifeline, leaving the Prices to fend for themselves.
Patrice Lumumba is elected president. However, in the face of US and Belgium – especially US – hostility, and of mining interests of southern Congo, Lumumba’s presidency lasts just fifty-one days. The father of Congo’s independence is deposed and beaten to death. Joseph Mubutu, a corrupt, rapacious army colonel and coup leader, becomes President.
(For more background on these events, see --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba)
Nathan, a physically imposing and domineering Southern Baptist minister, possessed by his war guilt and inflexible biblical dogma, sees his mission in the narrowest possible light—to save souls. Nothing else matters, not even the wellbeing of his family. As his daughter Leah observes, when speaking of the frequent funeral processions that pass their front porch, “He doesn’t seem to mind the corpses so much as the souls unsaved. In the great tally Up Yonder, each one counts as a point against him.”
Although unequipped for life in the jungle and cut off from financial support, the Price family struggled to survive. Predictably, things do not go well. Eventually, after a year of extreme hardship, events transpire that culminate in Orleanna’s and her daughters’ abrupt “exodus.” Without other means of escape, they walk out of the Congo. Nathan doggedly remains behind.
We come to know Nathan only in relief, like a photo negative, viewed only through Orleanna’s and his four daughters’ eyes.
(Maybe, some day, as was done for Beowulf’s ‘Grendel’ in John Gardner’s 1971 novel by that name, Kingsolver will retell ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ in Nathan’s voice, although I doubt he would be any less a monster.)
Now, let’s talk about the daughters, whose narrations make up most of the book. They are Rachel, sixteen; Adah and Leah, fourteen; and Ruth May, five.
Rachel, the oldest by sixteen months, is a self-absorbed teenager whose most important possession in the Congo is her mirror. She wants nothing more than to get back to Georgia. Upon arriving in their remote village, she declares, “Jezz oh man, wake me up when it’s over” and “…the Bobbie girdle I quit wearing right off the bat, this horrid sticky jungle being no place for Junior Figure Control.” (Yes, as with her other books, Kingsolver serves up a considerable helping of humor, especially from the pens of these daughters.) Rachel’s sister Leah describes Rachel this way: “[O]n the plane, she kept batting her white-rabbit eyelashes and adjusting her bright pink hairband trying to get me to notice she had secretly painted her fingernails bubble-gum pink to match.” Rachel becomes familiar to us for her hilarious malapropisms and critical eye of her own, and for her acerbic observations in response to one assault after another perpetrated by the Congo or her father. Of her father, she writes, “Hurray! They all cheered, but I felt a knot in my stomach. He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.” and, when asked, “Did you know Katanga has seceded from the Congo?” “I’m just happy to know somebody has succeeded in something.” she replies. It turns out that Rachel, as detached as she is, is the truest reporter of events and dialogue, often punctuated with her own sardonic, malaprop-laden asides. (I can only imagine the fun Kingsolver had writing as Rachel. I can hear her laughing out loud, as I did, when writing lines like, “It is my girlfriends …” that helped me “… make the graceful transition to wifehood and adulteration.” And, “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.”)
Rachel's reporting of her father tense meeting with his predecessor, Brother Fowles and his African wife and children, and Nathan’s debate about scripture with the genial Brother Fowles is sharp, enlightening and a joy to read. (I highly recommend Rachel’s chapter, starting on page 245 of the paperback edition.)
Then there’s the twins, Leah and Adah, both cleverer than Rachel, and more complicated—less stereotypical American teenagers and more open to the Congo experience. Leah is a tomboy who, early on, works hard to win the approval of her father, but is determined to learn the ways of the jungle, like hunting with bow and arrow. As Adah attests, “Nelson [their houseboy] shows her how to stand, close one eye, and whack her arrow trembling into the heart of a leaf. She is a frighteningly good shot.” Her determined embrace of Africa separates her from her Father. She comes to view Nathan as Africans might view him, if not deranged, inconsequential. Consequently, she loses her own religious faith, but never her earnestness, her intensity, saying at one point to her future African husband, “I want to be righteous, Anatole. To know right from wrong, that’s all. I want to live the right way and be redeemed.”
Her twin sister, Adah, brain damaged at birth (“Officially my condition is called hemiplagia.”) walks with a pronounced limp and has trouble speaking, but is in every other respects as clever as her twin sister. “It is true…” Adah says, “that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. … Silence has many advantages.” Besides being a sharp observing and chronicler of events, Adah’s talent or affliction, depending on how you look at it, is palindromes – reading and making up verses backwards and forwards, like, “Amen enema,” (her palindrome for her father) and “Poor Dan is in a droop.”
The youngest, Ruth May, is just five when they arrive in the Congo. Her voice is less distinct, but she has a charisma all her own and quickly earns the affection of the village children by leading them in a game of “Mother May I” or, from their mouths, “Ma-da-meh-hi.” Born nine years after the clutch of the first three, who had arrived within sixteen months of each other, Ruth May is Orleanna’s favorite. Referring to her last child, she says this: “… the baby who trials her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after—oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep.”
Of course, Africans play a vital role in this book and it is here that Kingsolver’s meticulous research and talent for empathy are on full display. She absorbs the rich traditions, language and nature of Africa and plays them back to us in ways that make them intelligible, teaching us to appreciate and respect Africa’s struggles and rhythms, even to understand some of the subtle tones that make up the Kongolese language. And, while not as foreign to her as Africa must have been, she achieves the same feat of affinity, as she inhabits the souls of each member of the Price family.
The central tragedy here is that Nathan, a fundamentalist southern preacher bent on baptizing African children in the Kwilu River, a river in which an alligator had recently eaten a child, is the least suited to the task of saving African souls. Religion, race, prejudice, cultural assumptions and ignorance conspire against his ever succeeding, especially at this critical moment as the Congo is waking from a century of colonial rule, to demand its independence. Kingsolver’s novel drives this point home: our approach to Africa ignores Africans. The reasons for this are made manifest.
Nathan’s predecessor, Brother Fowles, who has married an African and embraced Africa on its own terms, and who plies the Kwilu River in an old barge delivering aid, put it this way: “If some of the branches have been broken off, and you who were only a wild olive shoot have been grafted in, and made to share the richness of the olive’s root, you must not look down upon the branches. Remember that you do not support the root; the root supports you.”
Armed with his religious dogma and southern American prejudices, Nathan is unequipped to absorb this central lesson. Africans have their own religions passed down for milllennia; the Congolese only tolerate his; they don’t embrace it. He brought a hammer to a jungle that uses vines and grasses to build their homes. They have no need for nails.
The Africans of the village have indigenous knowledge acquired over centuries that it would take a lifetime for an outsider to acquire. So too, have they been subjected to centuries of colonial rule that they have patiently endured, and for the most part, struggled to peacefully rid themselves. Patrice Lumumba finally achieved Independence in 1960. Yet, as was revealed more than a decade later, the United States saw Congo’s independence only through the narrow lens of the Cold War and considered Lumumba a Soviet puppet—an enemy who must be eliminated. Speaking to CIA director Allan Dullas, Eisenhower said something to the effect that that “Lumumba should be eliminated.” He was, and the consequences reverberate even today.
In a very real sense, ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is an allegory. Nathan arrives in the Congo with his own prejudices and misconceptions, dragging along a reluctant family as ignorant of the environment and people there as he is, but who come to see firsthand what their preacher father is incapable of seeing. Nathan is burdened with contempt for anyone who doesn’t accept the righteousness of his mission and burdened too with contempt for women, even those in his own family, and of the blacks that inhabit the Congo and even those whites who have learned to appreciate and love the Congo, as Brother Fowles does. If Nathan represents a US government that views the world through its own narrowly defined interests and exaggerated fears, then the women of his family represent those who come to see, after its too late, the greed and ignorance that drives a nation’s policies, and the shameful injustice imposed on so much of the world by their own government.
Barbara Kingsolver has much to teach us here. We have seen this story played out, time and again, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, where a powerful nation’s economic interests and imagined fears overwhelm weaker nations around the world. There may be short-term gains, but as the bubble that is our economic empire’s arch through history pops, these chickens will come home to roust.
While ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is allegorical below the surface, foremost, it is a moving story about a family caught up in its own history; lives they can barely understand themselves decades later. As Orleanna writes, referring to that rare okapi she spied across a stream, “I didn’t know any name for what I’d seen until some years afterwards, in Atlanta, when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in a public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
This speaks to the universal human condition to which we all are subject. It is what makes this book an enduring classic.
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