The Poisonwood Bible
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.
We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.
- Adah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
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Nathan Price enters the Congo hellbent on baptizing the natives. Untrained in the Kikongo language spoken in Kilanga, unfamiliar with Kilanga’s people and history, and unwilling to entertain opinions that differ from his own, Nathan’s goal is to baptize Kilanga’s population in the crocodile-infested waters of a nearby river. In his butchered Kikongo, Nathan proclaims that Jesus is poisonwood, confusing his congregation as his wife and daughters look on with embarassment. He proclaims himself a good Christian while beating his wife and daughters and without recognizing the hypocrisy. Yet Barbara Kingsolver‘s The Poisonwood Bible is not so much the story of a maniacally stubborn missionary as it is of those he leaves in his wake. It is a story of tortured and tenuous survival, of a family’s physical and psychological struggle, and of the continent they simultaneously love and long to escape.
As the Prices’ year in Kilanga draws to a close, the Congo gains independence from Belgium. Nathan refuses to leave, despite the advice of his fellow missionaries, thus trapping his family in Africa. With no income, the Prices are forced to rely on the kindness of their African neighbors and to persevere through drought, torrential rains, and an ant plague of biblical proportions. And even after tragedy strikes the family directly, his daughters find Nathan baptizing neighborhood children in the rain in an impromptu ceremony the children neither requested nor understand. The family splits at the seams, mother and daughters scattering across the globe, leaving Nathan to his allegedly divine calling.
The Price daughters become the novel’s central focus, as all of them struggle to form identities and beliefs independent of their domineering father. Leah Price stays in the Congo and marries an African teacher, and though she finds herself more personally and politically engaged in the affairs of the Congolese than any other American in the book, she remains haunted by her own skin, as her whiteness prompts distrust in her neighbors and connects her to the horrors — slavery, Belgian rubber plantations, the U.S. installation of a Congolese dictator – whites have inflicted upon Africans. Adah Price in turn becomes a doctor for the purpose of studying African pathogens. However, despite her success, self-definition proves challenging and elusive, as her lingering attachment to a childhood disability causes her to question the authenticity of others’ affection. Rachel bounces from man to man, and, despite living in Africa, never bonds with its people, instead associating with white diplomats and oil executives, drinking frequently, suspicious of everyone, and never finding true love or respect. All of the Price girls harbor the guilt of white privilege and wonder at the justice of their survival on a continent where so many children die of preventable causes. They are simultaneously grateful for and undeserving of their lives, though their guilt manifests in different ways.
As the Price girls grow, the Congo, their adopted home, grows with them. As in Kingsolver’s most recent novel, The Lacuna, history and fiction intersect in The Poisonwood Bible. The Belgian Congo becomes the Congo, free of colonial rule and led by elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, as the Prices’ missionary work is supposedly about to conclude. Lumumba’s imprisonment occurs as Nathan’s decision to stay in the Congo imprisons his family in Africa. Lumumba is murdered the same day the Price family splits apart. And as the U.S.-supported dictator, Mobutu, takes the reigns of a new Zaire – using the country’s wealth to construct private villas, imprisoning dissenters, taking loans from the World Bank that subject the Congo to the West all over again — the wounded, mined, linguistically and culturally fragmented Zaire limps toward an uncertain future, much as the Price girls stumble and question as they try to carve out their own. Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, The Poisonwood Bible initially personifies the Congo as a dark, ravenous, hopelessly wild place that swallows all who dare enter. Africa is failing, or has already failed, yet Kingsolver’s characters realize that while blaming colonialism and Western intervention may explain the Congo’s problems, it does not solve them. Both Rachel and Leah feel drawn back to the U.S. — to the vaccinations, to the abundance of food — but find themselves inextricably connected to Africa, unable to leave even when they are unhappy or unsafe. Ultimately, a glimmer of hope emerges towards the end of the novel in the the form of a newly independent Angola, tired from war but in control of its natural resources and slowly stepping up to the challenge of self-governance. Kingsolver’s juxtaposition of the human journey with the national and continental one, of fiction with fact, illuminates and humanizes the history of a warn-torn, disease-ridden corner of the world the West destroyed and now would prefer to ignore.
The ending, however, I did not like. So much of this 550-page book is about living with guilt and injustice and the inability to forgive oneself, and to have the last ten pages offer an eerie, post-mortem absolution seems unjustified and out of place. Life comes from death, I suppose, and the intensely fecund jungle will continue to grow, but there is no closure for the Prices, and no certainty for a post-Mobutu Congo. After chapters about loss and death and hardship, the oddly happy ending feels like a forced smile. Nonetheless, the reflective and lyric Poisonwood Bible is well worth the read.
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