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11/27/02

Kingsolver addresses conflict in humankind

By Hunter Pope
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
HarperCollins, 1999. $9 — 560 pp.


The path of the self-righteous is equipped with a sturdy blindfold. Under the unseen feet, you feel the lush softness of the earth you claim to be yours. However, all around you are faces that shun you, poke fun, and fly obscene gestures at your back. When you take the blindfold off, everything is peachy. Everyone is smiling at you, although it seems to be a little fake. No matter. You must be right. You know you’re right. Everyone else is a heathen. You are white. You have Jesus Christ in your pocket. You come from the U.S.A., where nothing ever goes wrong. They help people who don’t know the way. That’s why you’re here. You know they are wrong because they are savages.

This is the world of Nathan Price, an arrogant missionary from Bethlehem, Georgia, who is sent to the Congo in 1959. Nathan resembles (not all, but) a good many missionaries who believed that instilling a new Christianity in lands of ancient and cemented religions was a novel idea. Everyone is wrong but Nathan. No matter that the politics of the Congo region was implemented before Nathan was a seed. No matter that the Congo natives made their food from scratch, while Nathan ate a plate of food that probably went through a hundred gardens, fingers, and warehouses before reaching his palate. His fingernails are clean. The Congolese have mud flowing through their veins. But, all Nathan has to do is baptize these primitive souls and all the turmoil of the Congo will wash down the river.

It’s easy to pick on Nathan Price because he is a work of fiction. A lout summoned from Barbara Kingsolver’s ink to create The Poisonwood Bible. It’s not just about Nathan (although I’m sure if he could rise off the page, he would declare he should be the center), it’s also about his wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters (in descending age) Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. By using the literary tactics of William Faulkner, Kingsolver gives each of the women characters a first person voice. Orleanna’s aspect is given through the past. She writes as an old woman, looking back on how Nathan and the Congo destroyed her semblance of normality.

The four girls write from the perspective as it happens. Rachel is a shallow mid-teen platinum blonde whose biggest observations are outrages at the Congolese’s abstinence of color coordination. Leah is the strong one, an individual who believes (at first) that her daddy is right in converting the savages. But, she is a Darwin project, a species that learns to survive in the harsh elements. She adapts to her environment and begins to understand the ebb and flow of the unforgiving jungle.

Adah (my favorite) is Leah’s twin, the darker half who observes through silence and written palindromes. Adah had brain damage in the womb, which has left her right side nearly paralyzed. She walks with a slant, but somehow her brain is intact. Adah is perhaps the most brilliant of the four, her observations are keen and her views on her father and his religion are acidic.

Ruth May is the rebel, a free spirit that traipses up trees without consideration of elevation. She loves Jesus like her father, but her sense of Christianity is leagues beyond his. She accepts everyone for who they are, and she is the only person in the Price family that the tribal children will come near (she even teaches them the game of “mother may I”). Her ultimate dream is to become the deadly green mambo snake. Then, she tells the reader, she can observe all from the trees. Of all the characters, Ruth May is the closest to being a holy spirit.

The landscape that the Prices land on is the Kilanga Province, an area of undeveloped jungle that would have given Marlon Perkins the cold sweats. Droughts last longer than baseball season, and rains pour down like wheelbarrows falling from the sky. Animals and bacteria prey on humans alike, and life and death are seen as the same entity, which the natives call muntu. Twins are seen as evil portents called baza. The reasoning is that the Gods will look down on any mother who kept two babies. The mothers must take the babies into the forest and leave them there. To make matters shoddier, the Congo is on the verge of independence from the Belgians. If this happens, whites will become bullseyes.

This is the world that Nathan Price seeks to conquer. A WWII vet who was the only member to survive his battalion, Nathan believes that the Congo is his redemption. He will not leave until he overthrows the land in the name of Jesus. No matter if he takes his wife and daughters to hell, which is deftly disguised as lush foliage.

Nathan is a misguided soul. He believes that all women should succumb to men, and his all-female household draws his scorn. He looks down on college and if the girls talk back, he gives them the Verse, which means the tongued interlopers must write the same verse a hundred times. That, or he just strikes them with an open hand.

But, he is even more erroneous with the natives. Who cares if their customs have been in place before fossils? Nathan’s pushing of Jesus on the Congolese is like an unwanted mongrel looking for a leg to hump. The natives, however, are intrigued of this Tata Jesus, and they visit Nathan’s church out of cat curiosity. The results are both tragic and hilarious. In the Congo, a singular word can mean many things; it just depends on the trill of the tongue. Nathan doesn’t bother to learn these nuances and his broken interpretations frighten the natives:


[From Adah] “It is a special kind of person who will draw together a congregation, stand up before them with a proud, clear voice, and say words wrong week after week...Then there is ‘batiza’. Our father’s fixed passion. Batiza pronounced with the tongue curled just so means ‘baptism’. Otherwise, it means ‘to terrify’.”


The Poisonwood Bible is about conflict. Each person’s reasoning is a brick wall that meets another. It’s like trying to tame a jungle with hedge clippers. Kingsolver’s story starts in the light and ends up in a darkness that would have made Joseph Conrad scramble for a flashlight. For 30 years in the book, Kingsolver weaves a story around the five women and how each of them is affected by the Congo. She also demonstrates that white religions and white capitalism (she writes with historical accuracy about American, Belgium, and French imperialism in the Congo) will never mesh with the complexity of Africa. It is their world; we are either visitors or trespassers.

Although Poisonwood is a work of fiction, all the historical events are real, from the Independence under Patrice Lumumba to the tyrannical rule of Mobutu. She also relies on her childhood. When Kingsolver was seven, she and her family left Kentucky and spent two years in the Congo. Firsthand she experienced the missionaries’ stubbornness to bend religions that had no rubber soul:


“I understood the way we lived in my little corner of Kentucky was just that,” the author told Ellen Kanner. “One little corner where we had certain things we did, possessed, believed in, but there was a great big world out there where people had no use for many of the things my community held dear.

“I came home with an acutely heightened sense of race, of ethnicity. I got to live in a place where people thought I was noticeable and probably hideous because of the color of my skin.”


Pick up The Poisonwood Bible if you’re ready for a jolt. The read can be unnerving at times, but Kingsolver’s mastery of prose will disrupt your normal bedtime. Besides being a work of great fiction, Poisonwood demonstrates that each continent is unique, and an outsider cannot bring his or her own land there with hopes of cultivation. Finally, when I finished The Poisonwood Bible, I had grand visions of an opinion essay. I would rail against American Imperialism and the missionaries’ kiddy pool shallowness. But then, I would be the one with blindfold.