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As America traipsed giddily down the aisle toward Camelot on the coattails of
post-World War II smugness, the rest of the world "turned on an axis called the
Congo." It was a culture foreign and forbidding to the nations outside Africa
itself. Yet, the Congo beckoned so seductively with its diamond-heavy finger
that Western greed held a choke-hold on the Congolese until 1960, when Patrice Lumumba
rallied his people to revolution and independence.
In THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, Kingsolver leads us through the labyrinth of the Congo by using
one fictional family as our guide. Orleanna Price is the wife of Nathan, a
zealous Baptist missionary, who in 1959 self-righteously drags his family from Bethlehem,
Georgia, to the Congo. Suffering from the stigma of wartime cowardice, Nathan
is a bitter man so obsessed with what he believes God wants of him that he is oblivious to
the hardships his own family endures in the village of Kilanga. While Nathan is
intent on baptizing the unwilling villagers, the overwhelmed Price children try to adapt
to their jungle surroundings, learn a new language and culture, and still maintain the
united front that their father requires. Meanwhile, the determined Orleanna
mainly tries to keep her family alive as disease, starvation, the foment of revolution,
and even her husband's physical presence threaten their very
existence.
"I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband's confidence and the undertow of
my children's needs. That's my excuse..." Orleanna begins the
story of the Price family in flashback, claiming "I rode in with the horsemen and
beheld the apocalypse, but still I'll insist I was only a captive witness. What
is the conqueror's wife, if not a conquest herself?" From there, the
compelling story of Orleanna and Nathan's family is fleshed out through the revolving
narration of their four daughters.
Leah, the healthy half of 14-year-old twins, begins the sojourn "bearing Betty
Crocker cake mixes into the jungle" and matures into an understanding of the
Congolese culture that far outstrips that of her family. The villagers'
interpretations of her father's Bible-thumping help Leah down a timeworn path from
idolatry to downright defiance of the man who alternately abuses and ignores his progeny.
Ruth, a "stubborn child of five," reflects that "God says the Africans are
the Tribes of Ham... the worst one of Noah's three boys," worries that she will be
boiled in a cannibal's pot, and yet becomes the first to communicate with the village
children through a fearless game of Mother-May-I.
"Man oh man, are we in for it now, was my thinking about the Congo from the instant
we first set foot" proclaims Rachel, the oldest at 15. She's a platinum
blonde with blue eyes who earns the derisive nickname "Termite" from the
villagers. Self-indulgent and self-absorbed, Rachel imbues her viewpoint with a
biting wit riddled with malapropisms and a poignant vanity.
Some of the more lyrical insights into the Prices' new world shine through the eyes of
Adah, the silent and crippled twin who writes in palindromes, reads books back to front,
spies on the people around her, and understands far more than anyone credits.
"Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo
pink."
The Congo's complexities are so densely woven as to deny most of us even partial
comprehension of its transformation into Zaire. To tackle the subject is a
herculean task for any writer; to illuminate its subtleties through fiction requires a
deft pen that only an artist of Barbara Kingsolver's caliber could wield so
well. She brilliantly synthesizes all the varying viewpoints into a visceral
whole. THE POISONWOOD BIBLE compels us to smell the "ripe fruits, acrid
sweat, urine, flowers, dark spices, and other things I've never even seen" that make
up the Africa into which this family falls headlong. We journey step by step
with the Price girls and their mother as they painfully discover the beauty and ugliness
of being white Americans in the Congo during such tumultuous times. All is
never revealed nor ever can be in this ongoing process of what Kingsolver calls "a
path of exploring the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what's
right."
This is not the Kingsolver we were introduced to in THE BEAN TREES. A body of
work in and of itself --- full and extravagant --- THE POISONWOOD BIBLE bespeaks a wiser
Kingsolver. She's become an extraordinary storyteller who takes a leap of faith
across oceans of cultural differences to a continent that holds us in thrall even as it
repulses our sanitized sensibilities. She forces us to face full frontal our
own murky democratic images in the mirror of international culpability for the travesties
inflicted upon the Congo and its people.
Orleanna tells us early on that "Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of
Africa. It makes me want to keen, sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot
of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use. I find it
impossible to bear." In the beginning we may find ourselves idly sniffing for a
languid breeze redolent with exotic perfumes. But by the end, we are ready to
keen and sing right along with her, finding it almost impossible to bear... or ever to
forget... the heavy and tantalizing fruit of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE.
--- Reviewed by Jami Edwards
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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