Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible: A Reader's Guide (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
The Price family carry everything they think they’ll need with them on a lumbering late fifties plane and flew to the Belgian Congo as Nathan Price draged his wife and four daughters to in yet another missionary post; a village called Kilanga on the Kwilu River in the summer of 1959 and follows three decades of postcolonial Africa. Creating the voice of a character that feels realistic, authentic and engrossing is one of the most difficult parts of creating a narrative, but creative five independent and distinctive voices within one book is surely a magnificent achievement. The Prices are Nathan and Orleanna and their daughters: Ruth May, Rachel, Leah and Adah. The five female members of the family narrate their story in turn, and the magic trick Kingsolver achieves as a writer is to make their voices entirely original and independent of each other. Here is Orleanna, who always speaks from her later years;First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bartk like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason...The breathing of monkeys. The glide of snake belly on branced. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains...The forest eats itself and lives forever.The girls tell their story from the Congo as events happen, including the very smallest daughte, Ruth May…Sometimes you just want to lay on down and look at the whole world sideways. Mama and I do. It feels nice. If I put my hed on her, the sideways world moves up and down. She goes; hth-huh. hth-huh. She’s soft on the her tummy and the bosoms part…Sometimes I tell her; Mommy Mommy. I just say that. Father isn’t listening so I can say that...Adah, the middle twin, had the left side of her body paralyzed from birth, which leaves her limping and nearly speechless, But she is observant, and it’s through her that a considerable amount of the scenes are related…Our Father, who now made a point of being home to recieve Tata Ndu, would pull up a one of the other chairs, sit backward with his arms draped over the back, and talk Scripture. Tata Ndu would attempt to sway the conversation back around to village talk, or to the vague gossip we had all been hearing about...but mainly he regaled Our Father with flattering observations, such as ‘Tata Price, you have trop de jolies filles – too many pretty daughters…Nelson, as usual, was the one who finally took pity upon our benighted stupidity and told us what was up: Kulwela. Tata Ndu wanted a wife. t‘‘One of the girls, you mean,’ Mother said. She pulled on the nape of Nelson’s T-shirt, extracting him form the stove so she might speak to him face to face. ‘You’re saying Tata Ddu wants to marry one of my daughters.’…Compare this voice with that of Adah’s twin sister, Leah…I prefer to help my father work on his garden. I’ve always been the one for outdoor chores anyway, burning the trash and weeding, while my sisters squabbled about the dishes and such. Back home we have the most glorious garden each and every summer, so it’s only natural that my father would bring over seeds in his pockets; Kentucky Wonder beans, croookneck and patty-pan squash, Big Boy tomatoes. We planned to make a demonstration garden from which we’d gather a harvest for our table and also supply food and seeds to the villagers. It was to be our first African miracle; an infinite chain of benevolence rising frm these small, crackling seed packets, stretching out from our garden into a circle of other gardens, flowing outward across the Congo like ripples from a rock dropped in a pond. The grace of our good intentions made me feel wise, blessed, and safe from snakes…And finally, the eldest daughter, Rachel…Man oh man, are we in for it now, was my thinking about the Congo from the instant we set foot. We are supposed to be calling the shots here, but it doesn’t look to me liek we’re in charge of a thing, not even our own selves. Father had planned a big old prayer meeting as a welcome ceremony, to prove God had ensued us here and aimed to settle in. But when we stepped off the airplane and staggered out into the field with our bags, the Congolese people surrounded us – Lordy! – in a chanting broil. Charmed, I’m sure. We got fumigated with the odor of perspirating bodies. What I should have stuffed in my purse was those five-day deodorant pads…Through these distinctive voices, we know the characters; even from these tiny extracts, you can hear the mother's tentative, dreamy, weary, bereaved and isolated on Sanderling Island, off the coast of Georgia. You can tell that Adah is Leah's identical twin sister, but where Leah is idealistic, Adah has a cynical view. As we read the extract from Leah, we see clearly how her idealistic and passionate benevolent bubble will surely burst as she clings to her father’s worldview. However, unlike her father, who is stupid and selfish, Leah is intelligent and compassionate and so the realities of the Congo wear away at her beliefs. Even from this early extract, we can tell that Rachel is an unadulterated egomaniac just as her father is, except she’s focused on the state of her appearance and her comfort, not her soul.Each voice has a distinctive language. Ruth May invents her own language, Adah reads them backward, Leah uses language to mimic her hero father and Rachel consistently and unapologetically misuses words. Meanwhile Nathan has a major language problem. He first encounters the Poisonwood tree in his ‘demonstration’ garden. Ignoring warning not to touch the plant, his arms painfully swell. But he has linguistic difficulties with the tree, too. In the native language the word "bangala" can mean "dearly beloved" if spoken slowly, or else Poisonwood Tree if said fast. Nathan doesn’t bother to grasp this subtle distinction. His unwillingness to learn anything about the culture around him is a symptom of his general cultural arrogance. So, on a weekly basis, he preaches that Jesus is the local tree that can cause intense pain and even death. But then, in the hands of people like Nathan - Kingsolver might be saying - the ideal of Jesus is a poison, and that missionary zeal did cause intense pain and even death.I couldn't give this a whole 5 stars thought; Kingsolvers major problem as a writer is she never knows when to stop. She goes on and on, and this book does cover 30 years; I think that was 25 years too many.
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