A Response to The Poisonwood Bible

"IMAGINE A RUIN so strange it must never have happened." So begins Barbara Kingsolver’s epic novel The Poisonwood Bible. In its 550 pages Kingsolver explains the ruin and the redemption that occur within a family that travels to Africa as missionaries in 1959. Amidst carpenter ant invasions, bouts of malaria, and political uprisings we are given a glimpse of the cultural, agricultural and economic turmoil of the Congo from 1960 to the present.

Kingsolver chooses to write her narrative from the vantage point of the family’s five women. Each chapter records the thoughts and feelings of one of these women. The father, Nathan Price, is seen only through the eyes of his wife andhis four daughters. Kingsolver admits that the book is a political allegory in which Nathan represents a historical attitude of the West. The cultural arrogance and misunderstanding of the West is exemplified in Nathan’s attitude towards Africa. The five women represent five different philosophical positions of how to respond to the question: "What did we do to Africa and how do we feel about it?"

Nathan is oblivious to his immediate context. Despite the differences in climate, soil, and vegetation he plants his garden in Africa just as he did in America. He forges ahead with his idea of what is religiously and morally right regardless of the experience of the Africans. All of his efforts meet with disaster. His garden is washed away by the first large rain, and he consistently alienates the people he has come to save. His calls for a river baptism are met with terror as people remember the children who six months before have been eaten by alligators in the same river. Through a combination of arrogance and mistrust he dismisses his interpreter. Missing the nuances of the language he begins to speak of Jesus as poison instead of precious. In his attitude and style he preaches to the people from a poisonwood Bible, poisonwood being a prolific local plant that can kill if eaten. Within the course of a year in Africa his life has unraveled but he has not changed.

Every member of the family must find a way to respond to their father and to find their niche in a strange land. The oldest daughter Rachel chooses to make a way for herself in Africa by opening up a luxury hotel and resort. Through hard work and a great deal of relational struggle she manages to profit financially from the people of Africa. She rejects the religion of her father but carries on many of the same attitudes, refusing to trust the people of Africa or understand their worldview. She transports her vision of America to the jungles of Africa and remains substantially untouched by her experience .

The second daughter Leah begins the book by idolizing her father and trying to imitate him. As her eyes are opened to what her father and her country is really doing to the Congo she begins to hate her father. Hers is a difficult journey of learning to forgive herself for being white and being complicit in all the ways that the West used the Congo, by exploiting its diamond resources, overthrowing the democratically elected officials and replacing them with officials more favourable to the exploitation from the West. Her healing comes through the love of her African husband and through her work at trying to redress some of the wrongs that the West has perpetuated on Africa. In the end Leah and her African husband start a commune of people displaced by various wars. They go back to the way of the African people and develop an approach to farming and living that is sustainable and contextual.

Adah is Leah’s twin. Seemingly handicapped at birth she has had to live in the shadow of her sister’s superior physical strength. Her childhood is spent in bitterness and she toys with the dark side of herself. When a medical colleague suggests that Adah’s handicap can be healed she is faced with a dilemma. Will she allow herself to be healed, will she accept salvation? As she chooses healing she discovers her calling. She is a gifted medical researcher and she soon devotes herself to the curing of infectious African diseases such as Ebola and AIDS. Through the story Adah is transformed from victimized voyeur to healer.

The mother Orleanna is paralyzed by guilt, guilt of her association with Nathan and guilt about the part she has played in the death of her youngest daughter Ruth May. She spends most of the second half of the novel trying to come to terms with this guilt. We are given a glimpse at the end of the novel that her guilt may have been self-imposed and that finally she comes to some sort of peace within herself as she accepts the forgiveness offered her. Her guilt has made her life a poisonwood experience but there is forgiveness even for her.

So each of the main characters responds in her own way to the poison of their experience with their father and husband. At one point Adah asks : "Will salvation be the death of me? " This is a key question of the novel. Will salvation cause the death of our normal way of seeing things, or our normal way of being in the world? Each one of the women has to decide whether they are willing to open themselves to the possibilities of salvation and the freedom it entails. It will indeed be accompanied by death and suffering but the novel shows that the new life is worth the cost . It will open up possibilities of healing and life. Through the alchemy of suffering the ruin is turned into redemption.