Talk:The Poisonwood Bible

Why the link to Heart of Darkness
Why the link to Heart of Darkness?--TWaye 05:51, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Heart of Darkness reference
Part of the reason I had difficulty reading The Poisonwood Bible is that from the moment I began, I kept thinking, Heart of Darkness has already been written -- why is this book needed?

The two books share a common theme. Mainly, the attempt of the western world to impose its beliefs on Africa not only harmed Africa but, in the process, destroyed the western envoys

I aggree with the above poster, who has indeed summed up the theme that Western attempts to impose beliefs on Africa have, indeed, harmed Africa. This notion should be clearly stated under themes if it isn't already. However I would say that the Poisonwood Bible is different in many ways. It has more respect for Africans, who appear as individual people with aspirations and strategies of their own (in Heart of Darkness they appear only as corpses, starving laborers, canibals, and heads on sticks). The character of Brother Fowels, the previous missionary who assimilated into the African culture is a type of character more or less absent in Conrad's novel (unless one counts Kurtz who is somewhat assimilated but who still asserts himself as a deity above his tribe). Also The Poisonwood Bible rebukes Marlowe's rather Victorian assertion that women are "out of it completely." Orleanna says (p. 9 Original Edition)"What is the conqueror's wife if not a conquest herself." Leah may be idealistic and Rachel may try to lead a "normal" or "respectable" life, but all of the daughters are victims, and all of them must find a way of coping with their experiences. Indeed, it is Nathan who most most often seems "out of it completely."

Major Characters
The major characters section is entirely plagiarized from Sparknotes. Fix please? 74.255.226.194 (talk) 20:43, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Some Notes on the Novel
PB (talk) 08:59, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

The Poisonwood Bible is one of my favourite novels and a few years ago I reviewed it for a course with the aim of identifying what made the writing so compelling. I have inserted my notes below.

Overview

In 1998 the Author’s Note stated that while the characters are “pure inventions” the Congo and its history “are as real as I could render them.” The chaos and horror of the country provide the backdrop for the dramas enacted within a white family living in an African village and the aftermath of that experience. Imperialism and American neo-colonialism, cultural as much as economic, and gender-based injustices are persistent themes.

The more blatant political analysis emerges in the last third of the book, by which time most readers are deeply engaged with the Prices and their African neighbours. Moreover, much of the narration is from the perspective of youngsters. For example, the response of one child to another at Sunday School to the news that the Prices are Congo-bound conveys the incongruity of a missionary from a racially segregated community going to enlighten Africans.

Symbols are frequently used to express political messages. Thus, an exchange between Mama Tabata and Rev. Price over horticulture embodies the arrogance of those who assume civilisation is white. Almost immediately Nathan suffers for not heeding Mama’s warning about poisonwood and later the family face starvation because of his faith in the superiority of American seeds. When Price cannot trust his interpreter and seeks to add Kikongo words to his sermons, he inadvertently links Jesus to poisonwood. Incidents like this stand for the problems that one country has in understanding another, let alone purposefully shaping the destiny of people with a very different culture.

While the story serves as an allegory for foreign powers in Africa and the responses of white people to that continent, the reactions of the Prices within both the village and their lifetimes are diverse. At the extremes are Rachel who ends up supporting apartheid and Leah who marries an African and commits herself to opposing injustice. Using five narrators presents multiple perspectives on events and characters and asks “What is true?”

The rigidity of fundamentalist Christianity and Nathan’s patriarchy is matched by the superstitions in Kilanga, such as twins abandoned after birth, and the chief seeking Rachel Price as his sixth wife. However, the locals show more religious flexibility when they interrupt Price’s preaching to take a poll on the credibility of Jesus. On another occasion they overturn a tribal taboo and allow Leah to join the men hunting. Such deliberations suggest a people capable of moving forwards while Nathan seeks guidance from his fetish, the Apocrypha. Structure

A major achievement of the book is the effective use of Orleanna and her four daughters as narrators. l will focus on how these voices are distinguished after outlining the complex structure of the novel that they inhabit. The contents page lists seven “books”, four of which take their titles directly from the Bible. Apart from the last, the books are sub-divided into conventional chapters. In each book from One to Five, the first chapter is written by Orleanna. In Books Two to Five, a second title page makes clear that Orleanna is writing on her return to Georgia. In Books One to Six, the chapters by the daughters that follow Orleanna’s are preceded by title pages, the texts of which are reproduced below.

Book One – Genesis – The Things We Carried, Kilanga 1959

Book Two – The Revelation  - The Things We Learned, Kilanga, June 30, 1960

Book Three – Judges – The Things We Didn’t Know, Kilanga September 1960

Book Four – Bel and the Serpent – What We Lost, Kilanga, January 17, 1961

Book Five – Exodus – What We Carried Out. (From this point on, each chapter by a daughter identifies a location and dates ranging from 1961 to 1986.)

Book Six – Song of the Three Children (In a chapter each, the surviving daughters as adults update their stories.)

Book Seven – The Eyes in the Trees (The spirit of Ruth May speaks in this book’s solitary chapter.)

Books One to Five begin with a chapter by Orleanna. Unlike the daughters, the mother contributes just five chapters. For example, in Genesis Leah contributes four chapters, Adah three, and Ruth May and Rachel two each. These numbers approximately represent the proportions of chapters by the daughters for the novel a whole. However, the interspersing of chapters, many of which are short, means that no point of view dominates.

Orleanna

Orleanna’s second sentence invites the reader to be the conscience and eyes of the forest. Gradually we learn her words are addressed to Ruth May, her youngest daughter buried in Kilanga, and that the mother has been consumed not just with grief for thirty years but also guilt for exposing her children to the madness of her husband’s mission. Yet as much as Orleanna is haunted by the Congo, she cannot forget its beauty and sees similarities between the country’s subjugation and her own marriage. Orleanna writes late in life and mostly in the past tense. From Orleanna’s historical outlook we learn how she met Nathan, wed, waited and found him scarred by war. As well as using the present tense to describe current thoughts and feelings, her first chapter begins with an invitation to imagine and the past tense does not appear for over two pages.

Orleanna writes these pages in the third person but soon slips into the first and remains there. She has the widest perspective. As well as wife and mother she speaks of her family of origin, growing up in Mississippi, politics, theology, natural history and expounds a philosophy that at times promises release from her anguish but never quite delivers.

Rachel The eldest daughter is fifteen when the Price family leave Bethlehem, Georgia. Self-centred and shallow, her style of writing reflects her character through adolescent angst and teenage expressions. Her first words in the novel are, “Man oh man, are we in for it now…”

Rachel’s lack of intellect is reflected in malapropisms, such as thinking she has reached the age of “one score and seven” when she turns seventeen. She dwells on the comforts she misses while her sisters make more attempt to understand or engage in their new environment.

Rachel craves a full-length mirror in the village until clothes become so worn that she no longer wants to see them. When the family are forced to flee the house she grabs a hand mirror rather than the Bible that “didn’t seem worth saving at that moment so help me God”. And at a later stage of her life, Rachel makes known that she most values religion for its social opportunities. A feature making her voice distinctive is superficiality. As with the misuse of individual words, Rachel does not appreciate that her sentences convey an unflattering picture.

Leah

Soon after the family arrival in Kilanga, Rachel refers to her age as fourteen-and-a-half, suggesting a wish to be older. More than the other daughters, her stay in Kilanga marks transition from child to adult thinking. She is far more adventurous than her sisters but a tension exists between tomboy and daughter closest to and most admiring of Nathan.

Often Leah writes soon after events in the village. Early on, Leah mostly uses the past tense but lapses occasionally into present. For example, at the end of her second chapter are paragraphs about her father that include, “Not everyone can see it but my father’s heart is as large as his hands. And his wisdom is great.” Halfway through the book Leah again uses the present tense to begin sharing doubts about her father and his religion. “If his decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn’t right, then what else might he be wrong about? … Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place.”

Leah’s next use of present tense is about Anatole and presages their marriage. In a later chapter she includes a contemporaneous explanation of aspects of Congolese culture. Again, this hints at her later life’s deeper understanding of Zaire. It is largely through Leah that the views of two Congolese males, Anatole and his protégé, Nelson, who becomes a servant to the Prices, are made known. Towards the end of the book, Leah, distant from what Nathan stood for, weaves accounts of her life in Africa with a passionate commentary on what has befallen that continent.

Adah

Kingsolver took pains to make Adah a different character from her twin, Leah. To begin with, Adah's disability means she is shunned by peers in Bethlehem. On Adah’s first page she expresses “a strong sympathy with Dr Jekyll’s dark desires and for Mr Hyde’s crooked body.” She is a fan of Edgar Allen Poe and favours harsher interpretations of Emily Dickinson’s verse. Early on, Adah is described by Leah as taciturn. Adah implies that quietness is linked to loss of faith at the age of five, unable to accept that children are damned for not knowing Jesus. In later life her colleagues find her cynical and, though Adah objects to this, she has a jaundiced outlook.

Geekiness is conveyed through Adah’s fascination with palindromes and writing and reading text, even whole books, backwards. Often her chapters feature such word play. But despite her disability and withdrawnness, Adah explores and find slowness rewards her with glimpses of forest elephants, Pygmies and men training with guns. And she turns her peculiar linguistic skills to exploring the meanings conveyed by subtle variations in Kikongo pronunciation.

More than the other daughters as youngsters, Adah uses technical terms, such as “pectoral muscles” when describing why a parrot cannot fly or referring to Orleanna as an “agoraphobe”. While Adah refers to Orleanna as Mother, her father is “the Reverend Price”, “the Reverend” and “Our Father”. Adah writes about the past, recent and more distant, but adds wry observations in the present tense and suggests doom. For example, when she describes a man repeatedly saying “dundu”. “Dundu is a small antelope. Or it is a plant of the genus Veronia. Or a hill. Or a price you have to pay. So much depends on the tone of the voice. One of these things is what our family has coming to us. Our Baptist ears from Georgia will never understand the difference.” Ruth May

As befits the youngest, Ruth May’s writing has childish flourishes, such as “drowneded” for drowned and due spelt “do”. She mishears words; amends becomes “amens” and circumcision, “circus mission”. Her chapters tend to be shorter and her use of tenses and other aspects of language unsophisticated. Speaking of Africans, she says, “Back home in Georgia they have their own school so they won’t be a-strutting into Rachel’s… Leah and Adah are the gifted children, but they still have to go to the same school as everybody. But not the coloured children.”

Ruth May’s accepts uncritically much that adults say, including racist interpretations of the Bible. For example, after describing the symptoms of kwashiorkor and she attributes this affliction to Africans being the descendants of Ham.

In the concluding chapter Ruth May, as befits a spirit who has gathered wisdom over thirty years, speaks differently:

“Listen; being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.”

But Ruth May’s spirit has also acquired insights. She reproaches the greed of the dying Zairian dictator and provides a last sentence of hope. “Move on. Walk forward to the light.”

Conclusion

Sadly, Mobutu’s death brought new troubles. As yet, the storm continues but those who complete The Poisonwood Bible know better the contribution of outsiders to the misery of the region. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wendwell (talk • contribs) 08:57, 9 January 2012 (UTC)