Independence Struggle
[In the following review, Greene offers favorable evaluation of The Poisonwood Bible.]
The Poisonwood Bible begins with a mysterious command: “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” The opening lines invite us in—“First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees.” We are summoned to see, through these eyes, a woman and four girls on a path below, “pale doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve.” We cannot at this point know what this means, this injunction to imagine, decide, to be the eyes in the trees; by the end of the novel, we can.
The “I” is Orleanna Price, wife of Baptist missionary Nathan Price. She and her four daughters are here in this jungle because Nathan, in his zeal to convert the heathens, has landed them in a remote village in the Congo. The time is 1960, when the Congo's struggle for independence from Belgium gets ensnared in Cold War maneuvering for Africa. Orleanna is looking back on events, arguing with an unknown accuser, hounded by guilt, by questions of complicity: “but still I'll insist I was only a captive witness. What is the conqueror's wife, if not a conquest herself? … That's what we yell back at history, always, always. It wasn't just me; there were crimes strewn six ways to Sunday, and I had my own mouths to feed. I didn't know.”
The story is told from her point of view and her daughters'. We begin from where they do, these Baptist girls growing up in Georgia in the 1950s—a narrative technique that, like the opening, draws us in, enlists us as participants. Rachel, the eldest, with a mane of blond hair and a head full of advertising jingles, is disconsolate at leaving behind her Breck Special Formula and five-day deodorant pads and the other things she has taken “for granite”: “Jeez oh man, wake me up when it's over.” Ruth May, the youngest, has a little-kid perspective that similarly illuminates this family's background: wondering why the village children have big bellies even though they're hungry, she reckons it's because they're the Tribes of Ham, “they're different from us”—“Jimmy Crow says that, and he makes the laws. … Their day for the zoo is Thursday. That's in the Bible.”
Between these two are the twins, Leah as upright and perky as Adah is halting, limping. Adah is hemiplagic, born with “half a brain dried up like a prune,” cannibalized in the womb (or so she imagines), grown weak as Leah grew strong. Whereas Leah strives for heaven and her father's approval, Adah has no such aspirations, having lost her faith when she realized her father's God condemned the unbaptized to hell “for the accident of a heathen birth.” Adah, who has spent more time than most pondering “unfortunate accidents of birth,” well sees the ironies: “May Africa talk back? Might those pagan babies send us to hell for living too far from a jungle? Because we have not tasted the sacrament of palm nuts?” Adah does not speak, but she writes, makes puns and palindromes, loves word play and Emily Dickinson and—unlike Rachel, whose words get the better of her—has a dazzling verbal facility. And she sees: low to the ground and slow of movement, her slant gives her special perspective. In the time-honored tradition of the soothsayer who is blind but sees better for it, her infirmity confers vision.
Much of the novel's meaning is in what these characters see, fail to see, learn to see; in what is seen by the eyes in the trees.
Even Rachel can see that, from day one, they're in trouble: “We are supposed to be calling the shots here, but it doesn't look to me like we're in charge of a thing, not even our own selves.” Though the congregation is initially well disposed to them, it does not remain so. Nathan wields the Word like a rod, invoking the wrath of God upon the bare-breasted women, trying to drag the children to the river to baptize them (the river is full of crocodiles). His rigid reading of the Word ill prepares him for the nuances of Kikongo, the language of the region, which has a disconcerting tendency to use the same word, intoned differently, to say antithetical things. “Jesus is bängala,” Nathan announces week after week, meaning Jesus is precious, unaware that the word, as he pronounces it, refers to the deadly poisonwood tree.
Orleanna sees the problems early on, but she can do nothing, caught as she is in the daily struggle to protect her daughters from snakes, killer ants, dysentery, disease, starvation—and their father. “What did I have? No money, that's for sure. No influence, no friends I could call upon in that place, no way to overrule the powers that governed our lives. This is not a new story: I was an inferior force.” She has no way to resist her husband, let alone take a role in the Congolese resistance, the struggle for independence that's happening all around them—the election of Patrice Lumumba, the ousting of Lumumba, the murder of Lumumba in a village a mere forty miles away. How could she know that the coup that destroyed him was backed by the CIA, or that President Eisenhower, whose bald head and grandfatherly smile beams down from a photo on her kitchen wall, authorized his killing and replacement by Mobutu, the ruthless dictator who ruled, with US support, until 1997? She could barely, as she says, get her shoes on the right feet.
We get glimmers of these events from a newspaper article that finds its way to their village: “Soviet Plan Moves Forward in Congo.” US media vindicate US intervention by portraying a Khrushchev ambitious for world domination, caricatured in sinister collusion: “big, fat, bald-headed Nikita Khrushchev … holding hands and dancing with a skinny cannibal native with big lips and a bone in his hair. Khrushchev was singing, ‘Bingo Bango Bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo!’” Who better than Adah to understand the scapegoating here: “That is the story of Congo they are telling now in America: a tale of cannibals. I know about this kind of story—the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. … It makes everyone feel much better.” Who better than she to imagine what Africa might say back: “So sorry, but Ike should perhaps be killed now with a poisoned arrow. … What sort of man would wish to murder the president of another land? None but a barbarian. A man with a bone in his hair.”
As the snatch and grab of power politics plays itself out, so finally does Orleanna Price, herself an occupied territory, move toward independence. What jolts her into action is personal rather than political tragedy—“Lumumba paid with a life and so did I.” Only gradually is she dragged into an understanding of history, as she hears, a decade and a half later, a radio broadcast of the Congressional investigation of CIA involvement in Lumumba's unseating: “History didn't cross my mind. Now it does.” She sees that to be ignorant is not to be innocent, and she begs, implores, the very earth for forgiveness. She seeks—as she recognizes all the sisters do—a way “to live with our history.”
Adah must piece together a new account of her past and relinquish the categories that have disempowered her, which means letting go of her view of her twin Leah as having victimized her. She takes a degree in medicine, but rather than become a doctor, she becomes (as she says) a sort of witchdoctor—not one who lives among her congregation, but one who studies it from her lab at the university. She is surprisingly successful in her research because she has a kind of intuitive understanding of viruses as partners rather than enemies, a sense that derives from what she's learned in the Congo of the interrelationship of life and death—an awareness that makes her appreciate voodoo, which honors the balance between the living and dead and “embraces death as its company, not its enemy.”
Leah, too, must let go of her categories, relinquishing her father's simplistic scheme wherein righteousness is rewarded and evil punished. Just as Adah, assuming voice and agency, becomes more like Leah, so does Leah, learning to question appearances, become more like Adah; and as the twins become closer, they come to see how each distorted the other and that their antipathy was based on a misunderstanding—an insight that resonates beyond the family drama to the political tragedy.
As these characters let go of old beliefs and construct new visions, Barbara Kingsolver leads us to see the limits of our own. There are ways besides ours of organizing social systems. Having experienced the droughts and the floods and the jungle, we understand that Congolese social practices and systems of exchange evolve from an affinity with the environment. There are ways besides ours of conceptualizing and describing reality; the language of the region, with its rich tonal ambiguities, is more adequate than English to the complex intertwining of antitheses so stark in the Congo. We balance Western against African values. Christianity against voodoo, and come to see through the eyes in the trees—a perspective which shows, among other things, the colossal arrogance of the West in imagining its language and culture as the measure of all things.
Not since Beloved have I been so engaged by a new work of fiction. The Poisonwood Bible is a good read, offering a point of entry anyone can start from, a story and characters that are gripping, a family saga that assumes epic and Biblical proportions. It addresses questions of history, the weight of the past, of memory, of narration. It has a strong political message, offering a scathing indictment of America's part in carving up Africa, yet it is also very funny, playful for all its seriousness, with the down-home humor familiar from Kingsolver's other novels though it has you laughing one moment and gasping with horror the next.
This is a complex, textured work, its imagery patterns resonating across levels of meaning. The idea of feeding, for example, plays out on ecological, biological, psychological and political levels: ants eat their way across Africa, the forest eats itself yet lives forever, crocodiles devour children; there is famine, hunting, poison, a snake in the belly, a dog-eat-dog world, a consumer society, a stewpot we're all in together. It is multivocal and multiphonic, its meaning not in a single voice but in the play of voices against one another, the mother and four daughters who tell this tale making five tones like those of the ancient pentatonic scale.
The Poisonwood Bible gives a way of thinking about cultures, a way of imagining otherwise. By the end, we—unlike the European explorers who first approached the shores of Africa to conquer, plunder, ruin—might imagine differently.
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