The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Posted By Foolish Sage on December 3, 2009

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book just about took my breath away. Haunting, disturbing, unsettling…yet so beautifully written I often found myself stopping after a particular passage or even a sentence and marveling that such a thing had come from human pen. It’s a good thing the story is set in such exquisite prose-poetry; otherwise it’s tale might be unbearable.

This novel works on many levels. Most obviously, it is a family saga; an often painful examination of how a family learns to cope with unbearable circumstances, at least partly of their own making. Kingsolver brilliantly paints that picture through the eyes and voices of the five Price women (mother and four daughters) dragged into the seething Congo of the early 1960s by their overzealous, overconfident missionary father/husband. Each of the women’s voices is entirely unique and believable.

Poisonwood Bible is also a case study in megalomania, whether on the personal or national level. Firebrand missionary Nathan Price serves as a metaphor for everything wrong with American and Western European colonialism: believing ourselves to already have the right answers, we continually fail to be able to hear anything from those we come to “help,” and thus end up destroying both them and ourselves.

On another level, this book personalizes the suffering Africa has endured over the stretch of its colonial history on into its modern independence movements. It forces us to see the price paid for “modernization” and “democritization.”

Finally, Poisonwood Bible is an indictment of religion misused as abuse. The title refers to what turns out to be Nathan Price’s unwitting self-parody of his own deliberate ignorance. When attempting to say, “Jesus is worthy of praise” in the local language, he unknowingly slightly mispronounces a word, resulting in “Jesus is the Poisonwood Tree,” a tree that causes a bitter sting and rash to anyone who comes in contact with it.

The lesson of The Poisonwood Bible is that in our attempts to do good to those who are different from us, we would do well to listen and learn for a long time before we ever attempt to act.

UPDATE: My wife has posted her reaction to The Poisonwood Bible, including a comparison with Fieldwork, a book on my own “to read” list.

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Barbara Kingsolver: Interview (telegraph.co.uk)

Category: It`s All About Me
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Comments

John Murphy

Arrived here from your wife's review. I have not read the book (although I am going to do so, sounds quite thought-provoking). I grant Ms. Kingsolver's criticism and admit that the history of missions is replete with characters like Nathan Price. However, what it appears that Ms. Kingsolver leaves out is an honest assessment of the culture of sub-Saharan Africa. Do some reading and it is appalling. The reason slaves were available on the coast to ship off to America was because tribes were selling other tribes to black slave traders. The cultures were terribly despotic (ironically enough they resemble the governments that have come to power since independence with the Congo being exhibit A) and autocratic and individual life meant little.

A little balance please, Ms. Kingsolver

Mark Traphagen

Hi John. Thanks for your comment.

I won't deny that Kingsolver presents a mostly one-sided picture in the novel. Perhaps I've been more tolerant of that because I believe she wasn't setting out to produce a documentary, as it were, of mid-twentieth-century western missionary efforts, nor was she attempting to document as a historian would African history or politics--though her novel is very much immersed in both. As I've said before, I think she was using the time-place-circumstance as a canvas upon which to paint a bigger picture of the dangers of the colonialist-paternalist attitude, wherever and whenever it rears its head.

Also, although admittedly she is a lot harder on the West and on whites--and at points probably over-romanticizes native African culture--she does not hide from the brutality and corruption of certain African rulers themselves. Of course, even there she reminds us that in most cases those dictators could not have accomplished what they did without the backing and support of the West, America in particular.

Late in the novel she does have one of the characters bring up the fact that an important link in the slave trade was Africans capturing and selling fellow Africans. But she is there to remind us that no buying or selling takes place unless there is a market, and white Europeans and Americans provided the very lucrative market.

John Murphy

Got the book. Looking forward to reading it.

My critique of this type of approach "colonialist-paternalist" is that there is rarely an analysis of what was happening before the colonialists arrived and whether things were better before or after.

As an example, for all of Cortes' perfidy in Mexico, the conquistadors watched Aztecs tearing the heart out of living human beings and saw (or heard about) human sacrifice of up to thousands at a time.

I remember reading a book—White Nile, Blue Nile, maybe—in which early explorers in Africa witnessed a king demonstrate his reign by randomly picking out individuals and having them executed, just because he could. Slavery and despotism started long before any whites made it there. Ms. Kingsolver perhaps doesn't realize this.

Daniel Kirk

You almost convince me to read it again. When I first read it my overwhelming reaction was, "This book is terribly written." But then again, those were the days of my misspent youth. :)

Mark Traphagen

Without some context, it would be hard to know to what negative things you refer. I have seen some Christians complain that they think the novel paints missionaries and Christianity in general with a broadly negative brush. I could see how that perception could come about, but I don't think it was Kingsolver's real agenda. Rather, as I said above, I saw the missionaries as metaphors for the whole gamut of white Western colonialism and paternalism.

There is a missionary couple in the novel who are portrayed in a very positive light because they were the polar opposites of the Prices. They sought to learn about and appreciate the Kongolese culture and thus were able to truly serve. But they're doctrinal syncretism (they had come to see the natives' animism as just another way to worship God) is probably too much for most Christian readers to swallow.

vogelabv

I remember hearing negative things about the book before. Do you know what they are, and are they concerns worth mentioning?

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