The Poisonwood Bible

I’m currently reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I had heard about the novel for a long time and loved the title but only came across it a couple of weeks ago at the local Oxfam bookshop. Not only does it encapsulate how misjudged and egotistic Christian missions can be (and have been in the past across Africa and the world) but fills my head with images of luscious, dangerous forests and the sense of an awesome adventure.

Throughout the first half of the novel, which is told by the daughters and suffering wife of the brutal evangelist Nathan Price, I was imagining being asked that old interviewers' favourite (in literary circles at least), which book would you most like to have written?’ For me it would be the first jungle-filled, humid, childhood focussed section of this amazing novel. More than just wishing I had written it I wish I had lived in the heads and spoken through the mouths of the four very different Price sisters as Kingsolver must have done for years of her writing life.

Father Price rules supreme in the lives of Rachel, Adah, Leah and Ruth May. Whether in the relative luxury of Bethlehem, USA or in the heart of the Congolese jungle they and their mother are the victims of his tyrannical mission. Nathan Price comes to represent hundreds of years of white, Western control over Africa but, very symbolically, his attempts at converting the locals are futile. Rather than continue to be the axis on which the novel turns Father Price is left behind in the jungle as the Price women finally decide to rescue themselves from him. The second part of The Poisonwood Bible focuses on the varying affects Africa has had on the Price daughters and their courageous mother.

I have always felt a connection to Africa, probably because of all of the books that I have consumed that have been based in or inspired by the country. The Poisonwood Bible doesn’t romanticize it but attempts to write the reality of a white, American, middle-class family trying to make a living there whilst only narrowly avoiding starvation and disease. Although not fully integrated into society due to their culture and colour the Price family live exactly as the locals do without servants or a country club to attend when they are feeling hungry. This is a more real and modern depiction of Africa than novels and biographies set in colonial Africa which focus on big game hunting and white people with a lot of servants. Albeit from a American perspective Kingsolver captures modern Africa in a similar way to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her spectacular Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun.

The shadow of Nathan Price stretches far over the sisters’ lives. For Leah, his once most devoted of daughters who grows to become most ingrained in the politics and everyday survival of the Congo, this shadow takes the shape of her guilt at being a white woman and therefore connected to the Portuguese, Belgian and American attempts of slavery and rule over Africa for hundreds of years.

None of the Price daughters manage to become totally integrated into African society. They live on the periphery or decide to distance themselves altogether. Their first adventurous years of Congolese life; running free in the jungle with local friends, collecting fruit and keeping pets, goes unrivalled in their adult lives. A shared grief and the responsibilities of child rearing and work bind them to the inside world. Only their mother, Orleanna, who spent her days in Africa tending to the hungry stove or her malaria-ridden children, finally frees herself from her memories and guilt by returning to America, planting herself a glorious garden and walking on the beach barefoot.

Parents try to give their children the best possible start in life. Nowadays that often means feeding their babies organic food, giving them space to run around outside and teaching them about nature and life. The Poisonwood Bible’s wide-angle lens encapsulates almost the entirety of the Price sisters’ lives. The transition from outside childhood to inside adulthood is very interesting to me. I feel the need to be outside more, as I was when I was small, to run and roll in wet grass, to be dripped on by trees and have pine needles stuck to the wet soles of my feet. My outdoors childhood set me up for a life in nature but now, living in a city and surrounded by concrete, I couldn’t feel more distanced from it. It seems to happen all the time that, whilst parents are trying to give their children a good start, they are forgetting to live by example and have the best life possible for themselves too.

Reading The Poisonwood Bible makes me want to make the rest of my adult life an outdoors adventure and, when the time comes, to take my children along for the ride too. Even after all of her heartache, worry and bad health Leah, the sister who becomes the African citizen, wife and mother, is ultimately the most fulfilled because she never gives up on the adventure.

N.B All pictures taken on my own jungley adventures.