The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
1998

Introduction

When The Poisonwood Bible was published in 1998, Barbara Kingsolver was already a well-established and respected author. Her fourth novel, however, became an overwhelming critical and popular success, especially after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. The novel sold more hardcover copies than all of Kingsolver's previous works put together, including three novels, short story collections, a poetry collection, and two nonfiction works.

As in many of her other stories, Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible focuses on the complexities of family relationships and communities in which people experience a clash of cultures. Yet here, she widens her scope to include three decades in the second half of the twentieth century during a time of political upheaval in the Congo. The novel focuses on the experiences of the Price family, who arrive in the Congo in 1959, emissaries of the Southern Baptist Mission League. Orleanna Price, along with her four daughters, struggles to adapt to and to survive the harsh conditions there while her husband, Nathan Price, descends into madness as he tries and fails to force the villagers to adopt his rigid Christian doctrines.

The family's troubles become life-threatening as the Congolese fight for their independence from Belgium and from U.S. interference in their political and social affairs. Kingsolver's intermingling of politics and human drama results in a satisfying tale of betrayal and forgiveness. Reviewers have applauded the novel's compelling characters, its political themes, and Kingsolver's insight into the complex dynamics of the family.

Author Biography

Celebrated author, journalist, and human rights and environmental activist, Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, on April 8, 1955, but she grew up in rural Kentucky. As she watched her country doctor father serve the poor and working class, she developed a sense of social responsibility and devotion to community that was later expressed in her writing.

When she was in the second grade, her father accepted a medical position in the Congo and moved his family there. At that time, Kingsolver began her life-long habit of writing in a journal. During her junior year at DePauw University where she was studying biology, she took time off to work in Europe as an archaeologist's assistant. After eventually earning a degree at DePauw, Kingsolver lived for periods of time in Europe and the United States, supporting herself with an array of occupations, including typesetter, x-ray technician, copy editor, biological researcher, and translator. In 1981, she earned a master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona and soon began working as a technical writer and freelance journalist.

By 1987, she decided to devote her time to writing fiction, and in the following year, her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published and gained national acclaim. The novel focuses on a young Anglo woman who moves to Arizona after adopting a Cherokee girl. Many of Kingsolver's later works are set in the American southwest and address the culture clash between Native Americans and Anglos. With The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Kingsolver broadened her scope to the landscape and politics of Africa.

Awards that followed for her other work include the Feature-writing Award, Arizona Press Club, 1986; American Library Association Award in 1988 for The Bean Trees and in 1990 for Homeland; citation of accomplishment from United Nations National Council of Women, 1989; PEN Fiction Prize and Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award, both 1991, for Animal Dreams (1990); Woodrow Wilson Foundation/Lila Wallace fellowship (1992–1993); an honorary doctorate from DePauw University, 1994; and the Book Sense Book of the Year Award, for The Poisonwood Bible, 2000. Also in 2000, Kingsolver received the National Humanities Medal, the highest U.S. award for service through the arts. Her devotion to her craft and to her progressive political sensibility prompted her to establish and fund the Bellwether Prize, awarded to previously unpublished authors who address themes involving social and political injustice.

As of 2006, Barbara Kingsolver was married to Steven Hopp, and the couple lived with their two daughters in Tucson, Arizona, and on a farm in Appalachia. Hopp and Kingsolver co-author essays and articles, some of which are included in her collection of essays, Small Wonder (2002).

Plot Summary

Book One: Genesis

The narrative presents multiple points of view as Orleanna Price and her four daughters each tell their own story of their family's experience in the Congo. Orleanna Price opens The Poisonwood Bible from Sanderling Island, Georgia, where she lives decades after her family left the Congo. While she thinks of Africa, she speaks to her dead child who is unidentified at this point. She remembers one afternoon when they went on a picnic. Even though she admits that the child she is speaking to was her favorite, she begs her daughter to leave her alone.

Fourteen-year-old Leah begins the story of the family's life in Kilanga, Congo, in 1959. The Price family came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bringing as many of the comforts of home as they could carry. Five-year-old Ruth May talks about segregation back home and insists that her sisters will not be going to school with the village children. She admits that she is bad sometimes and explains that Adah, Leah's twin, is brain damaged and hates all of them.

Fifteen-year-old Rachel takes stock of the situation when they land and realizes that they will have no control over their lives in the Congo. She immediately misses the comforts of home more than the others. The village men, bare-chested women, and naked children welcome them, singing their own versions of Christian hymns. After Nathan delivers a brief sermon about God punishing "sinners" for their nakedness, the villagers turn away dismayed, some women covering their breasts. When the Prices begin to eat food prepared by the villagers, Orleanna warns her daughters not to spit it out. That night, Rachel cries herself to sleep.

Adah describes the village with its little mud houses inhabited by "tired thin women." She remains mute because doctors who determined that she has hemiplegia, or the inability to move one side of her body, insisted that only half of her brain worked and that she would never speak. Leah explains that during their first days in Congo, the girls were all afraid to leave the house. They took bitter quinine tablets to ward off malaria, their greatest fear. Leah vows to work hard with her father in growing crops for the village to help them and to gain his recognition, which she desperately craves.

The children are in awe of Mama Bekwa Tataba, a village woman who becomes their servant and teaches them how to survive in the Congo. Leah is shocked that she is contemptuous of her father's planting skills, but Mama Tataba shows them the proper way to plant crops. When the rainy season comes, his crops are washed away.

On Easter Sunday, Nathan stages a pageant to encourage baptism, but the villagers, whose attendance at church has been sparse, refuse. Orleanna fries up chicken and passes it out to the village, winning them over. The family has inherited from Brother Fowles, the previous missionary, a parrot named Methuselah who has picked up his previous owner's earthy language, which vexes Nathan. He punishes Leah, Ruth May, and Rachel, thinking that they have taught the bird to swear, by forcing them to write out biblical verses. None tells him that Methuselah had overheard Orleanna swearing over the seemingly impossible task of keeping the family fed.

Nathan sets off dynamite in the river to kill fish for the villagers and so inspire them to join the church. So many fish are killed, however, that the day of abundance becomes a day of waste since there is no way to preserve the fish that are not eaten. They soon realize that their garden will never provide food because there are no insects to pollinate the plants. One day the family suffers two losses: Mama Tataba leaves after Nathan gives a long sermon on baptism, and Nathan releases Methuselah into the wild. Nathan later discovers that the villagers refuse to allow him to baptize them because a girl was eaten the previous year by a crocodile when she was swimming in the river.

Book Two: The Revelation

The narrative shifts back to Orleanna on Sanderling Island, reflecting on how Nathan hardened his will during their time in Kilanga and grew more distant from the children and from her.

Back in the Congo, Leah is fascinated by the new sights of the jungle and claims it to be a heavenly paradise. Ruth May makes friends with many of the village children, and Leah makes her first friend, Pascal, who teaches her the names of everything she sees as well as important survival skills. When Ruth May breaks her arm after falling out of a tree, Eeben Axelroot, a bush pilot and mercenary, flies her and Nathan to the doctor in nearby Stanleyville.

Media Adaptations

• Brilliance Audio produced an unabridged audio version of the novel, read by Dean Robertson, in 2004. As of 2006, no film version had been made.

Later, Anatole, the village schoolteacher and interpreter of Nathan's sermons, warns Nathan that their chief, Tata Ndu is concerned that his people will turn their backs on their own customs and traditions. Anatole explains that the only villagers who are attending his services are those who feel that their gods have abandoned them. Tata Ndu fears that if Nathan lures too many people to his church, the gods will become angry and punish the village. Nathan tries to force Anatole to support him, but Anatole remains neutral. He also warns Nathan that he must respect the village's spiritual leader, Tata Kuvundundu, and notes that the previous missionary, Brother Fowles, had gained the trust of the villagers and so had been able to bring most of them to church. This comparison angers Nathan, who later takes it out on Orleanna.

Nelson, an orphan boy in the village, comes to help out the Prices in return for a place to live. Adah, who sometimes spies on the villagers, notices that Anatole supports the movement for independence in the Congo. One day, the chief mistakenly thinks that she has been killed by a lion that was tracking her. As a result, more villagers come to Nathan's church, thinking that Jesus must have saved her. Their response pleases Nathan, who turns his attention briefly to Adah, which makes Leah jealous. After Nathan strikes Leah "hard for the sin of pride," she runs off into the jungle and does not return until nighttime.

In January, the Underdowns, who finance the Mission League, come to warn the Prices to leave before the conflict over the country's independence gets worse. They remind Nathan that his mission there was never sanctioned by the league. When the Underdowns tell him that no one is coming to replace him, Nathan refuses to go, believing that God will protect them.

When the rainy season comes, many villagers die from disease. Orleanna continually pleads with Nathan to leave, but he refuses to listen to her. Patrice Lumumba becomes prime minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo. After the Underdowns evacuate, the Prices' monthly stipend, which they used to buy food, stops. Orleanna becomes despondent, and she and Ruth May spend their days in bed.

Book Three: The Judges

Back in the present, Orleanna insists to herself and to Ruth May that she was unable to do anything to prevent their suffering. She tells of Nathan's experience during World War II, in which he narrowly escaped the Death March from Bataan, which claimed the lives of all the men in his unit.

Orleanna and Ruth May are near death from malaria, which does not seem to concern Nathan. The three girls struggle to feed them all with no money to buy food. Anatole tells Leah about the current political situation in the Congo, noting the difficulties that Lumumba is having in his efforts to maintain independence. Whites are beginning to be attacked in the cities by black revolutionaries. Every night Orleanna begs Nathan to leave, but he persists in refusing.

While the sickness holds on to Ruth May, Orleanna slowly tries to pull herself together and take care of her family. She refuses to speak directly to Nathan. After her illness, she begins to speak her mind and insists she will get them out as soon as she can find a way. Leah begins to doubt her father's judgment as she recognizes that he is unable to take care of them.

Brother Fowles and his wife visit the Prices and present them with a much more benevolent view of the villagers that involves compromise and respect. When he and Nathan disagree about the interpretation of scripture and the best way to save the villagers, Nathan stomps off angrily. The Fowles give the family gifts of food and medicine.

Tata Ndu decides that he wants Rachel to be his wife. In order to escape that fate and a growing sense of danger, her father convinces her to pretend to be engaged to Axelroot. As they spend time together in a fake courting ritual, Rachel eventually grows to like him. Ruth May thinks about the diamonds she saw in the back of Axelroot's plane when she went with her father to see the doctor. She has told no one because Axelroot insisted that her family would get sick and die if she did. This discovery suggests that the pilot has been involved in smuggling operations.

Leah teaches at Anatole's school, and she and Anatole become good friends. Orleanna gives Rachel some of her jewelry for her seventeenth birthday. Adah notes that Ruth May has gotten better, but it seems as if the life has gone out of her. Leah begins to learn how to hunt in order to provide food for the family. She has difficulty though teaching the children who are becoming increasingly wary of whites during the political upheaval. She and Anatole have long talks about the black Africans' lives and culture in contrast to that of Americans. Axelroot tells Rachel that Lumumba is going to be murdered. Adah hears the same news while listening to his radio but with the added information that the Americans are behind the plot.

One night, the village is attacked by ants, which cover the ground, destroying everything in their path. All run to the river except Ruth May and Adah, who both need assistance. For the first time, Adah speaks out loud, asking for her mother's help. Orleanna is forced to make a choice, and she chooses Ruth May, abandoning Adah, who is later rescued by Anatole. He tells Leah that the villagers have taken the family to safety and that they have been looking out for them during these past months. Feeling that Anatole is the only person she can believe in now. Leah tells him that she loves him.

Book Four: Bel and The Serpent

In the present, Orleanna recalls the details of the political unrest in the Congo, noting that the U.S. government organized a coup that put Joseph Mobutu into power. Back in the Congo, the villagers hold an election and vote against accepting Christ as the savior of Kilanga.

Leah begins to openly defy Nathan after the vote. The villagers plan a hunt so that they will not die of starvation, and Leah participates. She kills an impala, but one of the villagers claims that he killed it. The chief cuts off a piece for her, but she throws it back, hitting the man who had argued with her. Rachel constructs a secret plan to have Axelroot take her away from the village.

In an effort to scare or punish anyone who supports the Prices, Tata Kuvundu, the village's spiritual leader, places a snake near Anatole's bed and another in the chicken house where Nelson sleeps. The latter one kills Ruth May. A devastated Orleanna prepares her for burial and then moves all of their possessions outside of the house, so that the villagers can take what they want.

Book Five: Exodus

After Ruth May's burial, Orleanna begins walking with her remaining daughters to Leopoldville, leaving Nathan behind. During the journey, they become sick with malaria. When they arrive at the village of Bulungu, they stop for a while as Orleanna decides what to do next. She eventually continues on with Adah, leaving Leah, who is delirious with fever, behind in Anatole's care until she is well enough to travel home. Rachel leaves with Axelroot. During her convalescence, Leah's love for Anatole deepens. When she gets better, she decides to stay in the Congo with him.

By 1962, Rachel and Axelroot are living together in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he works in the mining industry. Adah is back home in Georgia attending Emory University where she is studying medicine.

In 1964, Leah is staying in a convent in the jungle for protection as Anatole aids the revolutionaries and is eventually imprisoned by Mobutu's forces. She hears that Nathan is living in the jungle and is ill. Rachel has adapted well to segregated Johannesburg but decides to leave Axelroot who treats her badly. She seduces a French ambassador and soon marries him.

By Christmas of 1968, Adah has discovered that her condition had been misdiagnosed, and she is able to get rid of her limp. She is afraid, however, that she will lose her identity if she is cured of her disability. Leah comes to Georgia for a visit with Anatole, now her husband, and their son. Orleanna has become a civil rights worker. Adah fears that she will lose Orleanna to Leah and her family but soon realizes that her mother needs her and is comforted by the thought.

In 1974, Leah and Anatole now have three children. She constantly fears that Anatole will again be imprisoned. In 1978, Rachel runs the Equatorial, a resort near Brazzaville in the French Congo, left to her by her third husband. The resort, which was formerly a plantation, gets a good tourist trade, and Rachel is content there.

In 1981, Anatole has been sent back to prison after returning from a stay in the United States. Leah determines that her family needs to go back to the Congo because they have a responsibility to the country. Also, she insists "the air is just blank in America…. You can't ever smell what's around you." Leah is desperately lonely without Anatole. In the United States, Adah has become an expert in tropical diseases.

In 1984, the three sisters reunite in the Congo, a meeting that becomes, in Rachel's terms, "a sensational failure." She explains, "For the entire trip I think the three of us were all on speaking terms for only one complete afternoon." They argue mainly about their views of Africa and its people. Leah tells her sisters that their father has died. After an incident on the river when he tried to baptize some of the village children, their boat overturned, and the children drowned or were killed by a crocodile. As a result, the villagers set fire to a tower that Nathan had climbed up, and he burned to death.

In 1985, Orleanna moves to Sanderling Island off the coast of Georgia. By 1986, Leah has four sons and is living in the Congo, renamed Zaire, where she and Anatole work with farmers and try to establish a cooperative. They hope to be able to move to Angola, a truly independent nation beyond the reach of U.S. influence.

Book Six: Son of the Three Children

Rachel's resort has become quite profitable. Now living in Angola where she teaches health classes, Leah admits, "Quinine just barely keeps my malaria in check." Orleanna also suffers from the diseases she picked up in Africa.

Book Seven: The Eyes in the Trees

Ruth May controls the narrative in the final pages as she speaks to her mother and sisters, insisting that she will not judge them. She notes that Orleanna and her sisters tried to find her grave to say goodbye, but the village is no longer there. Ruth May forgives them and tells them, "Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward…. You will forgive and remember."

Characters

Eeben Axelroot

Eeben Axelroot is the self-serving Afrikaner bush pilot, diamond smuggler, and CIA agent who helps Rachel escape Kilanga. They later live together in a common-law marriage until Rachel leaves him for a government official.

Brother Fowles

Brother Fowles, the missionary that had lived in Kilanga before the arrival of the Prices, "entered into unconventional alliances with the local people" and was consequently removed by the Mission League.38 He does not interpret the Bible as strictly as does Nathan and so can be much more flexible as he tries to help the villagers. His sympathetic and generous response to the villagers provides a model of what real missionary work can accomplish.

Tata Kuvundu

Tata Kuvundu, the village's spiritual leader, fears that Nathan will interfere with tradition and thus his power among his people. He tries to remove those whom he feels threaten his power by planting mamba snakes in their beds. One snake that was left in the chicken house for Nelson kills Ruth May.

Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba becomes the first elected president of the Republic of the Congo. His refusal to accept American influence in his country causes his ousting during a coup. He is later beaten to death by government forces. Anatole's support of Lumumba and the principles for which he stood makes him an enemy of Mobutu's government and as a result, he is frequently jailed.

Joseph Mobutu

Joseph Mobutu installs himself as president of the Republic of the Congo after leading a U.S. backed coup that ousted Lumumba from power. He ruled the country as a corrupt and tyrannical dictator for thirty years, enjoying a wealthy lifestyle while his people suffered in poverty.

Mama Mwanza

Mama Mwanza, one of the Prices' neighbors, had her legs burned so badly that they have become useless. She is able to move by scooting around on her hands. The Prices respect her resourcefulness, and Adah identifies with her.

Tata Ndu

Village chief Tata Ndu fears that Nathan and his teachings will usurp the chief's position among his people. Tata Ndu decides that he wants to take Rachel as one of his brides but does not pursue her when he is told that she is engaged to Axelroot.

Nelson

In exchange for a place to live, twelve-year-old Nelson, a village orphan who is one of Anatole's best students, helps the Price family after Mama Tataba leaves. He teaches the girls African customs and survival skills.

Anatole Ngemba

Anatole is the village schoolteacher who later becomes a revolutionary. He interprets Nathan's sermons and becomes sympathetic to the Prices' difficulty in adjusting to village life. Leah falls in love with him, and the two marry and have four children.

Pascal

Leah names her first child after nine-year-old Pascal who becomes her first friend in the Congo.

Adah Price

Adah suffers from a condition called hemiplegia, which makes the left side of her body useless. She blames her twin sister, Leah, for this infirmity, insisting that she grew weak in her mother's womb while Leah grew strong. Adah, who has decided not to speak, takes a cynical view of the world but notices everything. She claims, "When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feebleminded and promptly make a show of their own limitations." Since, according to her, she is "mostly … lost in the shuffle," she isolates herself from others. Diagnosed like her twin as gifted, she spends her time thinking of palindromes, poetry, and math.

Adah feels more accepted in the Congo where so many black Africans have disabilities that "bodily damage is more or less considered to be a byproduct of living, not a disgrace." As a result, she enjoys "a benign approval in Kilanga that [she has] never, ever known in Bethlehem, Georgia." She later admits that she has "long relied on the comforts of martyrdom." After she returns home, she is able to regain the use of her left side and becomes a researcher, studying deadly viruses that afflict Africans.

Leah Price

When she and her family arrive in the Congo, Leah is a firm believer in their mission and is devoted to her father, whom she idolizes. Initially, she is desperate for his approval and always wants to be with him. She never contradicts him or questions his autocratic rule of their family. Her compassionate nature, however, forces her to recognize her father's self-serving motives, and she rejects him as well as his religion. As she falls in love with Anatole, her new ideal, she becomes deeply involved with the plight of black Africans. Adah claims that "her religion is the suffering." Anatole warns her against trying "to make life a mathematics problem with [her] in the center and everything coming out equal." His nickname for her is "béene-beene," which means "as true as the truth can be."

Nathan Price

Nathan Price, the Baptist missionary who brings his family to the Congo, is an autocratic man whose religious zeal makes him rigid and unsympathetic. Orleanna recognizes that he could never love her because that "would have trespassed on his devotion to all mankind." He has antiquated views of women and their abilities, illustrated by his pronouncement: "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes…. It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes."

His experiences during World War II made him "contemptuous of failure," and caused his "steadfast disdain for cowardice [to turn] to obsession." He had narrowly escaped the Death March from Bataan during the war, which claimed the lives of all the men in his unit except his because he had been evacuated due to an injury. Since then, he has carried the guilty suspicion and the fear that he was a coward, believing that God was always watching and judging him. As a result, he determined to prove his worthiness by saving more souls than were lost in his company. He "felt it had been a mistake to bend his will, in any way, to Africa," and so he became harder as time passed there. His monomania-cal pursuit of salvation for himself and the villagers blinds him to the dangers he and his family face, and so he refuses to let them leave.

Orleanna Price

Orleanna blames herself for her family's troubles. Adah's disability, she feels, was punishment for her own despair over getting pregnant with twins so soon after Rachel was born. She also blames herself for failing to protect her children from Africa and from their father, which results in Ruth May's death. When they first arrive, Orleanna tries to stand up to Nathan but is not strong enough to question the traditional role he forces upon her. Their difficult life in Africa begins to embolden her, however, as Ruth notes, "Mama has this certain voice sometimes. Not exactly sassing back, but just about nearly." When Ruth May dies, something in Orleanna snaps that gives her the courage to attempt to get her remaining daughters out of Africa. Ruth May's death, for which she continues to take responsibility, haunts her for the rest of her life.

Rachel Price

Rachael is a teenage prima donna when she arrives in the Congo, a status she struggles to maintain there. Her self-centered and materialistic nature does not change during the three decades that she lives in Africa. She does show certain resilience, however, as she weds three different men and eventually inherits a successful resort, all the while refusing to acknowledge the suffering that surrounds her.

Ruth May Price

Fierce, imperious Ruth May is "surprisingly stubborn for a child of five" and is always ready for a new adventure. Ironically, she is the one who is ultimately destroyed by Africa, which triggers feelings of guilt in her mother and her sisters.

Mama Bekwa Tataba

Mama Bekwa Tataba works as the Prices' servant after they arrive in the Congo. The girls initially are wary of her, but she teaches them how to survive. She also stands up to Nathan, who eventually frustrates her so much with his demands that the villagers submit to baptism that she leaves.

Mr. Underdown

Mr. Underdown and his wife are Belgian nationals who manage the finances for the missionary programs in the Congo. They represent the white ruling class in the Congo as they live in relative comfort in Leopoldville amidst of the overwhelming poverty of the black Africans. They flee immediately after the Congo gains independence.

Themes

White Supremacy

The novel chronicles the Belgian colonization of the Congo as well as U.S. efforts to control the country after it gains independence. The Price family unwittingly becomes involved in this process after they relocate to Kilanga. The doctor who sets Ruth May's broken arm tries to point this out to Nathan when he tells him, "We Belgians made slaves of [the black Africans] and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands." He insists that Nathan and his family "are stuck with the job of trying to make amends." Nathan, however, refuses to accept this responsibility, insisting that "American aid will be the Congo's salvation."

Nathan and Rachel accept and insist upon the supremacy of their position in Africa, but the other members of the Price family feel a sense of guilt. Orleanna articulates this emotion when she notes, "I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war." Leah tries to alleviate some of the damage by devoting herself to improving the lives of black Africans.

Free Will

Free will is a term used to describe one's ability to make choices independently of internal compulsions or external, environmental influences. Those who believe that humans can exercise free will reject the Puritanical notion of predestination. The issue of free will relates to the interactions between Nathan and his family and the Africans. When he tries to impose his interpretation of Christian doctrine on the villagers, they are able to resist his control since they have already established their own spiritual and cultural views. Nathan's wife and daughters, however, who have not had the opportunity to establish a strong sense of themselves outside the family, have allowed Nathan to take control of their lives.

Their experiences in the Congo eventually prompt Orleanna and Leah to stand up to Nathan and determine their own destiny. After Leah observes her father's self-serving motives in his interaction with the Africans, she refuses to allow him to control her behavior and begins to adopt some of the villagers' customs.

Topics For Further Study

• Some critics have complained that the novel Some critics have complained that the novel does not give Nathan a voice. Write one of the Price family's experiences in the Congo from his point of view.
• Read one of Kingsolver's novels that is set in the American Southwest, such as Pigs in Heaven. Compare and contrast in essay form the family dynamics in that novel and The Poisonwood Bible.
• Research and prepare a PowerPoint demonstration about missionary work in the Congo.
• How would you depict the novel's five narrative voices in a film? Write a screenplay of a portion of the novel that incorporates the Price family's different points of view.

While Orleanna also recognizes Nathan's cruel treatment of the Africans and his family members, her movement toward independence occurs much more slowly. During one of her monologues to Ruth May, she tries to explain why she chose to stay in the Congo as long as she did: "I wonder what you'll name my sin: complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? How can you tell the difference? Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence. I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could." Gradually, however, she becomes strong enough to exercise some measure of free will as she makes active choices in her attempts to protect her children.

After the wars of independence begin, Orleanna gains the courage to question Nathan's authority as she tries to convince him to leave the Congo even though she knows she will face his wrath. When the ants invade the village, she is able to make the difficult choice of which daughter to save, determining, "When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up." Ruth's death causes Orleanna to break away completely from Nathan's dominance and to take control of her family's destiny. Kingsolver suggests that the desire to determine one's own destiny can be strong enough to overcome impediments to free will.

Style

Narrative with Multiple Voices

Multiple voices narrate this book with the point of view shifting back and forth among Orleanna and her four daughters, providing different perspectives on the family's experiences in the Congo. King-solver employs these contrasting voices to suggest the subjective nature of observation and the impossibility of achieving a single objective point of view of other cultures and of personal experience. Each of the female voices in the narrative observes the Congo through her personal lens which has been shaped by experience. Orleanna, for example, relates her story of the Congo through a mother's eyes as she struggles to provide food and shelter for her family and keep her children safe. Thus, her focus is on what food is available and what dangers lurk outside the hut.

Each narrative angle also conveys contrasts between American attitudes toward the region. Rachel sees the Congo as an American materialist who is used to the comforts of home. Her response when they first arrive is an honest account of all of their feelings toward the naked villagers and the meal they offer them. She, however, maintains her initial assessment, while the others' views change over time as they learn more about their surroundings. Leah is the American idealist, first, following her father's missionary role, and then adopting Anatole's revolutionary stance. She ultimately rejects her American home for a difficult but satisfying African life that provides her with a sense of purpose and value.

Ruth May is the outgoing adventurer, making fast friends with the village children. Adah is the cynical observer, who is ultimately changed by her sympathetic response to the disease-ridden population. Orleanna becomes the voice of American guilt in consciousness of how Americans either allowed the corruption of colonization to occur or participated in the overthrow of governments for their own self interests. Nathan is not given a voice in the narrative, but his position is symbolized by the novel's title. Nathan's mispronounced declaration, "TATA JESUS IS BANGALA," which translates ironically to "Jesus is ironically to "Jesus is poisonwood," becomes a metaphor for the same self-serving arrogance that turns a noble ideal into poison. His misuse of the local language and the meaning he conveys accidentally in the process also suggest how the imposition of one set of cultural beliefs on a foreign culture is undermined by the outsider's inability to know the culture he is presuming to change.

Historical Context

The Colonization of the Congo

In the late 1870s, Leopold II, king of Belgium, gained control of the territories that made up the Congo in an effort to ensure his country's prosperity. He effectively set up a colonial empire there and established the International Association as a cover for his using the natural resources there as his own personal asset. Soon after, Leopold appointed himself head of the newly established, Independent State of the Congo, an ironic name since it was literally an enslaved state, which included the land known in the early 2000s as Zaire. Leopold took control of all land and business operations, in cluding the lucrative trade in rubber and ivory as he ruled from a large estate in the region northeast of Kinshasa. Belgian-backed companies also took control of mining operations.

At the turn of the century, the public began to become aware of the harsh treatment of black Africans, especially those who worked for the rubber companies. As a result, the Belgian parliament wrested jurisdiction from Leopold in 1908 and established the Belgian Congo. Forced labor was eliminated under the new government, but Euro pean investments still controlled the country's wealth, and blacks were not allowed any part in the government or the economy. Black laborers worked the vast copper and diamond mining operations, while Europeans managed them.

The Struggle for Independence

In 1955, as calls for independence were mounting, Belgium constructed a thirty-year plan for independence, which the government hoped would ensure continued domination in the Congo and at the same time improve the lives of black Africans. However, nationalists such as Patrice Lumumba, who led the leftist movement called National Congolese, continued their protests against the Belgian-controlled government. In 1959, nationalists rioted in Kinshasa, initiating what became the steady decline in Belgian power.

In 1960, Belgium decided to give up the governance of the colony, and Lumumba became prime minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo. Soon after, however, ethnic and personal rivalries threatened the stability of the new government. When the Congolese army mutinied, Lumumba sought aid from the Soviet Union as he tried to maintain control, but the country was soon seized by Joseph Mobutu who had Lumumba arrested and later murdered while allegedly trying to escape.

By the end of the 1960s, the Congo was divided into four parts, with Mobutu controlling the west, including Kinshasa. With U.S. weapons, Belgian soldiers, and white mercenaries, the central government stabilized, and in 1965, Mobutu proclaimed himself president. He ruled for thirty years with the backing of the U.S. government.

Critical Overview

Most reviews of The Poisonwood Bible were positive, though some stressed drawbacks while praising some parts. John Leonard wrote a glowing tribute in The Nation to Kingsolver's artistry. Leonard claims that in this novel, "Barbara King-solver has dreamed a magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment." Noting her shift from the domestic, southwestern American settings of her previous work, he concludes: "this new, mature, angry, heartbroken, expansive out-of-Africa Kingsolver—is at last our very own Lessing and our very own Gordimer, and she is, as one of her characters said of another in an earlier novel, 'beautiful beyond the speed of light.'"

Similarly impressed, Gayle Greene, in The Women's Review of Books, confesses, "not since Beloved have I been so engaged by a new work of fiction," and she praises "a story and characters that are gripping, a family saga that assumes epic and Biblical proportions." On the serious side, she applauds the novel's "strong political message, offering a scathing indictment of America's part in carving up Africa." But she also commends the novel's humor: "it has you laughing one moment and gasping with horror the next." In all, Greene finds it to be "a complex, textured work, its imagery patterns resonating across levels of meaning…. It is multivocal and multiphonic, its meaning not in a single voice but in the play of voices against one another."

Joining in, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly finds The Poisonwood Bible a "risky but resoundingly successful novel" that "delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy." The reviewer praises its "marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail," and, like Greene, finds its humor "pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world." The review concludes with the insistence that "King-solver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel."

Other reviewers were not as unconditional in their praise. Tim Stafford in Christianity Today, describing the novel as "grand and tragic," admits that "Kingsolver … writes beautifully and incisively of African village life." Stafford, however, finds fault with her characterization of Nathan Price, which, he claims, creates "a hole at the center of the book." He asserts that readers might "expect more insight" into this "incomprehensible" man. He also criticizes her "cartoonish story of idiot missionaries and shady CIA operatives destroying the delicate fabric of the Congo." Yet, her focus on the female members of the Price family "almost absolves the book of its shortcomings." He concludes: "King-solver writes luminously of these women who flex and cling to life, surviving, absorbing blows, still hoping. Their voices are unforgettable."

Stephen D. Fox in Critique criticizes King-solver's depiction of the villagers who, he claims, are "quite generalized, almost completely lacking in noteworthy or unique customs." Kimberly A. Koza in Critique concludes that the work "gains its power through [Kingsolver's] exploration of the Price women's struggles to judge their own complicity in both their family's fate and that of the Congo" but complains that her "shift to polemic in the second part of the novel often leads her to generalize and, at times, to oversimplify historical complexities."

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, she examines the theme of survival.

The threats to the Price family's physical survival in The Poisonwood Bible are obvious and immediate. They must find enough food to eat, stay away from poisonous snakes and tarantulas, and guard against dysentery and malaria. Less obvious but more complex are the personal obstacles that they face. One such problem is created by Nathan's religious fanaticism, fueled by his own insecurities, which prevents him from successfully adapting to his surroundings. His inability to overcome this obstacle ultimately destroys two lives—his and Ruth May's. The rest of the Price family are able to cope with many physical and personal trials during their time in the Congo. Yet, like the malaria that lingers in their systems long after their escape from Kilanga, emotional damage remains, which has a profound effect on the next three decades of their lives.

As they are taught by the villagers to keep external dangers at bay, the Price women learn how to evade, to adapt, and to confront internal obstacles to their survival. Initially, they face a profound sense of culture shock compounded by their homesickness after their relocation to a foreign, often dangerous world. Their first response is to try to hold onto their American identity. They bring with them artifacts from American culture, like Underwood deviled ham, Band-Aids, Anacin, and number 2 pencils. As these goods run or wear out, however, they are forced to adapt to local customs regarding diet, farming methods, and social interaction—all except Rachel, who refuses to relinquish her American identity with its pronounced superiority and entitlement.

At first, Ruth May and Leah have the easiest time. Ruth May, who exhibits a child's natural adaptability, is the first to make friends with the village children. Leah soon makes friends of her own while she gains an appreciation of the beauty of the jungle, which she considers a heavenly paradise. Adah's gradual acceptance of her surroundings is made less complicated by her status as outsider. As she arrives in the Congo, she feels the same sense of disconnection she felt at home in a world that both pitied and ostracized her for her disability. When the villagers, who are used to physical deformities, do not treat her as more odd than they consider the rest of her family, she is able to settle into her new home. Orleanna's task is more difficult since her main focus is her family's health and security.

The family's process of adaptation is made more complex and challenging by Nathan's rigidity and righteousness. In his steadfast refusal to accept any point of view other than his own, he presses all to conform to his rules. His insistence that the villagers be baptized causes palpable tension between the family and the village that he refuses to try to alleviate. Adah complains that he speaks for everyone in his family since "he views himself as the captain of a sinking mess of female minds."

Adah and Rachel try to stay out of his way as much as possible to avoid his wrath. Orleanna, however, must deal with his tyranny on a daily basis as she struggles to protect and nurture her daughters. During their first few months in the Congo, she is "too dumbfounded to speak up for herself" or for her family when Nathan ignores their needs, since this is the role he has forced upon her from the beginning of their relationship. She admits, "Nathan was in full possession of the country once known as Orleanna Wharton…. Because in those days, you see, that's how a life like mine was known." In an attempt to justify her passive stance, she insists that she was "thoroughly bent to the shape of marriage," likening herself to the parrot Methuselah who, like she, had no wings.

Leah deals with her father's autocracy by fully accepting his dogma. She devotes herself to his mission wholeheartedly and spends her days trying desperately to please him. His garden becomes the focal point of her world as she tries to help him realize his vision of bringing new crops to the village. She begins, however, to question his beliefs and his character when she observes his refusal to address the real needs of the villagers and of his family. As Anatole presents her with a different view of the Congo and its people, Leah begins a move away from her dependence on her father. Anatole becomes her new ideal.

Orleanna tries to stand up to Nathan as her family faces new dangers during the country's revolutionary stirrings, but his will proves too strong for her, and defeated, she retreats to her bed, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Ruth May notes that when she looks in her eyes, "there isn't any Mama home inside there … Something in her is even worse hurt than what Adah's got." After a month in bed watching her daughters struggle to get food for them all, Orleanna summons the courage to resume her responsibilities; she declares that she will do anything that she can to help her daughters escape.

Orleanna is unable to get the family out, however, before two disastrous events occur: the ants' invasion that prompts her to choose one daughter over the other, and Ruth May's death. For the next few decades, all of her daughters will be affected by these events, but none as much as Orleanna, who will experience a crippling sense of guilt.

What Do I Read Next?

• In her first novel The Bean Trees (1988), Barbara Kingsolver writes of the beginning of the relationship between Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter, Turtle, a story that is picked up in the sequel, Pigs in Heaven (1993).
• Barbara Kingsolver's Homeland and Other Stories (1989) contains twelve short stories centering on various characters who struggle to form and maintain relationships.
• Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa (1935) is a stirring account of a two-month safari Hemingway and his wife Pauline joined in 1933. In the work, Hemingway reveals what the experience taught him about Africa and about himself.
• Beryl Markham's West with the Night (1942) chronicles her exciting life as an African bush pilot in the 1930s.

Rachel is the least affected by what she experiences in Kilanga. She admits that until the moment that Ruth May dies, she believes that she could go home and pretend the Congo never happened, which echoes the thoughts of the entire family. Yet she has learned how to survive comparatively unscathed. On the night the ants invade, she sticks out her elbows and is carried along by the crowd, which is what she continues to do for the rest of her time in Africa. What saves Rachel is her refusal "to feel the slightest responsibility" for what happens to the family in the Congo and her insistence that "there is no sense spending too much time alone in the dark."

Leah stays in Africa as well, but she does so because the continent has had a profound effect on her worldview. Her ideological focus has shifted from her father's distorted evangelicalism to Ana-tole's more inspiring vision of independence and activism. She has faced the devastating results of the colonialist enterprise in the Congo, which have shown her that "there is not justice in this world," but "there's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace." Adah suggests that her sister feels guilt by association when she insists that Leah's mission in post-revolutionary Africa has become "like a hair shirt" to her.

Adah has also been intensely affected by her experiences in the Congo. After her mother chooses Ruth May to save during the invasion of the ants, Adah is crushed but is filled with a renewed desire to survive. When her mother takes her out of Africa and leaves Leah behind, she stops blaming her sister for her disability. Yet, she wonders, "How can I reasonably survive beyond the death of Ruth May and all those children? Will salvation be the death of me?" Eventually, she finds an unconditional salvation in her renewed relationship with her mother and in her own medical research.

The choice Orleanna is forced to make during the ant invasion, coupled with Ruth May's death, almost destroys Orleanna. Adah notes that since the ants, Orleanna "has been creeping her remorse in flat-footed circles around" her. After Ruth May's death, nothing matters to Orleanna except trying to ensure her family's escape. When her remaining daughters are safe, however, the burden of guilt becomes overwhelming. She continually talks to the deceased Ruth May, desperately trying to justify her own actions. After declaring, "I could have been a different mother … Could have straightened up and seen what was coming," she tries to insist that she could have done nothing to save her. Yet, Adah and Leah recognize that their mother has not forgiven herself for Ruth May's death. Adah explains, "Mother is still ruthless. She claims I am her youngest now but she still is clutching her baby. She will put down that burden, I believe, on the day she hears forgiveness from Ruth May herself."

Ruth May grants that forgiveness in the final pages of the novel, perhaps as a manifestation of her mother's need for absolution. She insists that she will forgive her as she tells her mother, "Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember." Thus, the women in the Price family survive the physical and emotional impact of their time in the Congo as they recognize, in Adah's words, "The power is in the balance; we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on The Poisonwood Bible, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Elaine R. Ognibene

In the following essay, Ognibene discusses the author's elucidation of how a dominating culture shrouds the truth about greed and power in the "scriptural rhetoric" of "righteous zeal and religious reckoning" while exploring the complexities of "clashing cultural views."

In his history of the Congo during the reign of Belgium's King Leopold (1876–1909), Adam Hochschild tells a riveting and terrifying story of greed and terror, as well as what he terms the "politics of forgetting" the hard truths that have emerged over the last hundred years or so. He shows how a dominant European and American technique for diverting attention from the truth involved a language of righteous zeal and religious reckoning, a scriptural rhetoric used to hide the real story of imperial greed. Several scholars from contemporary critical schools—deconstructionists, Marxists, and post-colonialists address the issue in a similar fashion. In the words of Phillipa Kafka, they work at "(un)doing the missionary position" in literature, advancing new notions of "exclusionary identity, dominating heterogeneity and universality or in more blunt language, White supremacy" (1997, xv), Relying on Henry A. Giroux's words, Kafka defines the missionary position as "monolithic views of culture, nationalism and difference" (xvi).

In The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver illustrates the hypocrisy of religious rhetoric and practice that sacrifices the many for the good of the few in power, drawing a clear parallel between a missionary's attitude and colonial imperialism. To the author, Nathan Price does not represent the missionary profession: he "is a symbolic figure … suggesting many things about the way U.S. and Europe have approached Africa with a history of cultural arrogance and misunderstanding at every turn" (http//www.kingsolver.Com/dialogue/12_questions.html). Nonetheless, Kingsolver does show how, contrary to popular opinion, religion and politics are not separate entities, but a powerful combined force used historically not only to "convert the savages" but to convert the masses to believe that what is done in the name of democratic, Christian principles is done for the greater good.

Even King Leopold understood the power of public relations: he knew "that what matters, often, is less the substance of a political event than how the public perceives it" (1998, 251), or, as Hochschild says, "If you control perceptions, you control the event" (251). Leopold used democratic, religious rhetoric to control his rape and pillage of the Congo; he "recognized that a colonial push … would require a strong humanitarian veneer," so he promised to abolish the slave trade and establish "peace among the chiefs …" (Hochschild 1998, 45). Building the infrastructure necessary to "exploit his colony," Leopold raised money through the Vatican "urging the Catholic Church to buy Congo bonds to encourage the spread of Christ's word" (92). Using Catholic and Protestant missionaries to set up children's colonies, theoretically to offer religious instruction and vocational information, Leopold's true goal was to build his own kingdom. "He deployed priests, almost as if they were soldiers … to areas where he wanted to strengthen his influence" (133-34). Describing 19th century colonizing behaviors, Hochschild observes, "In the Congo the Ten Commandments were practiced even less than in most colonies" (138). Ironic how almost a century after Leopold, deceptive and destructive "missionary" rhetoric persists and prevents human rights. In the United States, the rhetoric appears in a variety of groups from the Promise Keepers to the Kansas Board of Education, but the message is always one of righteous coercion. In post-colonial Africa, there is "still a form of neocolonialism" that denies human rights. As Raoul Peck, award winning filmmaker of Lumumba, states, "things haven't changed." Both at the time of Lumumbu's decolonization movement and now, the Congo is "too rich in resources to be left to the Congolese" (Riding 2001, 13, 26).

Numerous contemporary novels, such as Crossing the River by Caryl Philips, Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan, or Comfort Woman by Nora Okja-Keller provide examples of the missionary position gone awry. In these novels, authors often invert the journey motif. Men who see themselves as good Christians who lead good lives learn from their journeys that the concepts of Christianity upon which they have based their lives are inherently paradoxical. Some lose their way and sense of purpose, because neither scripture nor faith offers them an understanding of the disorder in their lives. Some ironically convert to "pagan" rituals and ways; others wander seeking answers to questions that have no answers and living isolated lives. Although locales shift and the specific religious affiliation, age and race of the missionary change, one recurring theme crosses culture and class lines: the men all see themselves as carriers of the "Word," superior to the populations they aim to convert. Over the course of the novels, most of the men alter their missionary position as their own words turn back upon them.

One man who does not change is Nathan Price. In The Poisonwood Bible, Nathan's evangelical, self-righteous, judgmental attitudes threaten the lives of his family, as well as the people in the remote Congolese village of Kilanga. A zealot, Nathan risks lives in pursuit of his obsessive vision. An abusive father, Nathan goes mad for the second time in his life, as he tries to convert the natives over a year and a half period of hunger, disease, drought, witchcraft, political wars, pestilential rains, Lumumba, Mobutu, Ike, and the CIA. The effects of Nathan's missionary position on his wife, Orleanna, his four daughters, and the Congolese become clear as Kingsolver parallels Nathan's behaviors to imperialist actions in the Congo.

Kingsolver uses multiple narrators to construct her political allegory. Orleanna, Leah, Adah, Rachel, and Ruth May tell their stories in contrapuntal turns, offering personal versions of the consequences of the Reverend's taking them to the Congo. Despite dramatically different voices, all, even Rachel, Ms. Malaprop of the novel, tell stories of change as well as discovery. Most reveal specifics about intellectual and spiritual awakenings; the loss of one kind of belief and birth of another. All, even five year old Ruth, draw some parallel between the tyranny of politics in the Congo and the war in their private lives. And all expose the missionary tactics of the man Adah calls "Our Father" as monolithic, abusive, and destructive. As the characters tell their stories in interrupted sequences that move back and forth among speakers, the narrative point of view creates a field of reciprocal subjects, all crucial to the story but none exclusive or central. The heart of the novel emerges only by stacking multiple renditions and discerning the similarities and differences that together shape the broader view. As tension builds up to crisis, their stories accomplish one of King-solver's stated aims: they "connect consequences with actions" in the Price family and the broader world as well (Sarnatoro 1998, 1).

In the beginning, "God said unto them … have dominion … over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28). The Prices's journey into the heart of the Congo begins with Nathan, like King Leopold, taking the words of "Genesis" literally. The daughters' stories come from decades of journal-keeping but are recounted as circumstances unfolded; Orleanna's story comes from a kind of guilty hindsight. The voice that opens each of the first five chapters ("Genesis," "The Revelation," "The Judges," "Bel and the Serpent," and "Exodus") where scriptural titles set the themes is that of Orleanna Price, the wife of a man "who could never love her," a woman who tells her story to the ghost of her dead child, and a person who sees herself as "captive witness" to events that occurred during her year and one-half (1959–61) in the Congo. To Orleanna, "hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher." Her narrative focuses upon the family stepping down "on a place [they] believed unformed," on their desire to have dominion, on their limited knowledge of almost everything, and on the unnameable guilt that she still carries with her. Or-leanna's story illustrates the complicity that comes with silence and the "common hunger" shared by Nathan and others out to conquer the Congo.

In "The Revelation," Orleanna explains her initial ignorance about bringing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle and her slow learning about Congolese cultural practices. She wanted to be a part of Kilanga and be Nathan's wife, but she acknowledges her true position: "I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more … just one of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war." Orleanna muses retrospectively on her political mistakes as well as her cultural ones, recognizing parallel behaviors between Nathan and national leaders. Thinking about Eisenhower's need for control and retired diplomat George F. Kennan's belief that the U.S. should not have "'the faintest moral responsibility for Africa' ", she reconstructs Nathan's similar need for control, as well as his desire for distance from the consequences of his acts.

The longer she lives in Kilanga, the clearer Or-leanna's vision becomes. Remembering a man who seduced her with promises of "green pastures," she now sees a "righteous" and unbending judge, an abusive husband and father for whom ownership is the norm. Trying to make sense of Nathan's transformation to a tyrant, Orleanna correctly identifies the turning point to be World War II and Nathan's escape from the Death March from Bataan that killed the rest of his company. Returning home a man who blamed others for his own sense of "sin," Nathan refuses her touch. When she jokes, Nathan hits her. When she listens to stories about the war on the radio, he tells her not to "gloat before Christ" about her "undeserved blessing." When they have sex, he blames her for her "wantonness." When she stands still, he condemns her "idleness." When she or one of the girls suffers, he accuses them of "a failure of virtue." Occupied by Nathan's mission "as if by a foreign power," she falls prey, allowing him "full possession of the country once known as Orleanna Wharton…." Drawing parallel behaviors between Nathan and the colonizers, Orleanna sees how her own "lot was cast with the Congo … barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom."

Reconstructing the political espionage in the Congo, when America and Belgium "divided the map beneath [her] feet," the fifteen years after Independence, when Senator Church and his special committee looked into the secret operations in the Congo, Orleanna itemizes specifically the people and the politics involved. Appropriately she does so under the title heading of "Bel and the Serpent," a text from the Apocrypha; to most a book "of fear mongers who … want to scare people." Her history reveals the men who fit that description, including her husband. While the Congolese station chief, hired by CIA head Allen Dulles to arrange a coup, hired a scientist, Dr. Gottlieb, to make a poison that would kill or disfigure Patrice Lumumba, Orleanna was trying to protect her children and escape the "dreadful poison" raining down upon her from her husband's obsessive behavior. Sponging her five-year-old who was dying from malaria, Or-leanna was oblivious to the "scent of unpleasant news" that she now knows: on that same August day, Mobutu Sese Seko was promoted to colonel in exchange for one million dollars in United States money to guarantee his loyalty; Lumumba is put under arrest in a house surrounded by "Mobutu's freshly purchased soldiers;" and, after Lumumbu's execution in January, the Congo is "left in the hands of soulless, empty men." Tracking the history of that period, author Bill Berkeley confirms that the Congo was left in the hands of tyrants, white and black, who, throughout Mobutu's thirty-four years of "brutality unmatched" in the colonial era and after, "took the jewels" and killed the people (2001, 117).

Plagued by unanswerable "if" questions, Or-leanna closes her narrative in the "Exodus" chapter on a note that is sad, insightful, and redemptive. Free of Nathan's control, she chooses to speak and in voice comes redemption. She begins by defining the need to understand the deceptive nature of words, a recurring theme in the novel: "Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat … when you have hungry children … Orleanna's wisdom about the space between words moves her to change. She accepts responsibility for her complicity and acquires the words for her story. For Orleanna, telling her story is a syncretic process, as she aims to reconcile what has gone before.

Like Orleanna, the highly intelligent fourteen year old twins, Leah and Adah, stand still and silent under their father's autocratic rule for much of their time in the Congo. They stand, however, at different ends of the Nathan continuum. Leah, an avid conversationalist, likes spending time with her father more than she likes "doing anything else," pays him due homage, and vows "to work hard for His favor, surpassing all others." She is, as her twin sister notes with disdain, "Our Father's star pupil." Adah, the twin who suffers from hemiplegia, loves palindromes, and does not speak until she is an adult, ridicules her father throughout her narrative with a brilliant ironic wit. Both, however, capture Nathan's destructive behaviors in their narratives. Leah via unconscious irony that grows into conscious knowledge and Adah via conscious understanding of her father's pride and ignorance. Both undergird their "Father" story with a narrative of domination and greed in the Congo, demonstrating similarities. By the end of the novel, their diverse views connect, and each woman names herself a pagan of sort, an "un-missionary." Like their mother they come to see that the Emperor, in this case "Our Father," is not wearing any clothes. Like their mother, they also believe that they are responsible in some way for the horrors that happen in Africa and they seek forgiveness.

Leah begins with stories about Nathan's arrogance and abuse. Watching Nathan correct Or-leanna's mistaken notions about items to take to the Congo, she sees his disdain for the woman he associates with the "coin-jingling sinners" in the temple. Leah next observes Rachel fall victim to a strap thrashing when she paints her fingernails bubble-gum pink, to Nathan a warning signal "of prostitution." A third example appears as the family lands in Leopoldville, and Nathan arrogantly dismisses Reverend Underdown's kind efforts as an attack on his self-reliance. Leah's comments upon landing in Kilanga are ironic: "He led us out … into the light…. Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God—which fortunately weighs nothing at all." Leah is both wrong and right about "light" and "balance" in ways that she cannot yet imagine.

In Kalinga, Leah's sisters prefer to be mother's helpers, but she prefers to help father "work on his garden." Her garden story becomes a parable of the minister's inability to harvest either seeds or souls. Nathan plans his Garden of Eden to be his "first African miracle" and instructs his daughter while they work with a moral paradigm about the balance of God's "world of work and rewards." He states, "Great sacrifice, great rewards!" When Mama Tataba cautions Nathan about both his method and the poisonwood plant, he cites scripture and ignores her words. Next morning, with "a horrible rash" and swollen eye caused by the red dust from the tree, Nathan, one of "God's own," feels unjustly cursed. Denying responsibility for his own foolish acts, he screams out his rage at his family.

While Nathan heals, Mama Tataba reconstructs the garden shifting the design from flat to hills and valleys so that the seeds will grow, and later Leah watches as an angry Nathan levels it again. When Nathan does follow Mama Tataba's design, plants do grow but bear no fruit, because, they lack pollinators. To Leah, Nathan's failed efforts contradict his theory of balance and rewards, and his words about cause signify nothing: the Bible convention in Atlanta, Nathan tells Leah, "debated about the size of heaven …" and "there's room enough for everybody," especially the "righteous." Empty words, like empty vines, bear no fruit, Leah understands.

At fifteen, the more Leah learns about the ways of Kilanga, the more complicated her life becomes. As the sisters spy on Eeben Axelroot, securing information about the CIA, guns, tools, army clothes, and "distant voices in French and English" that she will later comprehend, Leah also learns the language of Kikango and begins to recognize the wide gap between cultures, between American games like "Hide and Seek" and the Congolese children's game of "Find Food." Embarrassed by her father's ignorant and arrogant behavior, Leah shifts her ground. Catalysts are many, but the most important ones are her relationship with Anatole, an African teacher and co-worker whom she comes to love and marry; her increasing knowledge about war and politics, especially about Lumumba's revolutionary struggle; and her nursing Ruth May and Or-leanna through a horrible bout of malaria. Each drives Leah to break the order of "Our Father" and join with "the inhabitants of this land" that she is coming to love.

The two episodes that solidify Leah's attitude about her father and her loss of his kind of faith are the election held by the villagers in Nathan's church and Ruth May's death. These two episodes also signify Kingsolver's testament to the power of language understood and her indictment of Nathan's rhetoric. During Sunday service, in the midst of Nathan's sermon about false idols from the "Apocrypha," the congregation is inattentive. Finally Tata Ndu, the tribal chief, stands and cuts Nathan off to hold "an election on whether or not to accept Jesus Christ as the personal Savior of Kilanga." Nathan shrieks that his behavior is "blasphemy," but Ndu hoists Nathan upon his own white imperialist petard. Ndu states that "white men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking … Jesus and elections" are two. "You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good." Leah feels a chill as her father begins speaking "slowly, as if to a half-wit" and then blows up, insulting the whole congregation. To Leah, Ndu "states truth" about Nathan's, and other white men's ignorance: "You believe we are mwana, your children, who knew nothing until you came here." Explaining the foolishness of such thought, Ndu clarifies the history of his learning handed down across generations, the philosophy of cultural sharing, the politics of a tribal government that teaches the need to listen to each man's voice before making a choice and then to select only if the entire community agrees, and the dangers of a majority vote capable of excluding up to forty-nine percent of the people. The congregation votes and Jesus loses, eleven to fifty-six. Leah sees how Nathan has no sense at all of the culture he wants to civilize; his message is as irrelevant as his Kentucky seeds to the Congo environment.

Kingsolver cleverly weds the personal and political in both Leah's reflections and Tata Ndu's connection of Nathan's actions to other white colonizers whose "Christian" rhetoric resounds with bigotry. Interestingly, writing about ongoing evil in Africa today, Bill Berkeley like Ndu, rebuts the views of two authors who, like Nathan, continue to perpetuate stereotypes of African inferiority. He dismisses as "nonsense" their notions that current violence results from a lack of "'Western enlightenment,'" a "'new-age primitivism'" or the "'superstitions'" that "supposedly flourish in tropical rain forests" (2001, 9).

Leah loses any faith that she had left in both her father and his God when Ruth May dies from a venomous snake bite, and her father has no words to explain the child's death, except that his youngest daughter "wasn't baptized yet." Seeing an "ugly man" who desired the personal glory of baptizing his child with all of Kilanga's children, the daughter who had idolized her father, now could not stand to look at him. Amidst torrential rains, Nathan appears like Lear, a mad father abandoned by his daughters, wandering in the wilderness and speaking in words that few can understand. Leah notes the bizarre and almost humorous irony, when Bwanga, one of Ruth May's friends, asks, "Mah-dah-mey-I?" The children remember Ruth May's game and echo her words, looking at her dead body and asking again and again in a rising plea: "Mother May I?" While the children chant to "Mother" seeking wisdom and permission, Father, Leah observes, continued his biblical oration without any clear idea of what was going on. Nathan lacks the wisdom that Lear gained from his suffering; Nathan is deaf to the truth just as he is deaf to the language nuances of the Congolese culture.

When Leah sings her part of the "Song of the Three Children," the song that closes the novel becomes a history and a promise. She knows that there is no justice in the world, but she sustains her belief in a certain kind of grace. Like Brother Fowles, she listens to the people, trusts in a dynamic Creation which will not "suffer in translation," and remains with Anatole and their family in Africa, the land she chooses as her own.

Adah begins her journey in a much different way than Leah. Although they are identical twins, Adah sees herself as a "lame gallimaufry" who is definitely not her father's "star pupil." Associating herself with both "Jekyll and Hyde" because of her dark desires and crooked body, Adah chooses silence, recognizing its advantages in certain circumstances, especially in Kilanga. Yet she aligns herself most often with Emily Dickinson, using her poetry as a kind of personal philosophy that guides her narrative: both liked to "dwell in the darkness" (i.e. a world of secrets and revelation), and both "Tell All the Truth but tell it slant." Her slanted truth carries a skeptical tone, especially about "Our Father," who punishes his children for being female or for straying from his puritanical path with the "dreaded Verse." Adah's words about her father are brilliant and caustic; there is little that she does not notice.

"Our Father speaks for all of us, as far as I can see," Adah says as she begins her analysis of Nathan's behavior in Kilanga. Not only does Nathan silence his family, but he insults them and has since the time of the twins' birth. Adah sarcastically surmises her father's attitude about her own condition: "Our Father probably interpreted Broca's aphasia as God's Christmas bonus to one of his worthier employees." She too comments upon her father's garden fiasco, his distance from and lack of concern about family members, and his passion for the Apocrypha. However, Adah's stories about "The Verse," her father's paradoxical sermons, and his persistent insult and abuse of family all connect, and each adds a specific dimension of Nathan's character that relates his behavior to broader public events.

"The dreaded Verse is our household punishment," states Adah, "we Price girls are castigated with the Holy Bible." Nathan writes some scriptural reference for the child-offender; the offense could be any act, from painting one's nails to saying damn, that "Our Father" considered a sin. Then the "poor sinner" must copy "Jeremiah 48:18 … and additionally, the ninety-nine verses that follow it." Her satiric commentary on her father's preference for "his particularly beloved Apocrypha" slides into a reductio ad absurdum set of questions that parallel Nathan's "impressive" outcomes with her own "grocery sums in the Piggly Wiggly" to the case of the "cursing parrot" Methuselah who was "exempt from the Reverend's rules … in the same way Our Father was finding the Congolese people beyond his power. Methuselah was a sly little representative of Africa itself, living openly in our household." Adah concludes with delicious wit: "One might argue, even, that he was here first."

From "Genesis" through "The Judges," Adah describes her father's ignorant errors as he attempts to convert the villagers to his point of view. Her palindrome for Nathan's sermonizing, his "high-horse show of force" is the "Amen enema." As the Reverend towers over the altar, Adah watches the congregation stiffen, and recalls the dead fish on the riverbank, one of her father's conversion mistakes. Nathan promised Kilanga's hungry people "the bounty of the Lord, more fish than they had ever seen in their lives," but he executes "a backward notion of the loaves and fishes," sending men out to pitch dynamite in the river. The villagers did feast all day, but there was no ice to save the thousands of fish that went bad along the bank. Nathan's destructive act won him no converts. To Adah, he appeared incapable of understanding why, just as he could not understand how saying "words wrong" led only outcasts to his flock.

Nathan's method is his meaning and that is his mistake, according to Adah: "Our Father has a bone to pick with this world, and oh, he picks … it with the Word. His punishment is the Word, and his deficiencies are failures of words…. It is a special kind of person who will draw together a congregation, stand up before them with a proud, clear voice, and say words wrong, week after week." Adah observes the Reverend shouting: "TATA JESUS IS BAN-GALA!" every Sunday, while people sit scratching themselves in wonder. "Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord … for Jesus will make you itch." The irony seems clear to all but Nathan. He fails to see how the language of the region, rich in tonal ambiguities, describes far better than his English the complex antithesis that face people in his congregation. He expects only that they, like his family, will do as he teaches.

After the Congo achieves independence, after the family loses its stipend and all contacts with the larger world, after Orleanna and Ruth May fall "sick nigh unto death," the girls had to endure Nathan's "escalating rage" and physical abuse. Adah remembers the "bruises" and connects her father's abusive behavior with the secrets she learns about Ike and the planned assassination of Lumumba. Why the "King of America" wants a tall, thin man in the Congo to be dead is a shock to Adah. "How is it different," she wonders, "from Grandfather God sending the African children to hell for being born too far from a Baptist Church?" Adah wants to stand up in church and ask her father: "Might those pagan babies send us to hell for living too far from a jungle?" Adah never asks her father those questions, but she carries them with her when she leaves the Congo and decides to speak.

Free from Nathan's righteous rage, Adah finds her voice in a language of self-definition and science at Emory University, where she finds a future as a neonatal physician and researcher on AIDS and Ebola. Profaning her father's religious obsession, she states, "I recite the Periodic Table of Elements like a prayer: I take my examinations as Holy Communion; and the pass of the first semester was a sacrament." When she commutes back to her mother's house, searching for Nathan's military discharge to provide her tuition benefits, she discovers that his medal was not for "heroic service" but for "having survived." Though the conditions were "technically honorable … unofficially they were: Cowardice, Guilt and Disgrace." Adah finally understands why the Reverend could not flee the same jungle twice. Sixteen years later, Adah, like Orleanna and Leah, asks, "How many of his sins belong also to me? How much of his punishment?" She too tries to make sense of her complicity. Unwilling to engage in the "politics of forgetting," Adah tells the hard truth in her own poetic way.

The youngest and the oldest of the daughters, Ruth May and Rachel, lack the astute insight, sense of complicity for wrongs done in the past, and passionate commitment to make the world better for others than their twin sisters share. Both, however, each in her own humorous and sad way, show the evil results of their father's behavior, and both stories illustrate the consequences of white supremacy in ways the reader least expects.

Ruth May's time in the novel is short; she arrives in the Congo at age five and dies from the bite of a diabolical green mamba snake when she is six. Her words are few, but her naive voice reveals the prejudicial attitudes shaped by her father and a religious rhetoric of white superiority and biblical truth. Her statements about African people or blacks in general, her tales about parental conflict, and her "political" comments are never completely correct, but they illustrate well the outcomes of discrimination. Ruth May begins by repeating words of her father and expands into ordinary Georgia attitudes: "God says the Africans are the Tribes of Ham," the worst of Noah's three sons, and "Noah cursed all of Ham's children to be slaves forever…." She thinks about "colored children" in Georgia, who are "not gifted" and, as Ruth May heard a man in church say, "… different from us and needs ought to keep to their own." Ruth May continues, telling readers about Jimmy Crow who "makes the laws" excluding blacks from stores, restaurants, and the zoo. She also tells about a classmate in Sunday school teaching her to talk like the "cannibal" natives: "Ugga bugga lugga." Ironically, these words parallel those of Khruschev in a newspaper cartoon that appears in an article on Soviet plans for the Congo. Holding "hands and dancing with a skinny cannibal native with big lips and a bone in his hair," Khruschev sings, "Bingo Bango Bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo!" words that sound amazingly like Ruth Ann's. A five year old's words, humorous as her mistakes may be, paralleled against the Khruschev cartoon, illustrate the breadth of white supremacist attitudes and the depth of Kingsolver's anti-imperialist ideology that undergirds the narrative. Her story about parental conflict adds to this understanding.

Ruth May hears her parents taking different positions on a range of issues related to the natives. For example, she watches malnourished children with distended stomachs and comments, "I reckon that's what they get for being the Tribes of Ham." Father "says to forgive them for they know not what they do." Mama says, "You can't hardly even call it a sin when they need every little thing as bad as they do." When Ruth May notices the lost legs, arms, eyes, and other physical disabilities of the natives, Father says, "They are living in darkness. Broken in body and soul…." Mama says, "Well, maybe they take a different view of their bodies." Ruth May observes that "Mama has this certain voice sometimes …" and when Father states that "the body is the temple," Mama says, "Well, here in Africa that temple has to do a hateful lot of work in a day…." Ruth May sees Father "looking at Mama hard … with his one eye turned mean," for talking back to him. Even Ruth May recognizes the undertow of her parents' relationship, but King-solver uses Ruth May's voice for more. Ruth May's story shows how her father places the people of Kilanga alongside his family, always beneath his feet, as she consistently challenges Nathan's and other exploiters' sense of superiority.

Nathan's physical abuse of both her sisters and herself, his assignment of "The Verse," his trying "to teach everybody to love Jesus" but breeding fear instead, all these acts are visible to Ruth May. So too are the broader politics that bring destruction to Kilanga. Ruth May's story is "off the mark" in words but on target in meaning. She observes the Belgian Army arrive, recognizes that the "white one knows who is boss" and sees the shoeless "Jimmy Crow boys" who hide out and say "Patrice Lumumba!" She listens to the doctor who sets her arm argue with her father about those "boys" and "missionary work" in the same debate. When the doctor says that missionary work "is a great bargain for Belgium but … a hell of a way to deliver the social services," listing the abuses of slavery, such as cutting off hands in the rubber plantations, Father becomes angry and shouts, "Belgian and American business brought civilization to the Congo!" Like other colonizers, Nathan associates "civilization" with his God, his language, and his culture.

These are the words Ruth May remembers; these are the words that make her "scared of Jesus." These are the words that tell her that her father isn't listening to anyone but himself. These are the words that when she has malaria make her believe she is sick "because of doing bad things." These are the words that make Ruth May believe that "being dead is not worse than being alive" but different, because the "view is larger."

Rachel, as clueless and morally neutral as she is, malaprops her way into the reader's critical vision, because she best represents America's material culture. Capable of entertaining her sisters with imitation radio commercials—"Medically tested Odo-ro-no stops underarm odor and moisture at the source!"—Rachel is "willing to be a philanderist for peace," but she can only go so "far where perspiration odor is concerned." For Rachel, fashion is more important than culture, politics or moral issues that she neither sees nor understands. Ironically, however, Rachel sees truth about things that concern her. For example, from the moment the Prices arrive in Kilanga, she sees the truth about Nathan's position, as well as the family's place in the Congo. "We are supposed to be calling the shots here," Rachel begins, "but it doesn't look to me like we're in charge of a thing, not even our own selves." Yet Rachel, like her father, takes for "granite" almost everything, although his assumptions are more serious than Rachel's expecting a "sweet-sixteen party" or a washing machines in their hut. Rachel's stories about the welcoming party planned by the natives and the Underdowns' visit, although only two of many often humorous tales, reinforce stories already told by her mother and the twins. But Rachel's narrative is different: her tone is one of contempt and her focus is on pragmatic issues, mainly her own gains and losses. Rachel finds herself a place among the exploiters. Even at the end of the novel, three marriages-of-sort later and not yet out of "the Dark Continent," Rachel still does not believe that "other people's worries" have "to drag you down."

When the Prices arrive in Kilanga, Rachel feels shoved "into heathen pandemony" as men drum and women sing, welcoming the family. Seeing women dancing and cooking "all bare chested and unashamed," she observes Father "already on his feet" with "one arm [raised] above his head like one of those gods they had in Roman times, fixing to send down the thunderbolts and the lightening." When Nathan begins to speak, "Rachel sees his speech as a rising storm." Initially the people cheer Nathan's passion, but Rachel's stomach knots because the Reverend "was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life." Rachel, despite her mistake, describes well the poison her father uses to destroy the people's spirit. As Nathan preaches about nakedness and the "sinners of Sodom," the natives' expressions "fall from joy to confusion to dismay." Nathan's words, unlike those of the Congolese, are not of welcome but of damnation, and throughout the novel, Nathan continues to use scripture as a weapon of attack.

When the Episcopalian Underdowns who oversee financial affairs for the Mission League bring news of uprisings and the need for the Prices to leave, Nathan's behavior shows how little he has changed. The Underdowns carry newspapers that cite Belgians as "unsung heroes" who come into a village and "usually interrupt the cannibal natives in the middle of human sacrifice." They also bring news about a Soviet plan for moving forward in the Congo, depriving "innocent savages of becoming a free society," and the election in May for June independence of the Congo. Rachel sees that for her father this news was a "fairy tale," and she states his response: "An election … [w]hy … [t]hese people can't even read a simple slogan…. Two hundred different languages … this is not a nation, it is the Tower of Babel and it cannot hold an election…. [T]hey don't have the … intellect for such things." Rachel misses the similarities between her father's words and the article's about "savages"; instead, she becomes angry at having her own wishes for leaving the Congo dashed. Rachel does, however, capture cause: "Father would sooner watch us all perish one by one than listen to anybody but himself." Refusing to heed any advice to leave, Nathan assumes his intractable position.

The remainder of Rachel's time in Kilanga is short. Under the pretense of engagement to Axelroot, the Afrikaner bush pilot, diamond smuggler, and CIA mercenary, Rachel learns about his espionage activities and eventually escapes with him to Johannesburg, South Africa, the beginning of her exodus experience. After three relationships, two real marriages, one divorce and one death, Rachel inherits her last husband's (Remy Fairley's) Equatorial Hotel for businessmen in Brassaville and never leaves the continent she so much wanted to escape. She does, however, create her "own domain." Although she credits herself with never looking back, her final words show that the memory of her father-as-antagonist remains; "Oh, if Father could see me now, wouldn't he give me The Verse!" Congratulating herself for not being like her father, for sounding "un-Christian," Rachel ironically misses the point that she is in a way most like him in her singlemindedness. Although in her own malapropism: "It's a woman's provocative to change her mind," Rachel never does.

Kingsolver ends her complex novel, leaving the reader with an uneasy sense of balance between loss and salvation. Nathan dies guilty, wandering in the jungle, speaking his rote messages about his foreign God, and sustaining his myth of purpose. Ruth Ann dies, and her spirit hovers over her mother offering forgiveness. Rachel, who cares little about others, does understand that she can reap the financial rewards of her white South African hotel. Orleanna and the twins, however, experience a redemptive sense of worth. Each in her own way learns, in Robert Coles's words, how "to hold secure one's own moral and spiritual self" amidst the "crushing institutional forces of the state … the marketplace, and … the church…." Each is "driven by particular interests" and "passions" (1999, 167). All three women become advocates for justice: civil rights, medical research on AIDS, and revolutionary educational practices for the poor people in the Congo. The novel ends, but King-solver's story is not over. The net in which the Prices and the Congo are caught still exists, because the exploitation embodied in the "missionary" position remains to haunt not only the Congolese but a broader world as well.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one hundred years after Stanley preached the "gospel of enterprise," seeking men to work in Africa who would be "missionaries of commerce" (Hochschild 1998, 68), conflict in Africa continues in daily acts of violence and failed efforts at peace. As Tamba Nlandu, professor of philosophy and native of the Congo, explained, the country is divided into antagonistic sections that include multiple warring factions and wars continue even after "peace" treaties are established. Citing tribal and cultural conflicts, as well as power and greed as dominant motives for both Africans and outsiders alike, he sees peace as only a remote possibility (see also Fisher 1999; Fisher and Onishi 2000; Hranjskj 1999, 2000; Shaw 1999; and Traub 2000). Current information about wars appears in daily news stories about countless numbers of people succumbing to disease and hunger in burned, looted villages throughout the Congo. Citing the human toll of thirty-two months of war in "apocalyptic terms," Karl Vick estimates the dead at three million people, especially children (2001,A1,A5; see also Knickmeyer 2001, Nullis 2001). In late May 2001, Colin Powell, Secretary of State, traveled to Africa and promised to help combat disease and nurture democracy, a hopeful note. Yet Powell's promises are qualified by his own caution to avoid getting "too committed" and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's desire for a sharp reduction in overseas commitments (Knickermeyer 2001, A1,A4). Richard Hollbrooke, former ambassador to the United Nations, worked hard but with little success to reduce Congressional antipathy for international peace keeping (Crossette 2001, 2-3). Despite promises of money to fight AIDS, the triumph of human rights is precarious at best, because as journalist David Rieff notes, an "entrenched moral absolutism" limits actions "to identifying atrocities, not doing good deeds" (1999, 40).

The "monolithic cultural views" that King-solver questions reappear in a recent interview with George Kennan. Questioned by Richard Ullman about the U.S. role in Russia, Kennan urges detachment: "I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights," establishing a clear distinction between Europe which "naturally, is another matter" because "we are still a large part of the roots of a European civilization" and anywhere else where struggle and violence occur (Ullman, 1999, 6). Half a century after Eisenhower, whether Russia or the Congo, Kennan feels "not the faintest moral responsibility."

The power of Kingsolver's novel lies in her ability to question that response. On the surface, The Poisonwood Bible, seems different from earlier works, such as The Bean Trees or Animal Dreams, fiction set mainly in South or Southwest America and occurring in a short span of time. In all her fiction, Kingsolver grapples with clashing cultural values, social justice issues, ecological awareness, and the intersection of private and public concerns. The Poisonwood Bible, however, is more complex; its images resonate across levels of meaning, allusions are multiple, and the stories of its narrators carry deep spiritual meaning. As retold narratives cross and refract, shedding different shades of light on the same truth, ethical questions multiply. Unlike authors such as Joseph Conrad, who, as Chinua Achebe states, "eliminate the African as a human factor" and reduce "Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty … mind," Kingsolver reverses expectations and roles; it is not the Congolese who are ignorant or "savage" or say the wrong words but the colonizers (North 2001, 40). Words, Kingsolver warns, have multiple meanings, especially in the Congo. To decode those meanings, readers must "look at what happens from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone." Kingsolver dares us to do so and to discover the moments of truth in the telling. This essay offers one "particular" angled version of a multidimensional novel; it illustrates how in "(un)doing the missionary position," King-solver "connects consequences with actions" and challenges readers to do likewise.

Source: Elaine R. Ognibene, "The Missionary Position: Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible," in College Literature, Summer 2003, pp. 19-36.

Sources

Fox, Stephen D., "Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme: Disability, Family, and Culture," in Critique, Vol. 45, No. 4, Summer 2004, pp. 405-18.

Greene, Gayle, "Independence Struggle," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 7, April 1999, pp. 8-9.

Kingsolver, Barbara, The Poisonwood Bible, HarperPerennial, 1998.

Koza, Kimberly A., "The Africa of Two Western Women Writers: Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Laurence," in Critique, Vol. 44, No. 3, Spring 2003, pp. 284-94.

Leonard, John, "Kingsolver in the Jungle, Catullus and Wolfe at the Door," in Nation, January 11/18, 1999, pp. 28-30.

Review of The Poisonwood Bible, in Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1998, p. 366.

Stafford, Tim, "Poisonous Gospel," in Christianity Today, January 11, 1999, pp. 88-90.

Further Reading

Edgerton, Robert, The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo, St. Martin's Press, 2002.

Edgerton chronicles the turbulent history of the Congo, from its pre-European colonization to the early 2000s.

Siegel, Lee, "Sweet and Low," in the New Republic, March 22, 1999, pp. 30-36.

Siegel critiques Kingsolver's characterizations of black Africans and what he considers her slanted view of Congolese politics.

Taylor, Jeffrey, Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness, Three Rivers Press, 2001.

In this fascinating account of his journey on the Congo River in a canoe, Taylor brings his reporter's eye for detail to his descriptions of the landscape of this beautiful but sometimes treacherous country.

Walls, Andrew F., The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in Transmission of Faith, Orbis Books, 1996.

Walls focuses on the theoretical background of the missionary movement in the Western and Eastern worlds as well as on specific missions.