Jesus is Poisonwood

The Poisonwood Bible, By Barbara Kingsolver Harper Collins, 1998, 535 pages $26 in hardcover, softcover due out in October

In 1958, Baptist Missionary Nathan Price took his family to Africa. He went to a tiny outpost in the town of Kilanga, in the Belgian Congo to bring the savages the rigid truth of his Baptist Jesus. With him went his wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, driven by force of Nathan's will and the back of his hand. They went, expecting to get by for a year and then return to their home in rural Georgia.

But Africa had other plans. Between Nathan's obsession and the march of history, their stay in the Congo was much longer, and much harder, than they expected. They struggled both to survive the difficult conditions of a Congolese Village and to understand the rich and complex culture of the people of Kilanga.

Meanwhile, the Congo is changing around them. The Belgians announce independence and Patrice Lumumba, a former postal worker, becomes the first Democratically elected president of the Congo. But his term would be short as men who wielded the power of the Atom bomb, decided in locked rooms in Washington DC that a president should be removed. Telegrams were sent and money changed hands, and Lumumba was overthrown, arrested, and murdered, replaced by a dictator that would rule for decades.

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, is the compelling and thought provoking story of the Price family. Perhaps more accurately it is the story of the Price women. Written entirely in the first person, each chapter takes the point of view of Orleanna or one of her daughters. Orleanna appears, at the start of each section, looking back from the home in Georgia where she returned after she buried one of her children in the African soil and left. Haunted by guilt over the daughter she could not protect, she mixes it with guilt and outrage at the crimes her country committed against the Congo. "Maybe I'll confess the truth, that I rode in with the horsemen and beheld the apocalypse, but still I'll insist that I was only a captive witness," Orleanna says, looking back. "What is the conquerors wife, if not a conquest herself?...That's what we yell back at history, always, always. It wasn't just me; there were crimes six ways to Sunday, and I had my own mouths to feed."

In the Congo, Orleanna's life was one of constant work and fear, the constant struggle to keep her children fed and safe from a host of dangers that take so many of the village children--dysentery, malaria, deadly Black Mamba snakes--with no time for reflection. So it is up to her daughters to tell that story.

There is Rachel, the oldest, shallow and self-centered but defiant, wanting nothing more than to get back home to pink mohair sweaters and a real sweet sixteen party. Leah, one of two twins, strong-willed and tom-boyish, at first cleaves to her father and his righteousness, but in time becomes fiercely anti-colonialist. Her twin sister Adah, disabled from birth by a condition the doctors call hemipalgia, walks with a crooked gate and speaks little but is brilliant and darkly insightful. Ruth May, just five when they land in Kilanga, sees the world through Sunday-school eyes.

Each in their own way they come to terms with the Congo. They watch as Nathan's plans go awry. The American seeds he plants (to show the "natives" how they can better themselves by working the earth) which grow and flower, but will not fruit for lack of insects that will pollinate them (the African insects are adapted to African plants). His calls to baptize children in the river are angrily rejected because of the crocodiles which killed a child a year before. Each setback only strengthens his resolve to go onward, crashing through the thorns and thickets of misunderstanding with stubborn will and brute faith.

Leah and Adah, on the other hand, try to understand the culture and the people they are thrust amongst. With the help of a village boy named Nelson and the teacher Anatole, they come to wrestle with the complexities and the subtleties of the language Kikongo, of their place in the village and the world outside. It is a complex language, where a word like nzolo can mean "most dearly beloved," or it can be a small potato, or a grub used for fish-bait. They uncover too the damage that colonialism has done to the Congo, in large and small ways. Even western concepts like an election are foreign to the people of Kilanga, who make their decisions by a form of consensus.

Barbara Kingsolver does a wonderful job of weaving together so many issues and insights into this rich and thoughtful book about colonialism. Yet her characters are never sacrificed to make the point. The story remains one of the Price family, even as the Price family becomes a metaphor for the ways in which the West has encountered Africa. At times the writing is brilliant, especially when it is Adah speaking in her poetic word games and palindromes. ("Nob, nab, abandon. Mother, I can read you backward and forward.")

As much as it is a tale about the Congo, or about colonialism, or even about four sisters, The Poisonwood Bible is about the moral complexity of the world. Says Leah "...The practice of speaking a rich, tonal language to my neighbors has softened [her father's] voice in my ear. I hear the undertones now that shimmer under the surface of the words *right* and *wrong*." Such distinctions were ones that her father never understood, as he never understood the subtleties of the language of Kikongo. Which brings us to the central metaphor of the story, the Poisonwood Bible. Trying to use Kikongo, Nathan would end his sermons with "Tata Jesus is Bangala (1)." *Bangala*(2) means something precious and dear. But pronounced slightly differently, as he did, it becomes Bangala(1), or the poisonwood tree, and the Reverend Price ends each sermon with the message "Jesus is Poisonwood."

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Formatting note - there are two forms of "Bangala", (both of which should be italicized. Bangala (1) has an umlaut over the first "a". Bangala (2) does not.