The Poisonwood Bible
Some of my favorite books of all time have been recommended to me by the sisters Field: The Historian, Lullaby, and most recently The Poisonwood Bible.
A thanks to Caroline and Katie for the book recs over the past 10+ years!
In a nutshell
This is a work of fiction grounded in historical realities with two key themes: the impact of Christian Missionaries in foreign lands and European colonialism paired with modern intervention of foreign military powers in the Congolese government.
It’s told from 5 different perspectives - a mother and 4 daughters and recounts their time spent as Baptist Missionaries in a small village in the Congo in 1960. Each has a unique voice and brings a rounded perspective to an interesting and intense period in their lives.
Interventions in Religion
Their father is an evangelical zealot who shall we say is “heaven-bent” on baptising the children of their new village in the local river.
One of the village children died tragically in the river a year prior from a crocodile attack and his insistence in taking the children in the water is off-putting if not fully offensive.
Challenges in his ministry are exacerbated by his lack of local language and the few words he does know are pronounced with an incorrect inflection leading to wild misunderstandings which don’t help progress his cause — though of course he doesn’t realize this.
The majority of the book focuses on their missionary year in Congo, 1960, but follows the family throughout the following decades so that we understand how their time in Africa impacted the remainder of their lives.
Interventions of Colonialism and a Coup
Throughout the book we learn about the initial Portugal overlordship of the Congo, the appropriation of the Congo by Belgian King Leopold II and the US funding a coup in 1960 to protect their financial interests in mining.
This was a great initial understanding into the complex and heart wrenching history of the Congo and I’d like to dig deeper into African history as a result.
A selection of my favorite passages:
pg X - In the Author’s note Kingsolver shares that she was the daughter of medical and health care workers (nothing like the parents portrayed in the novel) and that they set her on “the early path of exploring the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what’s right.”
Sums up the book perfectly.
pg 11 - “And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed informed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now.” - Orleanna Price
I keep rereading the passage to understand if Kingsolver’s words here are pointing to
solipsism or saviour complex - though in my opinion you don’t have the latter without the former.
pg 22 - “But that was our burden, because there was so much we needed to bring here. Each one of us arrived with some extra responsibility biting into us under our garments: a claw hammer, a Baptist hymnal, each object of value replacing the weight freed up by some frivolous thing we’d found the strength to leave behind. 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 Price
pg 31 - “He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.” - Rachel Price
I really like the way she develops the voice of each daughter, peppering in some comical misspellings and conveying each their relationship to their parents and reaction to religion
pg 84 - “Here bodily damage is more or less considered a byproduct of living, not a disgrace. In the way of the body and other people’s judgment I enjoy a benign approval in Kilanga that I have never, ever known in Bethlehem, Georgia.” - Adah Price
pg 109 - “Yet we sang in church ‘Tata Nzolo’! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fishbait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. ANd I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment.” - Orleanna Price
pg 130 - “It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games - ‘Mother May I?,’ ‘Hide and Seek’ - and his: ‘Find Food,’ ‘Recognize Poisonwood,’ Build a House.’ And here he was a boy no older than eight or nine. He had a younger sister who carried the family’s baby everywhere she went and hacked weeds with her mother in tha manioc field. I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress. For the first time ever I felt a stir of anger against my father for making me a white Preacher’s child from Georgia.” - Leah Price
pg 261 - “‘Children should never have to die.’
’No. But if they never did, children would not be so precious.’
‘Anatole! Would you say that if your own children died?’
‘Of course not. But it is true, nevertheless. Also if everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure.’
‘But everybody wants to live a long time. It’s only fair.’
‘Fair to want, e-é. But not fair to get.’” - Leah Price and Anatole
pg 279 - “‘Well, it’s every bit God’s word, isn’t it?’ Lead said
‘God’s word, brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a chain of translators two thousand years long.’
Leah stared at him.
‘Darling, did you think God wrote it all down in the English of King James himself?’” - Lead Price and Brother Fowles
pg 369 - “Oh, it’s a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it’s easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that’s nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.
You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don’t expect them to do a thing for you. They’re far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven’s name we will do next.” - Orleanna Price
pg 373 - “God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.” - Leah Price
pg 515 - “Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from men who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.” - Leah Price
