The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

 Source of book: I own this.

 

This book was my first foray into Barbara Kingsolver. For some reason, years ago, when The Poisonwood Bible became an Oprah Book Club selection, I was under the impression that Kingsolver was a genre writer, like, say, Danielle Steele. This impression was, obviously, not correct. Her books are solidly in the literary fiction category, with good writing, thoughtful ideas, and messy endings. 

 

  

Where to start with this post? I guess maybe a bit of background. Kingsolver spent a year in what was then Belgian Congo (later Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo) as a child - her parents worked in public health - and, although she was young, the experience made a big impression on her. In writing The Poisonwood Bible, she drew not only on her memories, but on her mother’s extensive diary from those years. 

 

The book features no fewer than five narrators, which rotate throughout the book. The (arguably) central character, missionary Nathan Price, drags his wife and four daughters to the Congo to convert the heathens. They are not particularly in favor of this, but because they are Southern Baptists, his wife Orleanna believes she has to submit without question. The kids, of course, have no say at all. The eldest, Rachel, is a shallow beauty who loathes Africa and cannot wait to escape somehow. Leah and Adah are twins - Leah is the tomboy who is also smart, worships her father, and has a strong sense of justice. This will obviously lead to a complete disillusionment later. (Note here: I very much identified with Leah for a number of reasons.) Adah suffers from congenital damage, as the twin which didn’t do so well in the womb. She struggled to talk (and still refuses to talk most of the time, for her own reasons), and walks with a limp. She is a divergent thinker, obsessed with anagrams and palindromes and language generally. She is brilliant, and longs to get out of the family so she can attend college - something Nathan believes females have no need for. The youngest is Ruth May, a small child, who is, well, a kid. Her viewpoint is therefore of one who learns languages and makes friends easily, and in many ways adapts best to the situation. 

 

The book is set in 1960, with the narrative eventually stretching into the 1980s as it follows the family in the aftermath of the eventual catastrophe. This time period is the end of Belgian rule, the brief existence of democracy in the Congo, before United States backed forces assassinated the president, and installed a brutal and greedy dictator….who just happened (by complete coincidence, of course) to be willing to sell out the diamonds and cobalt resources to American corporations. The Price family is encouraged to leave following the Belgian withdrawal, but Nathan refuses to do so, despite his now complete lack of income - or skills to support himself in Africa. This, combined with a famine, ends up inexorably leading to tragedy and the breakup of the family. 

 

That’s probably enough about the plot. Kingsolver took a bit of flak for the book from Evangelical sorts, claiming it was “anti-Christian.” In fact, I am acquainted with some who absolutely loathe the book for that reason. This is, of course, a gross misunderstanding - and oversimplification - of the book. Kingsolver addresses this in her afterward (written some time after the book), and I thought she nailed it. 

 

It aroused ire in a few people who don’t understand the symbolic nature of literature and presume that a Christian missionary character who behaves badly in a novel is somehow proof of the author’s anti-Christian sentiments. If these people read more novels they would figure out that Robert Lewis Stevenson’s classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not evidence that Mr. Stevenson hated physicians. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is not about the hypocrisy of archdeacons or the moral benefits of scoliosis, and Moby-Dick is not an antiwhale rant, per se.

But I received surprisingly few such complaints - one letter in every five hundred or so. (Probably people who don’t grasp literary symbolism don’t read a lot of novels, including mine.) 

 

I can’t help but observe that the sort of Evangelicals who fail to understand the symbolism are also those who, like Nathan, read their own holy book in a wooden, literalist manner. And who also tend to read Evangelical fiction, which is not exactly known for its nuance or subtlety. Like Nathan, when you think you have all the answers, it is difficult to see past your own nose. 

 

The point of the book is really a lot more broad, and looks at the Western exploitation of and violence toward indigenous cultures in general, and Africa in particular. Nathan isn’t an anomaly, but rather just one facet of the colonialist enterprise, the condescension toward non-white cultures, non-industrialized peoples. He is merely one example of the White Savior Complex, the practice of delusion that one is helping “lesser” peoples while in reality living off their largesse. Nathan is just better at deluding himself than others who more openly exploit. 

 

At this point, let me share a bit of my family history. Both of my pairs of grandparents were foreign missionaries, and both my parents were born and raised abroad. My dad’s parents went to the Philippines, while my mom’s parents went to Mexico. I believe that this simple fact about my ancestry has - and continues - to affect my own life in profound ways I am still trying to understand. Just to name a few: because of how missionary life in the 1950s and 60s was, most missionaries didn’t drag their kids into the jungle like Nathan Price, but instead lived in relative luxury by local standards. My parents grew up with house servants, and a clear caste distinction between white and non-white, and I think this colored their view of many things in a negative way, unfortunately - something that has come out more and more with age. Also, most missionaries shipped their kids off to all-white boarding schools at a young age, and this combination of neglect and social isolation also had an effect on the kids. Then, add in trying to integrate into the American culture of the 1970s after being isolated in traditionalist cultures, whether that of Catholicism (the belief of the people they were trying to convert) or of Fundie boarding schools, the culture shock led to difficulty in figuring out how to raise our generation - and left them vulnerable to huckster cult leaders like Bill Gothard. (I know, this was the case for parents who didn’t grow up overseas, but missionary kids in general seem to have had issues dealing with modern American culture in a constructive way.) 

 

But going deeper than the personal stuff, I have really wrestled the last few years with the legacy of missionary work in general. Even before I deconstructed a lot of my theology, I felt that so much of the “gospel” that was being shared was really the “gospel of American culture” - or more accurately, the “gospel of white American culture.” It reeked of cultural imperialism - “our culture is superior because we have bigger guns and more money.” 

 

More recently, I have had grave doubts about the “conversion” that was being sought. In the case of my grandparents, the overwhelming bulk of what they did was try to convert people from one form of Christianity (Catholicism as practiced overseas) to another (Evangelical Protestantism.) Which, well, isn’t so much spreading Christianity but trying to win converts to your particular theology. And also, it smacks of being a continuation of the imperial wars of a few hundred years back - do we make the “natives” more like Spain, or more like England. 

 

This is why, even when I engaged in more giving for missionaries, I was very careful about who. I have zero interest in pushing an intellectual conversion from one dogma to another. And even less in pushing American culture on anyone. I’m fine with trying to spread the Kingdom of God in the way Christ taught it. “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.” And believe me, “good news” to the poor is not “believe this doctrine, not that.” I cannot in good faith conclude that my ancestors did much of lasting value. I am more optimistic about organizations like Doctors Without Borders that see their goal as serving others, not cramming doctrine down their throats. 

 

And, it is worth talking a bit more about the role of the United States in the world. The more I read of history, the less I find to admire about US foreign policy since World War Two. From Iran to the Congo (and literally dozens of other countries), the US has opposed democracy and installed dictators that are friendly to corporate financial interests. The usual official “justification,” has been that the democratically elected government was too “socialist” for American taste. In reality, what that means is that the government thinks that the profits from resource extraction should go primarily to its citizens, rather than to foreign corporations. This is a disgusting and embarrassing legacy. And whenever the Right wants to lecture on immigration, they should look in the mirror, because it is belligerent foreign policy which has created many of the humanitarian crises which lead to refugees. 

 

This has been a significant point of contention between Conservatives here in the US and those of us increasingly on the Left. Conservatives genuinely believe that when the US military goes in to a country, we will be welcomed as “liberators.” And then are shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, when the opposite happens. The late Rachel Held Evans nailed it when it comes to the truth about our foreign adventures:

 

When you belong to the privileged class of the most powerful global military superpower in the world, it can be hard to relate to the oppressed minorities who wrote so much of the Bible. (And no, their oppression did not consist of getting wished "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" at Target. That's not actual persecution, folks.) The fact is, the shadow under which most of the world trembles today belongs to America, and its beasts could be named any number of things—White Supremacy, Colonialism, the Prison Industrial Complex, the War Machine, Civil Religion, Materialism, Greed.

 

The Poisonwood Bible spends some time on the specifics of the Congo/Zaire history in the last quarter of the book, mostly through Leah recounting what she has learned. (Leah is left behind in Africa when Orleanna takes Adah back - Leah is gravely ill with malaria, and Orleanna cannot take both.) This is, on the one hand, fascinating history - and Kingsolver did her research. On the other, it gets preachy in places, and I think those are weak points in the book itself because they end up distracting from the story and bringing the pace to a stop. While I might have done without quite as much of it, if it brings to light the inconvenient truth about the US in Africa, the way we sentenced the Congo/Zaire to decades of brutal, corrupt rule, just so we could profit - then I am glad Kingsolver included it. 

 

So many passages in the book are fantastic. Kingsolver is a skilled writer and, even more so, a storyteller. With the exception of the didactic stuff near the end, she shows what she needs to show through a compelling story. The five voices are all distinctive, and even without the chapter headings, you could tell in a sentence or two who is talking. Orleanna is haunted and introspective. Rachel is self-absorbed and prone to malapropisms. “Write that down, Adah. If we don’t boil our water for thirty full minutes we’ll get plebiscites and what not.” Adah is poetic and full of wordplay. Usually, a palindrome appears in the first few sentences of her stories, because that is how her brain works. Ruth Ann is naive and always writes like a child. Leah is self-confident and strong and thoughtful in a different way than Adah. 

 

In the end, each of the five has to come to peace with what happened to them, and the resolutions are interesting, to say the least. 

 

The book starts off, in a lot of ways, with Orleanna’s confession after the fact. One passage in particular was interesting. 

 

You’ll say I walked across Africa with my wrists unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods: cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity. Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same. There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow. It’s easy to point to other men, conveniently dead, starting with the ones who first scooped up mud from riverbanks to catch the scent of a source. Why, Dr. Livingston, I presume, wasn’t he the rascal! He and all the profiteers who’ve since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience. 

Boy isn’t that the truth. And pointing out some of that price tends to get you a lot defensiveness, and accusations of “virtue signalling.” But the price is still there. The price of my own prosperity is largely borne by others I will never meet, and others long dead following enslavement and genocide. But by all means, keep preaching that we are better than everyone else… 

 

Adah reminds me of my second kid, who is even snarkier than my wife. In her first section, she does make an astute observation, regarding her tendency to keep quiet rather than speak. 

 

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

 

Adah will have a journey wherein she discovers that her combination of self-pity and contempt for others has been a defense mechanism. When she is able to improve her physical issues, she loses this mechanism and must face life on its own terms. 

 

Leah too has a lot to learn. Early in the book, she has to think through polygyny. It is easy to say that the husband should repent, but what then? Should he drop a wife? Which one? 

 

Father says we’re to pray for all three of them, but when you get down to the particulars it’s hard to know exactly what outcome to pray for. He should drop one wife, I guess, but for sure he’d drop the older one, and she already looks sad enough as it is. The younger one has all the kids, and you can’t just pray for a daddy to flat-out dump his babies, can you? I always believed any sin was easily rectified if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart, but here it gets complicated. 

 

Leaving aside for a minute the ludicrous Evangelical belief that polygyny is “unbiblical” - it’s actually the most “traditional” biblical form of marriage - Leah is right. When it comes to issues of marriage and sex and cultural forms of organization, there is no “easy” answer. And certainly you can’t just say a prayer and make it better. A similar question was raised in the ultra-fundamentalist groups my wife and I were part of. Many believed that a person who got divorced and remarried needed to divorce the new spouse, even if they had kids together. What? How is that going to help? But that’s how fundamentalism works. It’s all about rules no matter the cost to actual humans.

 

Speaking of doctrines that kill rather than heal - and things that led to my own deconstruction, here is Adah, speaking about the problem with the doctrines surrounding “salvation.”

 

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw.

 

This too has always been a problem for me, and thus for my beliefs about missionary work. What kind of god makes salvation a matter of chance? What kind of god apparently loves white people more than anyone else? Calvinists answer this by making god into a psychopath who gets joy out of eternal torture of those he selects for hell - which is most humans, white people excepted. 

 

Orleanna also raises an important question which is too often glossed over. We often ask women why they don’t leave abusive men. It’s not that simple, and for many, there are strong circumstances that make it very difficult. 

 

What did I have? No money, that’s for sure. No influence, no friends I could call upon in that place, no way to overrule the powers that governed our lives. This was not a new story: I was an inferior force.

 

In the African jungle, Orleanna had no power. Even when she escapes, she barely makes it with one child, and luck plays a huge part. Even here in the first world, though, women raised in fundamentalism, or married to fundamentalist men, have huge barriers, not the least of which is the lack of financial options. And also the lack of support of family and friends, very often. 

 

That is why, in my experience as a family law attorney who has handled a lot of domestic violence case, the single biggest thing we can do to give abused women the means to leave to safety is a way to make a living. Raising our daughters, the single one thing we can do to prevent them from being stuck in an abusive situation is to give them the skills to earn their own money. Nothing else makes as big of a difference. 

 

Orleanna also points out a nasty dynamic I have seen within fundamentalism. 

 

Nathan believed one thing above all else: that the Lord notices righteousness, and rewards it. My husband would accept no other possibility. So if we suffered in our little house on the peanut plain of Bethlehem, it was proof that one of us had committed a failure of virtue. I understood the failure to be mine. Nathan resented my attractiveness, as if slender hips and large blue eyes were things I’d selected intentionally to draw attention to myself. 

 

So many truths about fundamentalist beliefs there. From the “kristian karma” to the blaming of the woman when things go wrong to the suspicion of beauty. 

 

Of course, nothing like living away from the privilege to strip away the belief that you are special. Once the missionary funds dry up, it takes a while for the Africans to believe that the Prices are destitute. Nelson, the boy who assists them (all while having to sleep in the chicken coop), explains to the others that after Independence, the family “didn’t get paid extra for being white Christians.” 

 

Another interesting passage is Adah’s account of her discussions with Nelson about twins. There is a long history in human society of the abandonment of twins, which, as Adah eventually realizes as an adult (and as a doctor and researcher), makes evolutionary sense in a society defined by scarcity. Two are less likely to survive than a single birth, and the drain on the mother’s resources means less overall good than simply trying again next year. Christianity, however, means a shift in thinking. Or at least it should. As Adah learns from Nelson (and the rest eventually learn from Brother Fowles, another missionary - and one with a far better grasp of the situation - the only real appeal of Christianity is that it cares for the weak and helpless. Here is how Adah puts it, in conversation with Nelson: 

 

Nelson became agitated again. “So, you see, both wives of Tata Moanda go to the Jesus Church! And the Mama Lakanga! All these women and their friends and husbands! They think they will have twins again, and Tata Jesus will not make them leave the babies in the forest.”

This was fascinating news, and I queried him on the particulars. According to Nelson’s accounting, nearly half my father’s congregation were relatives of dead twins. It is an interesting precept on which to found a ministry: The First Evangelical Baptist Church of the Twin-Prone. I also learned from Nelson that we are hosting seven lepers every Sunday, plus two men who have done the thing that is permanently unforgiven by local gods - that is, to have accidentally killed a clansman or child. We seem to be the Church for the Lost of Cause, which is probably not so far afield from what Jesus himself was operating in his time.

 

Amen! Preach it! But this is, of course, the opposite from American Christianity. And rather opposite from Nathan Price’s intention. Brother Fowles, on the other hand, notes later in the book that his ministry attracts women, because he preaches that men shouldn’t beat their wives. Isn’t that really the core of Christ-following? Loving your neighbor, caring for the vulnerable, the Church of the Lost of Cause? 

 

I should also mention Anatole. He is the local school teacher, and comes from a different tribe and language group than the residents of the village. He is a thoroughly admirable character, although complex in his relationship to whites. He too is an outcast: an orphan thrown on his own devices in a land that does not accept him fully. He will eventually end up responsible for Leah, when the rest of the family is gone, and they will eventually marry and raise a family in Africa. During a catastrophic invasion of army ants, everyone takes shelter in the river. Orleanna chooses to take Ruth May (something Adah resents, for good reason) - but Anatole remembers Adah and goes back for her at risk to himself. While sheltering, he and Leah have the first of many conversations about deeper things. 

 

But Anatole said suddenly, “Don’t expect God’s protection in places beyond God’s dominion. It will only make you feel punished. When things go badly, you will blame yourself.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I am telling you what I am telling you. Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.” 

 

This circles back to what Orleanna says too. This belief in cosmic justice, in Kristian Karma so to speak, is deadly. But it is what most religious hucksters are selling, from Bill Gothard to James Dobson to anyone else who promises a formula that will make things go well for you, whether financially or in how your children turn out. (Actually, following a huckster is the easiest way to alienate your kids in the long run.) It is fascinating that, in retrospect, Orleanna seems to have seen it coming. The catastrophe was expected, but it was also, in a way, a welcome necessity - it finally gave Orleanna the impetus to leave Nathan forever. 

 

Strange to say, when it came I felt as if I’d been waiting for it my whole married life. Waiting for that ax to fall so I could walk away with no forgiveness in my heart. Maybe the tragedy began on the day of my wedding, then. Or even earlier, when I first laid eyes on Nathan at the tent revival. A chance meeting of strangers and the end of the world unfolds. 

 

Perhaps the most devastating moment happens later in time, when Leah reflects on how she came to love Anatole in the haze of her malarial fever. (She pursues him pretty ruthlessly, although, after waiting for Leah to grow up, he returns her love.) She also reflects on her father, though, and how her adoration of him changed to disgust. I am haunted by what she says. 

 

Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say, for I’ve loved my father fiercely my whole life, and it changed nothing. 

 

Leah’s experience is extreme, definitely more extreme than mine. But there are some similarities. As a child, I adored and idolized my parents. I really did so well into my 30s, actually.   And, despite the difficulties of my teens, our catastrophic journey through Bill Gothard’s cult, and far too much unnecessary drama after I moved out and married, I still thought that my love would change things. But, to a degree, that love did turn out to be unrequited. Yes, my parents loved me. But not nearly as much as they love their religious and political dogma. Not enough to embrace my wife. Not enough to actually change in response to the changes in circumstances. Not enough to stand up to my sister. Love was not enough to change much of anything, ultimately. And in that sense, it was unrequited. This is a sad thing to me, because things could have been better. This is the second generation in our family where religion and favoritism have caused tremendous destruction. I’d like to hope it won’t go on down to the next generation, but, again, there are no guarantees. Life is messy. But I do hope that if I have learned one thing, it is that being like Nathan Price guarantees destruction. One cannot simply refuse to learn, to change, to adapt. One cannot be so sure that one has the One True Truth About Everything™ and expect it to work everywhere the way it did in the United States of one’s youth. For Nathan, he never does learn, but keeps doubling down and doubling down, and getting ever more reactionary and ever more dogmatic. And that, sadly, is not unique. When I look back on my childhood, I can see a steady progression down that reactionary and fundamentalist road, starting with Gothard. And along with that came a similar political journey, also reactionary and ideological, leading to the point where I had to turn away from all political discussion in disgust. In both cases, it was a return to childhood or young adulthood, and the certainty - the false certainty - that came with it. And it can be said of a whole religious movement, honestly. So many in my life decided in the Trump Era to light their reputations on fire and watch them burn to the ground. The result will not be some glorious return to a mythical utopia - it wasn’t for Nathan. Rather, it will just be a trail of destruction, pain, and death. 

 

The title of the book comes from an amusing misunderstanding. The Kalanga language contains many words that are the same but have multiple meanings depending on context and accent. Nathan never understands this, and insists on closing his sermons with “Jesus is Balanga.” By which he meant to say, “Jesus is precious.” But, because of his carelessness about the accent, meant “Jesus is Poisonwood.” 

 

There is so much truth in this picture. What we bring can either be something that gives life and hope and goodness. Or it can just be deadly poison. As Brother Fowles notes, the problem stems from thinking that we - white christians - have some sort of answer to bring to the world. We fucking don’t. Africa never needed European colonialists in the first place, and that included the missionaries. They were already closer to God than those who would convert them. The same goes for the indigenous people around the world. We never came to heal and bring good news to the poor. We came to kill and exploit and enslave, and paper it over with a belief that at least we caused some to give mental assent to our theological superstructure. 

 

In the end, I believe that the reason the book infuriated so many Evangelicals is that, at some level, we know Kingsolver is right: the end-all of Christianity isn’t the white American culture of the 1950s, or 1850s. We are in more need of salvation than those we seek to save.