Comments about “The Poisonwood Bible” written by Barbara Kingsolver

*** Spoiler alert: If you have not read the book, the notes below may reveal some of the plot. ***

Barbara Kingsolver presents the perspectives of Congo, Africa, Forests, Earth, Nature and looks at us humans and our activities from a totally different perspective. Throughout the book I felt that she held the mirror to the human race and helped us to see ourselves from the point of view of other beings on this planet.

She occasionally comes across as critical of the male of the human species and has a few “barbs” (pun intended) embedded in her narratives mainly through female characters. For example, Orleanna Price comments in passing at the beginning of the book “… in the 1920s, when elsewhere in the world the menfolk took a break between wars to perfect the airplane and the automobile, a white man …”. As if to imply, that the wars are the predominant occupation for, as she calls them, the “menfolk” :-). One felt a persistent undercurrent of her resentment against men, or rather, resentment against the mindless violent streak in men.

I loved Kingsolver’s writing style, her language, her creativity, the different perspectives she presented and her genuine love and respect for nature. Her wit and sarcasm expressed through Adah were simply superb… she could brutally tear down anyone with her tongue and coldly and objectively project the brutal truth. Later in the book, Kingsolver’s compassion, understanding, respect for Africa, guilt of her own race and all things human that she expressed through Leah was wonderful as well. She used Rachel well to provide some comic relief and to highlight human shallowness (or that of her fellow American public). She highlighted what innocence can do through Ruth May and also presented how we humans corrupt a child’s innocence by teaching false propaganda. Finally, through Orleanna Price she captured the human feeling of helplessness and dependence in soured relations. It’s easy to say that Orleanna should have walked out, but Kingsolver captured the feelings and practices of that time, that era and made the readers empathize with Orleanna’s feelings of helplessness and weakness. Kingsolver’s sharp observations of human behavior and human thinking at different ages and in different contexts were amazing.

On the flip side, the character of Father Price was just mono-layered with literally no depth or other side to him. Kingsolver gave all the characters a voice, a chance to tell things from their individual perspective, except Father Price. She did soften that up a bit later by explaining about his torturous time from the War and the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In short, he needed help and not a wife who complied with all his whims, not kids whom he could whack at will.

I did Google up Kingsolver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Kingsolver and http://www.kingsolver.com/biography/) and found information that kind of confirmed where she gets that earthy sense. She has her degrees in biology, has traveled the world and is also into farming / gardening. All of those things give her an earthy and knowing-woman-of-the-world kind of a perspective that city folks like me are unlikely to have. I now recall that she was in the news a few years ago with a book she released “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” and that kind of explains her general message of living in peace with nature and to try and be a part of it rather than to be on top of it.

Listed below are a few “good ones” from the book that explain the different characters and their way of thinking at different stages of their lives. Kingsolver’s attention to detail, of the thought process of each of the characters is astounding and is appreciated even better on second or third reading.

Caveat: These extracts are clubbed by character and not in the sequence of the story and so while they may show a character in different lights through the book, they may be a bit distracting from the story’s point of view.

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Orleanna Price

“We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth.” … “But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us.”

“Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa. It makes me want to keen, sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use. I find it impossible to bear.”

“Africa, where one of my children remains in the dark red earth. It’s the scent of accusation. It seems I only know myself, anymore, by your attendance in my soul.”

“The woman squatting beside the oranges leaped up hissing, slicing her hands like scissors blades at the two of us, scorching me with eyes so hot the angry chocolate irises seemed to be melting into white.”

“Until that moment I’d thought I could have it both ways: to be one of them, and also my husband’s wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. 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. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.”

“Oh little beast, little favorite. Can’t you see I died as well?”

“I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.”

“I couldn’t step in front of my husband to shelter them (her kids) from his scorching light. They were expected to look straight at him and go blind.”

“Nathan,  as a boy played football on his high school team in Killdeer, Mississippi, with great success evidently, and expected his winning season to continue ever after. He could not abide losing or backing down.”

“I held him in my arms at night and saw parts of him turn to ash. Then I saw him reborn, with a stone in place of his heart. Nathan would accept no more compromises.”

“Listen, little beast. Judge me as you will, but first listen. I am your mother. What happened to us could have happened anywhere, to any mother. I am not the first woman on earth to have seen her daughters possessed. For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they’ll still move toward him. Without cease, they will bend to his light.”

“Oh, a wife may revile such a man with every silent curse she knows. But she can’t throw stones. A stone would fly straight through him and strike the child made in his image, clipping out an eye or a tongue or an outstretched hand. It’s no use. There are no weapons for this fight. There are countless laws of man and of nature, and none of these is on your side. Your arms go weak in their sockets, your heart comes up empty. You can understand that the thing you love more than this world grew from a devil’s seed. It was you who let him plant it.”

“He came home with a crescent-shaped scar on his temple, seriously weakened vision in his left eye, and a suspicion of his own cowardice from which he could never recover. His first words to me were to speak of how fiercely he felt the eye of God upon him.”

Book Four – Bel and the Serpent – first chapter by Orleanna Price is a very tragic description of what happened to Congo and Lumumba. Must read.

“On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.”

“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.”

“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.” ß you can almost hear the gnawing of a mother’s guilt over her lost daughter.

“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water.”

“For women like me, it seems, it’s not ours to take charge of beginnings and endings. Not the marriage proposal, the summit conquered, the first shot fired, nor the last one either – the treaty at Appomattox, the knife in the heart. Let men write those stories. I can’t. I only know the middle ground where we live our lives.”

“But look at old women and bear in mind we are another country. We married with simple hopes: enough to eat and children who might outlive us. My life was a business of growing where planted and making good on the debts life gathered onto me.”

“But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it’s wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them.”

“A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.”

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Leah Price

“In a burst of light Methuselah opened his wings and fluttered like freedom itself, lifting himself to the top of our Kentucky Wonder vines and the highest boughs of the jungle that will surely take back everything once we are gone.”

“That’s one more thing to remember when I am grown, to tell about the Congo: how the mango fruits hung way down on long, long stems like extension cords. I believe God felt sorry for the Africans after putting the coconut so far out of reach, and aimed to make the mango easier to get a hand on.”

“There is something else I must confess about Tata Boanda: he’s a sinner. Right in the plain sight of God he has two wives, a young and an old one. Why, they all come to church! 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.” ß LOL J

“My view of the home is: it is always better to be outside.”

“Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you’ll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they’ve already seen most what there is. Married eyes.”

“He sings softly to the bees as he walks through the village, and the children run after him, mesmerized by the prospect of honey, their eagerness for a sweet causing them to vibrate and hum like the bees.”

“This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.”

“They used to feed Christians to the lions, and now Adah uses that phrase ironically, referring to how I supposedly left her to be eaten up on the path.”

“I could only stare at Ruth May’s bare left shoulder, where two red puncture wounds stood out like red beads on her flesh. Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.”

“She looked more like a billowy cloud that could rise right up through the trees, whenever mother finally let go.”

“We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”

“I suppose they were as astonished as we were that a member of our family was capable of death.”

“Democracy and Dictatorships are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and Capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of your nation, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?”

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Adah Price

“I am the one who does not speak. Our Father speaks for all of us, as far as I can see.”

“Oh, I can easily imagine the fetal mishap: we were inside the womb together dum-de-dum when Leah suddenly turned and declared, Adah you are just too slow. I am taking all nourishment here and going on ahead. She grew strong as I grew weak. (Yes! Jesus loves me!). And so it came to pass, in the Eden of our mother’s womb, I was cannibalized by my sister”.

“Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”

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

“Thousands more fish jerked in the sun and went bad by the riverbanks. Our village was blessed for weeks with the smell of putrefaction. Instead of abundance it was a holiday of waste. No ice.”

“How stupid, that they had not even conspired to get their story straight. All the evildoers in the Bible were spectacularly dumb.”

“I yawned, uninspired yet again by the pious and beautiful Susanna.  I was unlikely to ever have her problems.”

“For some, I am told, this weighted-down helplessness comes in dreams. For me it is my life.”

“I never imagined myself as a woman grown, anyway, and nowadays especially it seems a waste of imagination.”

“Now the thunderstorms. The funerals are drying up slowly as the puddles.”

“Bongo Bango Bingo. That is the story of Congo they are telling now in America: a tale of cannibals. I know about this kind of story – the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyone feel much better. So, Krushchev is said to be here dancing with the man-eating natives, teaching them to hate the Americans and the Belgians? After all, we have such white skin. We eat their food inside our large house, and throw out the bones. Bones that lie helter-skelter on the grass, from which to tell our fortunes. Why ever should the Congolese read our doom? After all, we have offered to feed their children to the crocodiles in order for them to know the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory.”

“When Miss Dickinson says, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’ I always think of something round – a ball from one of the games I will never play – stuck all around like a clove-orange sachet with red feathers. I have pictured it many times – Hope! – wondering how I would catch such a thing one-handed, if it did come floating down to me from the sky.”

“The things we do not know, independently and in unison as a family, would fill two separate baskets, each with a large hole in the bottom.”

“But Nelson as a pupil is apt to turn teacher himself at the least provocation. And he seems to think his chatter improves our conversation, since I only write things on paper.”

“By pure mistake, his implementations is sometimes more pure than his intentions. But mostly it is the other way around. Mostly he shouts, ‘Praise be!’ while the back of his hand knocks you flat.”

“Our Father has a bone to pick with this world, and oh, he picks it like a sore. Picks it with the Word. His punishment is the Word, and his deficiencies are failures of words.”

“Then there is batiza, Our Father’s fixed passion. Batiza pronounced with the tongue curled just so means ‘baptism’. Otherwise, it means ‘to terrify’. Nelson spent part of an afternoon demonstrating to me that fine linguistic difference while we scraped chicken manure from the nest boxes. No one has yet explained it to the Reverend. He is not of a mind to receive certain news. Perhaps he should clean more chicken houses.”

“Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.”

“Had I felt like entering the discussion, I would have pointed out that to Mama Mwanza his profession probably resembles the game of ‘Mother May I?,’ consisting of very long strings onf nonsense words in a row.”

“Wrote it, for the benefits of my sisters, left to right.”

“The point of the exercise was to convince ourselves that the wolf was not actually at the back door but perhaps merely salivating at the edge of our yard.”

“Poor tyrannical Rachel keeps trying to build a big-sister career upon a slim sixteen-month seniority, insisting that we respect her as our elder. But Leah and I have not thought of her in that way since the second grade, when we passed her up in the school spelling bee. Her downfall was the ridiculously easy word scheme.”

“That night marks my life’s dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began.”

“Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.”

“Since the terrible night of the ants, Mother had been creeping her remorse in flat-footed circles around me without ever speaking of it, wearing her guilt like the swollen breasts of a nursing mother. So far I refused to suckle and give her relief, but I kept close by.”

“On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.”

“The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”

“I have always been the one who sacrificed life and limb and half a brain to save the other half. My habit is to drag myself imperiously through a world that owes me unpayable debts. I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.”

“There was a room in Adah for nought but pure love and pure hate. Such a life is satisfying and deeply uncomplicated.”

“No wonder Father could not flee the same jungle twice.”

“Anatole and I inhabit the same atmosphere of solitude. The difference between us is he would give up his right arm and leg for Leah, whereas I already did.”

“If you are whole, you will argue: Why wouldn’t they rejoice? Don’t the poor miserable buggers all want to be like me? Not necessarily, no. The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you, or get The Verse. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right. How can I explain that my two unmatched halves used to add up to more than one whole?”

“I imagined getting the kerosene and burning him up in his bed. I only didn’t because you were in it too.

Mother: Then why didn’t you? Both of us together. You might as well have.

Adah: Because then you would be free too. And I didn’t want that. I wanted you to remember what he did to us.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada (without ‘h’) inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.”

“Lock (Rachel), stock and barrel (Leah). So I am the one who quietly take stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn’t know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.”

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Rachel Price

“Ruth May fixing to executrate …”  LOL.

“I knew right then I was in the sloop of despond”.

“Remembered the missionary times? This was a nerve shock even to me, to hear that the villagers thought Christianity was like some old picture show that was way out of date. What did that make Father then, Charlie Chaplin, waddling around duck-footed, waving his cane and talking without any sounds coming out?”

“Every grown up in the room, including my mother, the Cussing Lady, and Mrs. Underdown, who kept rubbing her neck and craning her chin to the side, you could have mistaken for a mental psychiatry patient right then. Except for Father, and of course he is the one who is really mental.”

“If we don’t boil our water for thirty full minutes we’ll get plebiscites and what not.”

“I thought I had died and gone to hell. But it’s worse than that – I am alive in hell.”

“‘You two can just go ahead and laugh,’ I said. ‘But I read the papers. Ronald Reagan is keeping us safe from the socialistic dictators, and you should be grateful for it.’

‘Socialistic dictators such as?’

‘I don’t know. Karl Marx! Isn’t he still in charge of Russia?

Adah was laughing so hard in the backseat I thought she was going to pee on herself.’”

“Those two were always connected in their won weird, special way. Even when they can’t stand each other, they still always know what the other’s talking about when nobody else does. But I didn’t let it bother me. I am certainly old enough to hold up my head and have my own personal adventures in life. I dreamed I toured the Ancient Palace of Abomey in my Maidenform Bra!”

“‘Thou shalt not kill,’ I replied. ‘That’s not just our way of thinking. It happens to be in the Bible.’

Leah and Adah smiled at each other.

‘Right. Herer’s to Bible, ’ Leah said, clinking her bottle against mine.

‘Tata Jesus is bangala!’ Adah said, raising her bottle too.

She and Leah looked at each other for a second, then both started laughing like hyenas.

‘Jesus is poisonwood!’ Leah said. ‘Here’s to the Minister of Poisonwood. And here’s to his five wives!’

Adah stopped laughing. ‘That was us.’

‘Who?’ I said. ‘What?’

‘Nathan’s five legendary wives. They must have meant us.’

Leah stared at her. ‘You’re right’”

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Ruth May

“God says the Africans are the Tribes of Ham. Ham was the worst of Noah’s three boys”… “So Noah cursed all Ham’s children to be slaves for ever and ever. That’s how come them to turn out dark.” <– Just reflects on how we humans are and how we pollute a child’s innocence in the God’s name to justify our evil deeds. They say, winners write history and they do it in the God’s name.

“For the longest time, I used think that my name is Sugar. Mama always says that. Sugar, come here a minute. Sugar, now don’t do that.”

“Mayonnaise,” I asked Mama. “What color was the jar?” But she didn’t cry. Sometimes when I can’t remember things from Georgia, she will cry.

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Anatole

“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.”

“There are more words in the world than no and yes.”

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Eyes in the trees / Green Mamba Snake (Nature / Forest / Time)

“Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Everyone is complicity. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived it could.”

“The mother and daughters move like oil through the clear dark fluid of this crowd, mingling and then coming back to itself.”

“The teeth at your bones are your own, the hunger is yours, forgiveness is yours.”

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