Barbara Kingsolver – The Poisonwood Bible

Before two weeks ago I had never heard of the name of Patrice Lumumba. Then I came across it twice.

Firstly, from reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book, ‘The Poisonwood Bible’, initially published in 1998. Then, during a random conversation with my uncle when he was recalling his younger years.

I know very little about the recent histories of African countries, save perhaps South Africa. It’s a bad gap to my knowledge, especially as so many of my family lived for several years in Kenya or Uganda. That’s why novels like Kingsolver’s are fascinating to me. I get to learn a little bit as well as become immersed in the drama.

The book is set mainly in the Belgian Congo from 1959. An evangelical Baptist minister, Nathan Price, arrives from the US, from a town called Bethlehem, with his wife and four daughters. Kilanga, their new home is in a remote part of the Congo, and the people there live a fairly self-sufficient but subsistence lifestyle. One of the daughters, Adah, who has a disability, finds herself almost in the norm given how many of the people in the village have physical impairments.

The book is divided into sections and the chapters within those sections are narrated by the mother from a retrospective view, and her daughters as they experience life then. There is no direct voice given to Nathan but his presence, in the first two thirds of the book is palpable. He’s dictatorial with his family and wants to direct (in God’s name) the village and also the land, ultimately failing at both because he refuses to listen to or to learn from them: baptism in the river is out of the question because of the crocodiles; planting American seeds his way wouldn’t work because the rains and insects were different here.

He doesn’t even really attempt to learn the language, throwing out the odd grabbed word with no proper comprehension of how it could be used. He calls Jesus a ‘Bangala’, but one of his daughters notes that he pronounces it wrongly, announcing that Jesus is a ‘poisonwood tree’ rather than a ‘precious thing’.

His middle daughter Leah, Adah’s twin sister, is in his thrall to begin with, trying, mostly in vain, to do right by his decree. Rachel, the eldest, cannot stand this family adventure, yearning for those American mod cons like shampoo and society balls, and refusing to really partake in their whole life there until she has no choice. The youngest, Ruth May, adapts, as young children often do, the most easily to the new world they now live in. The mother’s own voice, which begins each section, is mostly lyrical and unearthly, hollowed out as she is by loss.

Lumumba’s name starts cropping up as the country is getting ready for its first general election in 1960, having finally won the right to govern themselves. He is eventually democratically elected Prime Minister, and then quickly murdered in a coup sanctioned by the US.

I liked the book most when it centred on this village, before it went out and explored the bigger picture using the daughters as they grow up. I found the language rich, and the individual characters of each of the daughters well drawn. Although not a huge amount of action happens here, there is texture and layers as the slightly different viewpoints start stacking up. 

When they leave the village and the stories of the daughters’ lives as adults are told, I was less invested. It felt a little more expositional, but it still managed to make me rage at the injustices piled up on that nation. 

My uncle never went to the Congo but lived, in his teens, in Uganda in the late fifties and early sixties and would have read the news about the neighbouring country. ‘Patrice Lumumba,’ my uncle said, ‘was a good man.’

Overall, I think that Barbara Kingsolver is a terrific writer. Having a fictional drama overlayed onto a historical setting is a hard thing to do, and while I don’t think she pulls it off completely – the political backdrop, when it comes in, feels a bit heavy-handed – her fantastic descriptions and often poetic language make this book well worth reading.