The Poisonwood Bible

In late 1950s Congo, an American missionary arrives with his family intent on bringing enlightenment to the savages. The experiences of the family are told by the preacher’s wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, the vain Rachel, twins Leah, who is devoted to her father, and Adah, damaged at birth but more aware than anyone realizes, and the baby, Ruth Ann. The events take place during a period when Congo was eager to cast off its colonial chains and we see some details of events of the time.


Barbara Kingsolver - from the Guardian

This is a tale not merely about a missionary family in an alien land, but about learning to see what is in plain sight. It is about opening the mind and the heart. We learn about the local culture, good and bad, as well as about the mores of the missionaries.

The father is presented as a mindless faith-robot, determined to convert the heathen while being completely clueless about and uninterested in learning how to actually communicate with them. I would have preferred it had this character been given some more dimension, instead of serving as a stand-in for the arrogance of western cultural imperialism. His family is given a better shake. Through Orleanna’s and the girls eyes we see not only their private struggles and coming of age, but gain insight into and information about the strange world into which they have been thrust. Kingsolver reminds us of the time period with small portraits of local involvement in the independence movement.

I expect that there will be those who reject the novel because it takes an anti-imperialist and anti-missionary perspective, ignoring the aspects of the tale that are critical of local practices as well. But I did not react to this book as a political screed. There is great craft at work here. Kingsolver offers poetic descriptions that I found extremely beautiful, rich and moving. Her main characters were well-realized and accessible, and she succeeded nicely in giving each a very individual voice. The path along which she moves her characters made sense to me and only rarely did I have a tough time accepting her authorial choices.

Overall, this is a terrific book, well-crafted, informative and satisfying.

For any interested in learning about the history of the Congo, particularly as it pertains to Belgium’s role, there is no better read than Adam Hochschild ‘s King Leopold’s Ghost, an outstanding telling of that story.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

Reviews of other Kingsolver books
-----The Lacuna
-----Flight Behavior
-----Unsheltered

“The fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.”

(First read in 2002 or 2003; reread for book club and rating upped by 1 star.) Often I find that on a second reading a book doesn’t live up to my memory of it – last year I reread just four books, and I rated each one a star lower than I had the first time. But that wasn’t the case with my September book club book, which I’ve just flown through in 11 days. Maybe it’s that I’d allowed enough time to pass for it to be almost completely fresh, or that I was in a better frame of mind to appreciate its picture of harmful ideologies in a postcolonial setting. In any case, this time it struck me as a masterpiece, and has instantly leapt onto my favorites list.

Here’s the sum total of what I’d remembered about The Poisonwood Bible after the passage of 16–17 years:

It’s about a missionary family in Africa, and narrated by the daughters.

One of the sisters marries an African.

The line “Nathan was made frantic by sex” (except I had it fixed incorrectly in my mind; it’s actually “Nathan was made feverish by sex”).


Everything else I’d forgotten. Here’s what stood out on my second reading:

Surely one of the best opening lines ever? (Though technically there’s a prologue that comes before it.) “We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.”

The book is actually narrated in turns by the wife and four daughters of Southern Baptist missionary Nathan Price, who arrives in the Congo with his family in 1959. These five voices are a triumph of first-person narration, so distinct and arising organically from the characters’ personalities and experiences. The mother, Orleanna, writes from the future in despondent isolation – a hint right from the beginning that this venture is not going to end well. Fifteen-year-old Rachel is a selfish, ditzy blonde who speaks in malapropisms and period slang and misses everything about American culture. Leah, one of the 13-year-olds, is whip-smart and earnest; she idolizes their father and echoes his religious language. Her twin, Adah, who was born with partial paralysis, rarely speaks but has an intricate inner life she expresses through palindromes, cynical poetry and plays on words. And Ruth May, just five years old, sees more than she understands and sets it all across plainly but wittily.

Nathan’s arrogant response to the ‘native customs’ is excruciating. His first prayer, spoken to bless the meal the people of Kilanga give in welcome, quickly becomes a diatribe against nakedness, and he later rails against polygamy and witch doctors and tries to enforce child baptism. When he refuses to take their housekeeper Mama Tataba’s advice on planting, all of the seeds he brought from home wash away in the first rainstorm. On a second attempt he meekly makes the raised beds she recommended, and keeps away from the poisonwood that made him break out in a nasty rash. This garden he plants is a metaphor for control versus adaptation.

Brother Fowles, Nathan’s predecessor at the mission, is proof that Christianity doesn’t have to be a haughty rampage. He respects Africans enough to have married one, and his religion is a playful, elastic one built around love and working alongside creation.

The King James Bible (plus Apocrypha, for which Nathan harbors a strange fondness) provides much of the book’s language and imagery, as well as the section headings. Many of these references come to have (sometimes mocking) relevance. Kingsolver also makes reference to classics of Africa-set fiction, like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Africa is a place of many threats – malaria and dysentery, snakes in the chicken house, swarms of ants that eat everything in their path, corruption, political coups and assassinations – not least the risk of inadvertently causing grave cultural offense.

The backdrop of the Congo’s history, especially the declaration of independence in 1960 and the U.S.-led “replacement” (by assassination) of its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, with the dictator Mobutu, is thorough but subtle, such that minimal to no Googling is required to understand the context. (Only in one place, when Leah and Rachel are arguing as adults, does Kingsolver resort to lecturing on politics through dialogue, as she does so noticeably in Unsheltered.)

Names are significant, as are their changes. With the end of colonialism Congo becomes Zaire and all its cities and landmarks are renamed, but the change seems purely symbolic. The characters take on different names in the course of the book, too, through nicknames, marriage or education. Many African words are so similar to each other that a minor mispronunciation by a Westerner changes the meaning entirely, making for jokes or irony. And the family’s surname is surely no coincidence: we are invited to question the price they have paid by coming to Africa.

We follow the sisters decades into the future. “Africa has a thousand ways to get under your skin,” Leah writes; “we’ve all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa, one way or another.” Three of the four end up staying there permanently, but disperse into different destinies that seem to fit their characters. Even those Prices who return to the USA will never outrun the shadow the Congo has left on their lives.


What an amazing novel about the ways that right and wrong, truth and pain get muddied together. Some characters are able to acknowledge their mistakes and move on, while others never can. As Adah concludes, “We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.”

The mark of success of a doorstopper for me is that it’s so engrossing you hardly notice how long it is. I think this will make for our best book club discussion yet. I can already think of a few questions to ask – Is it fair that Nathan never gets to tell his side of the story? Which of the five voices is your favorite? Who changes and who stays the same over the course of the book? – and I’m sure I’ll find many more resources online since this was an Oprah’s Book Club pick too.


Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.


[English singer-songwriter Anne-Marie Sanderson’s excellent Book Songs, Volume 1 EP includes the song “Poisonwood”. The excerpted lyrics are below, with direct quotes from the text in bold.

Our Father speaks for all of us
Our Father knows what’s best for us as well

He planted a garden where poisonwood grew
He cut down the orchids cos none of us knew
that the seeds that filled his pockets
would grow and grow without stopping
his beans, his Kentucky Wonders
played their part in tearing us asunder.

Our mother suffered through all of this
Our mother carried the guilt
Carry us, marry us, ferry us, bury us
Carry us, bury us with the poisonwood.]

The Poisonwood Bible was certainly one of the best narratives about Africa that I have read in a very very long time. I give it five stars for the excellent research, writing style, narrative and insight. As a novel it managed to include a wealth of information on interpersonal relationships, political and religious issues and African culture. It took some guts to pinpoint the issues between different races, cultures and countries involved in Africa in such a way that the truth, which is underscored by various historical sources, and many of them, upset the readers to such an extent that many reviews are more shocked outbursts of anger than anything else. But for born Africans, both black and white, the narrative is well known, very familiar and very true!

The Price family's involvement in different aspects of African life after their disastrous beginning in the Congo as a missionary family, was an excellent way to tell more than one story which are all connected to a grave in the deepest forests of the Congo.

I was not convinced of the children's voices in the book. It was clearly voices created by an adult, but it did not hamper the spellbinding narrative to keep the reader engrossed in the story.

Although Tata Price was a missionary, he could have been anything else and still had the devastating influence on everyone around him due to his controlling brutal ignorant, unbending personality. He also could have been German, British, Portuguese, French, or even (nowadays) Chinese. The serious colonization of Africa started with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which the most powerful European countries agreed upon rules for laying claim to particular African territories, the British, French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Belgians, and Portuguese set about formally implementing strategies for the long-term occupation and control of Africa.

In 'Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham, an even more detailed story unfolds of events in Africa that would ultimately conclude in the final revolt starting in 1960 on the continent itself. But it wasn't the beginning of the African revolt at all. The first successful African Revolution took place in Haiti (1791 -1804) and was inspired by the French Revolution(1787-99) so by the way.

The Americans, therefor, were not the only 'culprit' or even the biggest one. The book should have pointed that out in some or other way. But of course it would have made the narrative too tedious and would not have fitted quite into the story.

However, spilled milk is spilled milk. It's good to know more about history and learn through novels about other countries. Insight is always a good thing. Africa is also not the only continent which was concurred throughout thousands of years and certainly won't be the last. Whatever happened, the role of the missionaries were manyfold. But the lasting legacy is their ability to educate people. Of all the different conquerors through the ages, Christianity, no matter how it was done, introduced intellectual freedom through education everywhere it went and was the forerunner of free societies all over the world.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote a great book and skillfully introduced many aspects of African life to readers who would otherwise not have obtained this information. She also highlighted the true rulers of Africa - which is not the democratically elected Black leaders in power on the continent at all.

It is one of those books that every single person who benefits from Africa's wealth in minerals, oil, and any other products should read!!! And that is just about the entire world!

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant book!!!!

What a terrific story. Such a nut case of a father. I hate sanctimonious people! Somebody should have shot him. Great detailed read about the struggles of living in Africa.

This is my favorite book. Hands down. There is something about this book that strongly affects me every single time I read it. I have read it maybe 8 times. The first time I read it, it was while working in a coffee shop. It was supposed to be my "break time" reading, but I am sure I nearly got fired that week, because I couldn't put it down.

The book is told from the point of view of the Price women, four sisters and their mother, who have all been brought to the Belgian Congo by Rev. Price, an Evengelical Baptist minister, determined to bring the word of God to the African savages, no matter what the cost. The family and their mission begin to dissolve as the Belgians pull out of Africa, leaving severe political unrest in their wake, unrest driven by the CIA and the US government. We see the family struggle to survive and cope with their faith; faith in God, in each other, in their country and in justice.

Kingsolver's strength in this novel is her point of view narration and the way each of the five female voices sound completely different, yet enough similarities exist to believe they are all related. As the daughter of a minister myself, I strongly identified with Leah, but I also enjoyed Adah's, her twin sister, point of view. The counterpoints of Leah's positive, hopefulness is juxtoposed nicely by her sister, who was crippled at birth, who speaks in rhymes and palindromes and sees the dark side of everything.

The relationship between mothers and daughters, and between sisters is strongly explored. We also see each of the girls chasing after their father's approval, which is nearly impossibe to gain. Each of the Price's learn something valuable from the dark continent, though some learn it more grudgingly than others. The book definetly increased my interest in the parts of African history that no one teaches you in high school, mostly how Western nations used the contient like a giant chess board, moving pawns and unseating democratically elected socialists in favor of capitalists willing to sell them raw materials cheap.

Five stars. All the way.

Though I found this novel quite daunting and dense at times; it really is a great work of fiction that should be read and taught in schools everywhere from high school to college.

It's an accessible postcolonial work that also serves both as a preachy learning tool about the evils of postcolonialism; as well as stereotyping ones religious beliefs and beliefs about race in general.

Nathan Price is one of those villainous father figures you love to hate- he's so stubborn about everything; and his daughters, Rachel, Leah, Ada, and Ruth May and wife Orleanna are all well-constructed women with complex point of views; complete with a deadly encounter with a green mamba snake out in the Congo.

I did read that Kingsolver was heavily influenced by that great classic of classics, “Things Fall Apart” in writing this book, and like Achebe, she writes with empathy and tenderness even it comes to the repellant characters.

You'll find yourself rooting for Leah and Ada especially since they're the moral compass of the story; whereas Rachel and Nathan Price are the one-note villains that every great work must have in the tradition of Colonel Kurtz.

It is not Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" though it was heavily influenced by the latter; but it certainly has some gorgeous cadences worth noting for the discriminating reader.

wonderfully written and surprisingly engaging masterpiece, illustrating the fluidity of perspective, the strength of women, and the damage that greed and possessiveness can inflict. very strong and individualistic characterizations for each of the narrative voices. understanding of a certain place and time in the Congo comes slowly but steadily to the reader and never feels forced. although kingsolver's liberal tendencies are clear, to me at least they do not unbalance the novel - except perhaps in the depiction of the minister/father. overall a novel of wisdom and beauty, well worth re-reading.

My official review "Tata Jesus is Bängala":

I finished the last 300 pages in 2 days (which is very fast for me - English books). I felt every emotion under the sky with this book. I hated Nathan Price, I hated injustice, I hated my uselessness, I hated the fact that there are no good prospects for Africa in the future. As a Geographic major I strongly believe that the closer you are to the Equator, the longer it will remain an underdeveloped country. Of course the country itself is full of resources (in non-foods) that could make them rich, but nothing can feed the overpopulated cities. Politics obstruct any way of turning diamonds into food. Anyway,
I loved the fact the author talked so much about how they processed their lives and experiences in the Congo. To some degree that's how I am. I grew up poor and desolate and now live in this insane country where everything is available. I feel restless and unsettles at times. Like Orleanna who can't wear shoes in Atlanta because she needs to feel dirt between her feet I prefer to walk to church (with stroller and kids) in Minus degree weather because that's my connection to my family and culture in Germany. Nobody gets it when we arrive at church with red noses, fully aware that we have a functional car.
I love and miss Ruth May. I cried a lot about dead animal. I laughed at her timely wittiness in describing the culture clashes.

I learned one important point about African culture. The author lingered on the fact that Africans (especially villagers) can't grasp the fact of a family owning or keeping more than they need or consume at any point. When a fisherman caught a full net he immediately shares with his village. People don't ask for fish or thank for the fish. They just take. Because that's how it is. When the Prices arrived there with storage the kids came to beg at their door. Not because they were greedy or rude but that's how the village functions.

We have many African immigrants in our ward and neighborhood (sometimes I am the only white person in a store on any given day). For example when the Relief Society announces a committee meeting "With refreshments" some African women just show up. They go straight to the refreshment table (in the middle of the meeting, untouched foods and all) eat, and then go home. None has a calling but hears the call to eat the offered food. There is an abundance and they have no money for food. It's all logical to them to eat when it's available if they were invited or not. There are also many problems with African can't getting off welfare. Honorable families don't understand the reason not to take when it's for everyone to take and use. There is no thinking about the future, just filling the belly now.

One of our Book Club books this year is "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" by Ruby K Payne to help us interact better.

I loved it. It was a good book. A few flaws but easily forgivable for the beautiful philosophical writing. It was the best epic I read so far.