Africa has been in my mind though I don’t know why. The books that I’ve read this year have reflected that. I remember picking up Ngugi’s The River Between not knowing that it would propel me into a lifetime passion of reading which borders on obsession. Since then I have been in the lookout for African writers, but I also want to read from those who have been there and lived there. This is the other side of the coin — the Karen Blixens, Joseph Conrad, Barbara Kingsolver. And no, despite my pursuit for finding novels about the continent, I have never been to Africa.
Barbara Kingsolver spent some time in Africa in her childhood, and that sojourn in Africa has been imprinted in her memory. Her father spent a short stint as a medical missionary right about the time when Patrice Lumumba, the popular Congolese leader, was murdered in cold blood. Africa never left her, not really, and The Poisonwood Bible is the manifestation of that. Perhaps all the five narrators in the story are all her experiences, different facets of herself — deconstructed and with these five perceptions, now embodied in real, tangible and wonderful characters, thrown into the melting pot that is Africa.
The voices of the narrators embody the structure of the novel: Orleanna, the mother, begins each new part of the novel with her perspective. This serves as an anchor and the root for the subsequent chapters, written from the perspective of her four daughters. Each, more or less, are equal in weight. Rachel, the oldest, is the all-American girl. Spoiled, vain, and a sucker for her own appearances; she longs to be back home. The twins, Leah and Adah, are from different sides of the spectrum. Leah follows her father’s religious footsteps and an athlete while Adah is physically deformed and lives within her intellect. Leah’s concern (at least in the beginning) is to please her father, while Ada’s is to create palindromic sentences. Ruth is the youngest and thus the most innocent, though she is full of life. The voices don’t necessarily follow each other in sequence. On different parts of the book, some voices are more prominent than others.
The plight of the preacher’s daughters
Arriving as a missionary family to the most remote part of the Congo, the reverend Nathan Price is a man on a mission to bring the word of Christ to the unbaptised natives. His expectations does not meet reality when he finds that the task is more challenging than he imagined. In the meantime, his family is dragged along to the drama of living in Africa, trying to hold on to their own way of life, while struggling to cope to the African way. A chicken is not a daily meal, like in the West, but reserved for special occasions. Yet, the Price family insists in the beginning to have three square meals a day. And let’s not even talk about them trying to eat the local food.
When the seeds of revolution germinates for the Congolese independence, Nathan Price had a choice to evacuate his family, but adamantly refused to as he was convinced to complete the task at hand. What follows is a struggle for the missionaries to live penniless, and compromising their ways so that they may survive. But when a drought comes, the whole village became a beast united in desperation. There are remarkable segments in the novel of a great hunt to purge the animals from the bush, and an army of ants who’d annihilate everything in their way by way of hunger. The fabric of the Price family is stretched to the fullest and ended in tatters, though ripped apart is a more apt way to put it.
The unbearable itch from the Poisonwood
The Poisonwood in the title is the subtle lines of how a word can confuse, despite the best intentions. The Kikongo word for it is “bangala”, meaning precious. But a slight deviation in the pronunciation translates the same word into Poisonwood — upon touching this venomous plant, the victim would be itching and retching for days. Language, though not exactly central to the story is an essential part of the novel. Language confuses, it is ambiguous, the ones who are masters of it try to impose it to those who do not speak it. The blabbering of Nathan Price is no better than the blabbering of the child lest his translator, Anatole, is willing to translate.
Luckily, he does, because he wants to give the choice to the people to follow their traditions, or to adopt new traditions. He does not want the preacher’s words misinterpreted, because the consequences may be more adverse than if his words were translated incorrectly. Adah, being a linguist, was obsessed on the philosophy of the Kikongo language and some of the thoughts are eloquent:
Muntu is the Congolese word for man. Or people. But it means more than that. Here in the Congo I am pleased to announce there is no special difference between living people, dead people, children not yet born, and gods — these are all muntu.
As language is the vehicle for cultures, it also presents eloquently the views of life and death. Like in English, there are many words in Congolose that sound the same and mean different things. It is the gap in between these communications that two people from different cultures may find the bridge.
It is also a post-colonial novel, from the vantage point of hindsight, the missionaries who had come to change the way of life for a culture that had preceded time seem an exercise in futility. Nathan Price was adamant for the natives to accept the word as he knows it. In contrast, Brother Fowles were stigmatised by his own church for being too close to the natives. Yet, he understood that he is only a branch grafted into the African tree, and lives as such to help and adapt. The conversation between him and Nathan is compelling reading. It reminds one of the hypocritical battle between Allie Fox and Reverend Spellgood in The Mosquito Coast, reversed.
There are other Belgians out there who are the remnants of the old guard. The Belgians are no different than expats anywhere — useless, living in luxury and condescending to foreigners not of their own flag. The systems in place put by the Belgians are shackles on the way to the freedom in the form of independence. But what is more is the wealth of resources underneath Congo — the diamonds attract the worst and the most powerful kinds of people. Patrice Lumumba was a threat to this backdoor to the country’s wealth and he was quickly “replaced” by Mobutu. The fall of Lumumba and the fallout of Mobutu is documented well in the novel, as some of the characters such as Anatole was directly involved. Mobutu was notorious as all dictators were in suppressing dissident voices.
The political context pales from what happens in the village. After independence, life in the village remained the same. Market days still happen as is, until the drought hits. When it does, shit truly hits the fan. We can see the hungry march of the ants mirroring the villager’s hunt to purge the bush so that they can feed. On dividing the spoils of the hunt, the villagers are merely re-enacting the battle to split the borderlines of Africa. Who gets what? And who took what by force? It is a beautiful allegory of how the continent was divided by the colonists.
The Poisonwood Bible is written beautifully, somewhat chaotic, but you’d never lose where you are — the voices are distinct enough that you know in a minute who’s talking. Ironically, though Nathan Price is almost a central figure that propels the story, we do not hear his voice directly. He is an image crafted by the voices of his wife and daughters. We get that he is vile, but we can also understand why. This is the beauty of the writing, as novels about memory often are.
