The Poisonwood Bible

This book has been on my "to-read" list ever since college. However, only now did I finally dive into it. I'm glad I waited because I believe it requires a mature and knowledgeable mind. I didn't know much about post-colonial Africa in college- I learned as I taught about Africa to my Freshmen. Through my profession, I've been able to expand my mind and become interested in things that I never explored ten years ago. Thus, The Poisonwood Bible, written by Barbara Kingsolver, is a kind of book that needs to be for the right time and the right mind in order to truly enjoy it's story and, ultimately, lesson.
The novel is about a preacher's family from the south that moves to the Congo in the 1950s for a religious mission. Unfortunately, the mission is only the father's and the rest of the family must endure the father's almost insanely fervent religious goals. The story is told mostly through the voices of the preacher's four daughters as the characters are initially introduced as children and the reader grows with them into adulthood. This novel is extremely complicated as demonstrated by the immense amount of research completed by the author. The author researched post colonial history of the Congo, continuously read the King James Bible, documented sounds/images/smells of Western Africa by traveling constantly and meeting locals, and Kingsolver even studied the language of females in the 1950s in order to give the daughters' voices authenticity. The creation of this novel was no small feat: the author took three years to accomplish a story that had been in her heart for over thirty.

I believe the success of this book comes from Kingsolvers passion about Africa. In an interview, she says a beautiful quote about the need to expose America's role in Cold War politics and how it affected nations around the world and even more remote villages that have nothing in common with Western politics.

"I live in a country that has done awful things, all over the world, in my name. You can't miss that. I didn't make those decisions, but I have benefited from them materially. I live in a society that grew prosperous from exploiting others. England has a strong tradition of postcolonial literature but here in the U.S., we can hardly even say the word "postcolonial." We like to think we're the good guys. So we persist in our denial, and live with a legacy of exploitation and racial arrogance that continues to tear people apart, in a million large and small ways. As long as I have been a writer I've wanted to address this, to try to find a way to own our terrible history honestly and construct some kind of redemption."

Kingsolver's analysis of US politics then is also a reflection of now. Her novel is only fiction, but a historical fiction also sheds a lot of light on good and bad decisions that affect us today.