CBR15 BINGO: Politics, because it addresses U.S. and Belgian involvement in the Congo
In 1959, evangelical Baptist preacher Nathan Price takes the word of God to the Belgian Congo, bringing his wife and four daughters with him. Though the mission is supposed to last one year, the family’s stay is extended through the sheer stubbornness and bad judgment of their patriarch and, while the novel spans 30+ years, the majority of it takes place in the few years that Price is actively proselytizing in a small village.
The story is told through the eyes of the four daughters. Rachel, 15 years old when they arrive in Africa, is a typical teenager who is more concerned with aesthetics and missing her birthday than her father’s mission or the suffering of the people around her. Leah and Adah are twins who share keen intelligence but who, physically, couldn’t be more different, Adah being born with hemiplegia that caused lameness on the left side of her body. Leah is devoted to her father and craves his approval above anything else. Adah, the most intellectual of the family, deals with her condition by holding herself apart from everyone, remaining silent and observing. Ruth May, the baby of the family at just five years old, is warm and adventurous, the first to make friends with the villagers. At the beginning of most of the seven books of the novel, we also hear from Orleanna Price, wife of Nathan and mother of the four girls. Initially we don’t know much about Orleanna, but she reveals a little more of herself with each of these introductions.
The first book of the novel strikes me as a missionary version of Dog Day Afternoon, where the hapless preacher can’t seem to get anything right. He ignores the villagers’ advice about how to plant seeds, causing his garden to be destroyed in heavy rains. He mispronounces local words that give new, humorous meanings to his sermons. When he does learn about planting and successfully grows something, he understands belatedly there are no local pollinators for his North America-based crops. Worst of all, he spends months trying to convince villagers to get in the river so he can baptize them to finally discover that the reason people won’t go in the river is, for one thing, it’s filled with crocodiles. At this point, you’d almost feel sorry for Nathan Price, if it weren’t for his cold disinterest and abuse toward his family and his unbending certainty that these villagers need to worship his God to be saved. The latter is an opinion he continues to hold to the bitter end.
This novel successfully evokes the growing disillusionment of the family against a backdrop of Belgian and U.S. interference in the Congo. At one point, when Price has to take Ruth May to Stanleyville to get a broken arm set, he gets into a debate with the Belgian doctor about the West’s place in the Congo. “The Belgians and American business brought civilization to the Congo! American aid will be the Congo’s salvation. You’ll see!” Price declares. While his certainty in Christianity and America is never shaken, the same can’t be said for his family.
Even Leah, the child who most adores her father, starts to question her values after spending some time with the Congolese people. And when things become politically unstable, and Price doubles down on sticking with his mission, she slips out of the grasp of his influence. “For the first time in my life I doubted his judgment. He’d made us stay here, when everybody . . . was saying white missionaries ought to go home. For us to be here now, each day, was Father’s decision and his alone. Yet he wasn’t providing for us, but only lashing out at us more and more. He wasn’t able to protect Mother and Ruth May from getting sick. If it’s all up to him to decide our fate, shouldn’t protection be part of the bargain?”
Adah, we learn, had abandoned blind faith even before coming to the Congo. She tells the story of how asking questions led to punishment: “According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north George, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. . . .Would our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? . . . Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God.”
The novel has been criticized for its negative portrayal of Christians in the form of Nathan Price, a claim that I find illogical. For one thing, there is a sympathetic missionary in the novel in the form of Brother Fowles, but the fact that he swears is probably another sticking point for those same critics. For another thing, we do get some insight into Price’s character through Orelanna’s revelation of his past. It doesn’t excuse him, but it takes him from a two-dimensional villain to a more complicated character. Finally, if people think that every Christian is a good person, then I just don’t even know where to begin to argue with that.
While the story of the Price family is engaging, Barbara Kingsolver was reportedly drawn primarily to the subject of imperialism and the alleged CIA-involvement in the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The hypocrisy of the Western world when dealing with African nations is slammed home in Orleanna’s observations: “In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself in a carefully chosen bush, and went out to seek the faces of his nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words–dangerous to the safety of the world!–from a roomful of white men who held in their mannered hands the disposition of armies and atom bombs, the power to extinguish every life on earth.”
This book isn’t subtle in its proclamations or symbolism, and that’s okay. The characters speak directly from their hearts (except maybe Rachel who, disappointingly, never grows out of her selfish teenage years and becomes downright hatable as a middle-aged woman). I enjoyed this novel immensely and, at 500+ pages, it moves at a brisk clip. My knowledge of African politics is sorely limited, and The Poisonwood Bible inspired me to want to change that.
