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Literature as narrative ethics: ethics, religion, and scripture in Barbara Kingsolver's The poisonwood bible

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Literature as narrative ethics: ethics, religion, and scripture in Barbara Kingsolver's The poisonwood bible

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Content LITERATURE AS NARRATIVE ETHICS: ETHICS, RELIGION, AND SCRIPTURE IN BARBARA KINGSOLVER’S THE POISONWOOD BIBLE by Erika Silver Hillinger A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (RELIGION AND SOCIAL ETHICS) May 2007 Copyright 2007 Erika Silver Hillinger ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Joan and A.B. Silver, who have been there for me every step of this incredibly long journey. Your love and support have been priceless, and there are no words to sufficiently thank you for everything you have done for me. I love you. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My primary thanks go to Professor John P. Crossley, without whom this journey would have been impossible. His support, encouragement, guidance, and wisdom are primarily responsible for the completion of this dissertation. I sincerely hope his retirement brings all the joy and relaxation he truly deserves. I would like to thank my parents, who have supported me in every decision I made over the past 20 years, and who said, every single time I took a leave of absence (and every time I returned), that they are proud of me no matter what. I would like to thank my children, Shea and Shira, who have patiently watched their mother sitting at her computer for far too many years. Their support and pride have made this all worthwhile. Shira, let’s go get ice cream. Thank you to the other members of my guidance committee: Gloria Orenstein, William May, Donald Miller, and Rabbi David Ellenson. Particular thanks to Gloria and Don for their helpful comments and insights on my dissertation. Thank you to the University of Southern California’s School of Religion. The financial and emotional support that it has extended over the years is incalculable. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had an opportunity to know and work with the stellar individuals in this department. I would like to extend a particular thank you to Henry Clark who helped me through my coursework years. Thank you to my mother-in-law, Arline Hillinger, who has supported me in every way possible, and to David, who was always willing to be with the children. iv Special thanks go to Lisa M. Lane, Mary Lou Hunter, Sarah Cabral, Liana Koeppel, Connie Grantham, and all the other wonderful women in my life who have given me laughter, love, and encouragement over the years. Without them, this journey would have been very tedious indeed. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract viii Doth Then The World Go Thus? 1 Introduction 2 The Poisonwood Bible 9 Chapter One Theories and Methods 15 Ethics and Literary Theory 16 Adam Newton 17 Richard Rorty 20 Wayne Booth 23 Normative and Descriptive Hermeneutics 26 Normative Hermeneutics 28 Descriptive Hermeneutics 30 Synthesizing the Hermeneutic Approaches 31 Common Morality 38 Feminist Theory 41 William James and Religious Experience 45 Conclusion 51 Chapter Two Book One: Genesis 53 Laying the Foundation 53 Genesis: Part I 58 Orleanna Price 58 The Things We Carried: Kilanga 1959 62 Leah Price 62 Ruth May Price 66 Rachel Price 67 Adah Price 76 Nathan’s Garden 79 Genesis: Part II 86 Easter in July 86 Ruth May and Tolerance 93 Adah’s Use of Language and The Verse 96 Leah, Methuselah, and the Cake Mix 105 vi Adah, bangäla and the Apocrypha 108 Leah’s Sense of Justice 113 Chapter Three Book Two: The Revelation 119 Orleanna: Sanderling Island 119 The Things We Learned: Kilanga, June 30, 1960 126 Leah and the Social Construction of Belief 126 Anatole Comes to Dinner: Religious Subjectivity 132 Adah Is Eaten By a Lion 140 The Tower of Babel 144 Waiting for a Child to Die 147 Patrice Lumumba 153 Hope Is the Thing with Feathers 155 Chapter Four Book Three: The Judges 157 Orleanna Price, Sanderling Island, Georgia 157 The Things We Didn’t Know: Kilanga, September 1960 169 Tata Chobé 169 Church for the Lost Cause 172 God Does Not Suffer the Coward 175 Awakenings 177 Brother Fowles 180 Ruth May’s Premonitions 198 The Gospel of The Poisonwood Bible 198 The Ant Invasion 200 What We Learned 202 Chapter Five Book Four: Bel and the Serpent 207 Orleanna Price: Sanderling Island 207 What We Lost: Kilanga, January 17, 1961 209 The Vote 209 The Hunt 218 Bel and the Serpent 222 The Muntu of Ruth May 225 Chapter Six The Final Books 234 Book Five: Exodus 235 Orleanna Price: Sanderling Island, Georgia 235 What We Carried Out 239 Leah Price: Bulunga, Late Rainy Season 1961 239 Rachel Price Axelroot: Johannesburg, South Africa, 1962 241 Adah Price: Emory University, Atlanta 1962 242 Leah Price: Mission Notre Dame de Douleur, 1964 244 Leah Price Ngemba: Bikoki Station, January 17, 1965 247 vii Adah Price, Emory Hospital, Atlanta, Christmas 1968 249 Rachel Price, The Equatorial, 1984 251 Book Six: Song of the Three Children 260 Rachel Price: The Equatorial 260 Leah Price, Angola 263 Adah Price, Atlanta 267 Book 7: The Eyes In The Trees 272 Conclusion 278 Bibliography 287 viii ABSTRACT Utilizing a hermeneutical approach, this dissertation analyzes Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible as an example of how popular literature can function as a form of modern moral theory. Ethical reflection is no less valid because it is couched in fiction, and bringing moral understanding or awareness to a reader, whether or not he can actively engage in the discussion, is the crucial element in understanding the novel’s influence as moral discourse. Within the reciprocal relationship among author, novel, and reader is an underlying understanding that the novel as narrative ethics reflects not only a judgment of what is, but what ought to be. The perceptions and opinions we bring to the novel, our hermeneutic of interpretation, influence how we ultimately treat any theological epiphany the novel may inspire, but just as important, the novel’s potential to produce such effects gives us warrant to classify the work as narrative theology. This dissertation demonstrates how Kingsolver has integrated her moral, political and theological views into The Poisonwood Bible, and how they are culturally, religiously, and morally relevant. The dissertation opens with an argument for literature as narrative ethics. Chapter One lays out the current shape of narrative ethics today, as is germane to this dissertation, and the theories and methods of relevant ethicists, theologians, sociologists, and feminists. Chapters Two through Six formally explicate The Poisonwood Bible as narrative theology. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of The Poisonwood Bible’s religious, ethical, and social relevance and its influence on our relationship to the Bible, religion, and literature. 1 DOTH THEN THE WORLD GO THUS? Doth then the world go thus, doth all thus move? Is this the justice which on earth we find? Is this that firm decree which all doth bind? Are these your influences, Powers above? Those souls, which vice's moody mists most blind, Blind Fortune, blindly, most their friend doth prove; And they who thee, poor idol Virtue! love, Ply like a feather tossed by storm and wind. Ah! if a Providence doth sway this all, Why should best minds groan under most distress? Or why should pride humility make thrall, And injuries the innocent oppress? Heavens! hinder, stop this fate; or grant a time When good may have, as well as bad, their prime! William M. Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) 2 INTRODUCTION Utilizing a hermeneutical approach incorporating Adam Newton, Richard Rorty, William James, and others, this dissertation analyzes Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible as an example of how popular literature can function as a form of modern moral theory. The most profound difference between reading a novel for its ethical value and perceiving a novel as ethics is the literature’s hermeneutic engagement with the reader. Ethical reflection is no less valid because it is couched in fiction, and bringing moral understanding or awareness to a reader, whether or not she can actively engage in the discussion, is the crucial element in understanding the novel’s influence as moral discourse. The fiction tells its story and, on a certain level, the story becomes part of our reality; by doing so, it in turn affects the narrative of our own lives. Within the reciprocal relationship among author, novel, and reader is an underlying understanding that the novel as narrative ethics reflects not only a judgment of what is, but what ought to be. The perceptions and opinions we bring to the novel, our hermeneutic of interpretation, influence how we ultimately treat any theological epiphany the novel may inspire, but just as important, the novel’s potential to produce such effects gives us warrant to classify the work as narrative theological ethics. Much has been written about ethics and the novel, philosophy and the novel, narrative ethics, and so on. I will incorporate many of these theories in the course of this dissertation, but I am primarily concerned with the way Barbara Kingsolver uses religion within The Poisonwood Bible to create a work of literature that can indeed 3 be considered ethics. She has quite a body of work to her credit, all of which deals with ethics and moral discourse in a variety of contexts, but I am specifically interested in her use of religion and the Bible within the context of literature, and it is that use which I shall primarily be explicating. Because novels are readily accessible and part of the public arena, there is an inherent ability within the genre to cut across social and intellectual strata within our culture. The ability for literature to be available in such a broad area also allows it to provide a public forum for moral theory. “The novel,” writes Elizabeth Say, “is effective as a theological construct…because of the public character of the novel and the way in which it is able to take moral and theological claims out of the rarefied atmosphere of the academy and into the realm of public debate” (Say 116). Its inherent accessibility is what makes it so valuable as a tool of moral discussion. Novels are particularly effective in getting across a message or political point when hidden inside stories that do not directly touch our lives, but with which we can empathize. In terms of moral philosophizing, it may not seem the best way to approach ethics by couching it in a way that is removed from the reader, but ultimately the reader is affected by being empathetically caught up in the story. This then creates the hook necessary for the first steps in creating an ethical dialogue between author and reader, reader and the public arena. In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha Nussbaum explains that literature provides a way of allowing us to confront topics which may be too difficult when faced head on: 4 Literary works that promote identification and emotional reaction cut through those self-protective stratagems, requiring us to see and to respond to many things that may be difficult to confront—and they make this process palatable by giving us pleasure in the very act of confrontation. (Nussbaum, 6) By making ethical discussion more palatable and more available, this moral discourse is now provided in a place where before it was lacking. It is, in part, due to this way of confronting our notions of reality that literature is capable of being ethics. Ethicist Adam Newton asserts that literature can “announce both a moral theory and moral inquiry (into a reciprocity between life and fiction), and in doing so articulate [through its meaning] the thrust and scope of what [Newton has named] narrative ethics” (Newton, 8). It is the interplay between what we recognize as Us and what we term Other that allows us to read even the most morally difficult literature. Nussbaum writes, good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science writing frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles. It inspires distrust of conventional pieties and exacts a frequently painful confrontation with one's own thoughts and intentions. One may be told many things about people in one's own society and yet keep that knowledge at a distance. (Nussbaum, 6) We recognize on one level that this is a fictional story about someone else, but on a deeper level there is an understanding (unconscious though it may be) that although this story is about someone/something/somewhere else, it could just as 5 easily be about me. 1 This empathy—this engagement with the literature— encourages moral inquiry while simultaneously articulating moral theory. Ethical literature—narrative ethics—is concurrently morally objective and morally subjective, and it is dependent upon the skill of the author to keep the second from overwhelming the first. Paul Ricoeur also addresses this phenomenon of placing ourselves within the text: The moment of understanding responds dialectically to being in a situation, as the projection of our “ownmost” possibilities in those situations where we find ourselves. I want to take [Heidegger’s] idea of the “projection of our ownmost possibilities” from his analysis and apply it to the theory of the text. In effect, what is to be interpreted in a text is a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit and wherein I might project my ownmost possibilities. This is what I call the world of the text, the world probably belonging to this unique text. (Ricoeur, 43) While we inhabit the world of the text, the possibilities for our understanding that world are potentially infinite. They are infinite in the ways in which we can come to understand not only the world projected by the author but also in the ways we might approach the text time after time in our reading. The only limitations to understanding this world are the limits that we as the reader bring to the reading of the text, both those understandings which are presupposed, but also those we gain by reading the novel and then bring transformed to the reading again and again. Given 1 This is what makes Shakespeare so timeless. While we don’t want to think that we could be Iago, we certainly understand the feelings he invokes in Othello. 6 Newton’s mutually binding (although acknowledged theoretical) relationship, these perceptions and opinions we already bring to the novel, our hermeneutic of interpretation 2 , influence how we ultimately treat any possible theological epiphany that may be inspired by the novel. The very fact that such thought is resultant from the literature ultimately allows us to classify the work as narrative theology. Many scholars have made an attempt to find a place for ethics in narrative. 3 I am asserting that it is not whether the literature provides a construct which allows an expression of ethical choices, but how the literature is inherently imbued with particular moral theories and/or philosophies and how these are then imparted to the reading public that make the literature narrative ethics. Not ethics in literature, but as Newton terms it, literature as ethics (Newton, 11). I as an ethicist may read a novel a particular way — in an ethically critical way — that has no bearing on the message being imparted to the reader. For me, the question is not whether there is or is not an ethics of fiction, but whether moral discourse is being brought to the table through the fiction and the validity/importance of such a discourse. Bringing a moral understanding or awareness to a reader, whether or not she can consciously engage in the discussion, is the important factor, and I believe that one can develop a philosophy of morality based upon reading fiction. Profoundly important books such 2 Or of suspicion, depending upon the context with which we approach the literature. 3 See for example Ricoeur, Booth, et al. 7 as To Kill a Mockingbird, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Huckleberry Finn, and The Handmaid’s Tale, just to name a few, have all influenced the way Americans think about ethical issues—some books even rocking the foundation of how we perceive the world. I also believe that it is possible to be so fully engaged in a literary work that it becomes its own philosophical treatise and provides a world- view just as valid as those of philosophers whom we label as such, particularly when literature is so much farther reaching than most philosophical treatises. 4 The fiction tells its story and, on a certain level, the story becomes part of our reality, part of our way of viewing the world we take part in, making it real, if not in genesis, then in creation: the story may have begun with a fictional premise, but it has developed into a reality that goes on to influence our lives. Whether we choose to believe or understand the origin, the fiction affects our world-view and by doing so affects the narrative of our own lives. If the author is successful, we come to alter our perceptions in a way that reflects the author’s understanding and that brings the hermeneutic she has inspired to any further reading we do, which will in turn unalterably come to influence the work we do in the world. Classical theorists tend to focus on one particular area of study in their scholarship, but the novel, as in life, does not confine itself to one restricted field. We can therefore have communitarianism and liberation theology working side by 4 One may disapprove of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, but how much more far reaching was Atlas Shrugged than an essay on the same subject would have been, and perhaps the categorical imperative would be a household notion if Kant had written a novel. 8 side to function in a possibly more effective way than if separately trying to effect the same goal. As an accessible forum for moral discourse, literature provides constructive methods for integrating a hermeneutical approach: how we approach the literature is intrinsic to the meaning we extract from the literature, and in turn, the meaning we extract necessarily affects our continued interpretation. Ultimately, the hope is that this interpretation can result in an applied ability to effect some change based on the intrinsic moral lesson of the novel. This is not, however, to say that the literature is meant to be some kind of morality tale. I am not talking about pedantic moral messages in the guise of a novel, as valuable as they may be in the context of their genre. What I mean is that a novel can inherently resonate with the reader in a way which reflects the reader’s already present understanding of what is ethical, and perhaps, hopefully, contribute in a way which can enrich this understanding, or conversely, show it to be worthy of further contemplation and, possibly, reassessment. I believe that moral discourse is just that—discourse. In this situation, the discourse is between reader and author, with the text being not a third party or Levinasian Other, but the vehicle by which the author expresses her own ethical prescriptions in a way that most clearly benefits all parties involved. Inclusive of this, however, is the hermeneutic circle which informs both reader and author. The moral discourse of the novel—the ability of the author to express particular ideas and then have a discussion about them with the reader, or specifically, with other characters in the guise of the reader—reflects the novel as narrative ethics. Narrative ethics is literature that has the ability to engage the reader in both normative and 9 metaethical concerns. Discourse concerning both how one should live one’s life and how one should best choose a particular path is part of the hermeneutic of what a reader has already experienced and chosen.  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE  Barbara Kingsolver has proven to be highly controversial as both a novelist and political writer. The Poisonwood Bible was not only an Oprah book, but has become a staple in high school English classes. As such, this novel is an ideal choice for a discussion of a novel’s influence on the reading public and is an excellent model for understanding how fiction provides both an effective vehicle for moral discourse and a valuable illustration of narrative as ethics. 5 At some point, it does not matter whether or not The Poisonwood Bible is good fiction. That, like anything, is up to reader taste. What is clear is that it is very popular fiction, and because it is being studied in classrooms and book clubs, it becomes important fiction. I believe there is an import to its existence and the fact that it is so widely read and studied. 6 5 I have found in the course of my research for this project, that current literature in the area of ethics is almost uniformly ignored. Much is made of the works of James and Dickens, but as intriguing and thought provoking as they might be, I find their influence to be less than overwhelming if only because they are not nearly so widely read these days as they once were. 6 It seems inevitable that at some point I must address the phenomenon of literature, religion, and The Da Vinci Code. Much of course has been written about this pop sensation, and much has been lamented in religious circles about its sacrilegious pages. While it is true that The Da Vinci Code is a novel that includes religion, and is incredibly popular, one could never make an argument that it is either a religious, ethical, or important book. Nor is it even, I would argue, religious fiction. While I initially applauded the book for its bold acknowledgment of much historical Christianity, the council at Nicea being a particular example, the liberties it also takes with Christian tradition, whether historically accurate or not, places it in a category of pop fiction that I would consider completely separate from literature or narrative ethics. 10 This dissertation does not review or critique The Poisonwood Bible; it simply uses it as a vehicle to clarify the phenomenon of literature as modern moral theory, as ethical narrative. As standard assigned reading in university literature classes and a New York Times bestseller, The Poisonwood Bible is becoming part of the culture, and its eloquence has the opportunity to make a far-reaching and indelible impression on the moral psyche of the American public. What makes Kingsolver relevant as a moral theorist is her ability to incorporate her realistic understanding of is alongside her ethical vision of ought. What is both characteristic and unique to Kingsolver is her ability and inclination to cover a variety of social and political issues that all come under the rubric of ethical theory. Kingsolver’s novels and essays cover topics ranging from ethics of care, ethics of justice, liberation theology, feminist theology, ecotheology, communitarianism, and moral relativism. Kingsolver aims through her literature—whether conscious or not—to correct biases inherent to the way we think as Westerners and as humans. 7 That she is a woman aiming to make these corrections (or bring the biases to our attention) inherently helps correct such patriarchal biases while at the same time allowing the reader to see the world through a woman’s eyes. This in itself addresses the historical exclusion of women’s voice and women’s stories—the antecedent to theology, according to Stanley Hauerwas 8 —and contributes to our contemporary canon of 7 See James Sterba, Three Challenges to Ethics. 8 Hauerwas, Stanley, The Peaceable Kingdom. 11 understanding women’s moral outlook. Kingsolver takes on moral theory and shows much of it to be lacking. There is no moral relativism in the world her characters inhabit. Kingsolver provides an opportunity for discussion which is not usually available to the American mainstream for no reason other than it is generally inaccessible. In Kingsolver's novel, moral discourse, political criticism, and ethical narrative are all interwoven. The Poisonwood Bible exemplifies Wayne Booth’s pronouncement that “serious ethical criticism cannot be divorced . . . from political criticism” (Booth, 12). The question of “what makes a Good Christian” is intertwined with “what makes a Good American.” She forces confrontation with whether we have the right to impose our religious beliefs on a culture which clearly cannot fathom them, and whether the American government has the right to order the assassination of another country’s leader. Through her characters, she challenges the reader to determine whether there is culpability or justification in either circumstance. And these valid ethical questions are no less relevant when asked within the pages of this novel than when asked by Richard Rorty, and perhaps they are even more so because they will be heard by a vastly greater number of people. 9 Kingsolver’s purpose in The Poisonwood Bible is two-fold. On a political/ethical level, she wants to present a universality of tolerance and understanding, both of religion and people. On a religious level, she wants to 9 Or, as Booth terms it, more people are listening. 12 demonstrate the subjective nature of Christianity and the Bible. The Poisonwood Bible develops a moral theology which serves to explore “common morality,” or at the very least, which brings questions of common morality to the table. It is a novel in which questions of what is Good and Right become even more morally relevant because the novel is not set in our “common” American society. One of the many points Kingsolver makes is that religious understanding is subjective, particularly in terms of Good and Right, righteousness and justice. The idea that there can be a common morality among these groups of people who have such vastly different agendas makes the whole idea seem almost ludicrous. Yet despite the reality of her characters’ lives in the Congo, there remains a subtext within the novel which is dependent upon our ethical engagement of the work; she subtly explores the possibility of a Universal morality similar to what Jeffrey Stout might advocate, that of a globally shared understanding of what constitutes moral truth: If moral diversity occurs within a single framework globally shared, and the differences in how people think and talk about moral matters can be explained in terms of deeper similarities, then the confidence might be restored in moral truth, in justified moral belief, and in the possibility of cross-cultural moral judgment. (Stout, Outka and Reader, 215) Kingsolver uses The Poisonwood Bible to create a framework, which while appearing different from the framework in which we find ourselves living (it taking place in Africa), actually illustrates that there are deep similarities in our disparate frameworks and that both the moral diversity within her characters and the universal 13 similarities between her main characters and her readers, justify her apparent belief that there can in fact be cross-cultural moral judgment. What separates The Poisonwood Bible from other literature and is in fact the primary reason that I chose this novel specifically as representative of narrative ethics, is the use of the Bible and religion within the novel. Kingsolver employs a hermeneutics of suspicion within The Poisonwood Bible. She examines biblical texts and incorporates them in a way that will be most useful to her vision of morality, tolerance, and even liberation theology. It is a particularistic theology of liberation, however. One which argues not for the liberation of a particular people, but for the liberation from biases against those who are different—whether in thought, body, or skin color. She argues for a universality of tolerance within which the Bible can be used as a tool of common understanding, although it frequently is not. This dissertation demonstrates how Kingsolver has integrated her moral, political and theological views into The Poisonwood Bible, and how they are culturally, religiously, and morally relevant. Chapter One lays out the current shape of narrative ethics today, as is relevant to this work, and the theories and methods of relevant ethicists, theologians, sociologists, and feminists. Although this is not a feminist critique of The Poisonwood Bible, implicit in the explication is a feminist methodology, because I believe that as a woman ethicist, I bring an inherent feminist perspective to any work that I do. Chapters Two through Six formally explicate The Poisonwood Bible as narrative theology, and the dissertation concludes with a 14 discussion of The Poisonwood Bible’s religious, ethical, and social relevance and its influence on our relationship to the Bible, religion, and literature. 15 CHAPTER ONE THEORIES AND METHODS Although I will primarily be discussing the use of the Bible as a literary device within The Poisonwood Bible, it is necessary to first lay the foundations for many of the other claims I make. This dissertation does not specifically discuss the merits or deficits of current literary and ethical theorists, but rather incorporates many of them into an overview of my own understanding of the value of ethical theory within the field of literary criticism. This understanding in turn goes on to inform my interpretation of what Kingsolver does within the context of The Poisonwood Bible. My own interpretation of moral discourse and ethical interpretation has been informed by a number of philosophers, sociologists, and ethicists, and their influence will be heavily felt in the following chapters. For most of them, I have taken a specific idea that they have written on and elaborated upon it for the purposes of this dissertation. Ethics and literary theory, intentionalist hermeneutics, religious subjectivity, common morality, and feminist theory will all be explored below. In no sense do I undertake the task of laying out what may be a more representative examination of any philosopher, ethicist, or theologian in any field other than in that area which I am specifically discussing. 16  ETHICS AND LITERARY THEORY  The field of ethics and literature has grown tremendously in the past 15 years, with particular emphases on various hermeneutic approaches to the novel and the intrinsic value of the novel in the fields of both philosophy and literature. I have found much value in reading, specifically, the works of Adam Newton, Richard Rorty, and Wayne Booth, all of whom argue the value of literature as a means of ethical understanding, although the differences among them range from slight to vast. Much of the current discussion revolving around the theory and ethics of literary study includes basic questions as to how we consider the literary text—do we think in terms of the text alone and the concerns of its characters, or are we influenced by the lives of the characters in such a way as to say that the text has an influence on our own concerns? In their introduction to Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack add that ethical criticism can also focus “upon the life of the author and how his or her own ethical or moral commitments have shaped the construction, production, and performance of narrative” (Davis and Womack, x). I feel that ethical literary criticism does all these things, and there is a value in reading the literature precisely for the multi-dimensional approaches it can add to our way of understanding the world we are a part of and that the literature in turn reflects. 17 Adam Newton Adam Zachary Newton most closely reflects my own feelings regarding the intimately connected nature of ethics and literature. Newton asserts that in most novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “narrators school their readers in the correct evaluation and response to character and moral situation” (Newton, 9). In these novels, ethics operates in interpolated fashion, bolstering the authoritarian character and weight of the novel with deontic and legislative weight. It exercises this influence both autonomously and hand in hand with epistemological, sociological and political frameworks which the novel inculcated from its outset. (Newton, 9) From this perspective, Newton believes, one “speaks of ethics as a ‘defining property of the novel,’” that narrative form “functions as a vehicle for substantive ethical ‘content.’” Entering into this “closed system of moral exemplification” is the “self-adequating ethos of the critic who, with Arnoldian flair and Aristotelian probity, matches form to content, and content to conduct.” Overall, Newton claims, such discourse “unproblematically translates literary discourse into moral recourse” (Newton, 9). Newton goes on to explain that beginning in 1957 with Northrop Frye, and including such disparate voices as J. Hillis Miller and Wayne Booth, ethical criticism contained the “distinctive quality of ethical/critical judgment, of its rightness as textual commentary,” and although Hillis Miller and Booth are poles apart, both can be categorized along with Frye as being invested in the “distinctive 18 quality of ethical/critical judgment, of its rightness as textual commentary” (Newton, 10). Such a categorical approach wrenches apart the integrative approach that Newton presents, primarily because it separates itself into categories of “‘the ethics of reading’/ ‘the ethics of fiction’/ ‘the ethics of criticism’” (Newton, 10). In contrast to this approach, Newton proposes that “a narrative ethics implies simply narrative as ethics: the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process.” The difference between the two is the difference “between a deontology and a phenomenology—between a reading which attempts to evaluate or even solve a text’s problems and one which engages them in their concrete, formal, narrative particularity” (Newton, 11). Newton, drawing heavily on the traditions of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanley Cavell, considers his ethics “the radicality and uniqueness of the moral situation itself, a binding claim exercised upon the self by a concrete and singular other whose moral appeal precedes both decision and understanding” (Newton, 12). When applying this to literature, he claims that certain kinds of textuality parallel . . . [Levinas’ face to face] ethical encounter in several obvious ways. Cutting athwart the mediatory role of reason, narrative situations create an immediacy and force, framing relations of provocation, call, and response that bind narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and text. (Newton, 13) Newton’s description of reciprocal binding seems to describe accurately this almost ineffable quality of the relationship between reader and text. While I will not 19 explicate my literature in the manner that Newton does, which I will explain momentarily, I do agree that his way of exposing the literature is important for understanding the relationship between reader and text. Reciprocal binding is what gives literature its weight and its power. Through reciprocal claims we infuse author intent with whatever “truth” we bring to the work through our experiences. Although I value and incorporate into my own thinking Newton’s way of approaching literature as ethics, I lean toward a slightly different approach. I wish to take Newton’s understanding of reciprocity and apply it to the idea that the novel as narrative ethics reflects the normative relationship, not only of what is (in all the aspects that such a description entails), but of what ought to be. Whether this ought occurs through the actual events in a novel, or through our perspective regarding the characters and their behavior, there remains this mutual relationship between reader and narrative—whether explicit or implied—which upon reflection dictates both what should (or ought to) be done and how we or the characters should, in turn, behave. 10 I find this particularly important when reading Kingsolver because I believe that her writing presupposes this underlying relationship. As we will see in the chapters below, there is an implicit understanding that we as the reader already have a relationship not only with her text, but with the biblical texts she uses to further our understanding of her inherent message. 10 Whether or not this occurs within the context of the novel or within our own lives as having been influenced as such remains outside the definitional relevance of the fact that the work is indeed ethics. 20 Richard Rorty In the introduction to his book, Contingency, irony, and solidarity (sic), Richard Rorty juxtaposes authors such as Kierkegaard, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov, with Marx, Dewey, Habermas and Rawls. The first group, he claims, are “illustrations of what private perfection—a self-created, autonomous, human life— can be like” (Rorty, xiv). The second group, on the other hand, he describes as “fellow citizens rather than exemplars. They are engaged in a shared, social effort— the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel” (Ibid). He then argues what I consider to be a very important point: We shall only think of these two kinds of writers as opposed if we think that a more comprehensive philosophical outlook would let us hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision. There is no way in which philosophy, or any other theoretical discipline will ever let us do that. . . . There are practical measures to be taken to accomplish this practical goal. But there is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. (Rorty, xiv) Rorty goes on to explain that both kinds of writers have their own vocabulary and their own value: If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools—as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. (Rorty, xiv) 21 Although he is considered controversial, especially when he makes statements such as these, what I particularly like about Rorty is his acknowledgement that life does not fit into neat little boxes and that theory, particularly philosophic theory, doesn’t either. Clearly, this is what identifies him as a pragmatist, and it is what draws me to him. Rorty’s idea that literature can reflect theory and reality without needing to choose one over the other, is evident throughout Kingsolver’s work. Rorty concludes his introduction by stating that one of the aims in his book is to suggest a liberal utopia: In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection, but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel it as we would, or “There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?” This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and especially, the novel. (Rorty, xvi) Fiction details the lives and suffering of people about whom we would otherwise never know, and until we feel a solidarity with the other, all the theorizing 22 about what constitutes Good, Right and/or Just behavior will never be able to serve as anything more than theory, and its value to us in our everyday lives will be limited. Rorty sees that “the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress,” and in his vision of utopia, “this replacement would receive a kind of general recognition which it still lacks. That recognition would be part of a general turn against theory and toward narrative” (xvi). The culture Rorty idealizes will recognize literature for its ability to connect the present to the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other. More important, it would regard the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process—an endless, proliferating realization of Freedom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth. (Rorty, xvi) The inherent value of such a movement seems obvious. If we recognize, as Rorty wishes us to, that narrative reflects not only theory but also the way things are, then we come to understand literature in an entirely different and far more valuable way. While I am greatly influenced by Rorty’s own theory, and I think that much of it is spot-on (my affinity with pragmatism will become quite evident), the weakness in Rorty’s utopian vision is that it in itself becomes a kind of theory to be understood and applied to the narrative rather than demonstrating the intrinsic value of how the literature is currently a means toward his utopian end. I have taken only a small piece of Rorty’s rather vast body of work to illuminate my own predilections toward the value of narrative—the novel in particular—but I think it succinctly demonstrates 23 Rorty’s own views regarding the value of literature, and it will be sufficient to demonstrate Kingsolver’s application of Rortian values. Wayne Booth Like Rorty, Wayne Booth also believes that there is great power in how narrative reflects and reinvents our lives: Even the life we think of as primary experience—that is, events like birth, copulation, death, plowing and planting, getting and spending—is rarely experienced without some sort of mediation in narrative; one of the chief arguments for an ethical criticism of narrative is that narratives make and remake what in realist views are considered more primary experiences—and thus make and remake ourselves. (Booth, 14) When Booth wrote The Company We Keep in 1988, his goal was to “restore the full intellectual legitimacy of our common-sense inclination to talk about stories in ethical terms, treating the characters in them and their makers as more like people than labyrinths, enigmas, or textual puzzles to be deciphered” (Booth, x). He also hoped to “‘relocate’ ethical criticism, turning it from flat judgment for or against supposedly stable works to fluid conversation about the qualities of the company we keep—and the company we ourselves provide” (Booth, ix-x). At the time he made such claims, ethical criticism of literature was indeed a much “flatter” field of inquiry, but his careful differentiation between the “ethics of reading” (à la Hillis Miller), and the ethical power of having read a story and the relationship between 24 that reading and the reader, is what set Booth’s book apart. Booth’s own understanding of an ethics of reading states that, for any individual reader, the only story that will have ethical power is the one that is heard or read as it is heard or read—and that may have little connection either with the author’s original intention or with the inherent powers of the story-as-told. The ethics of reading that results when we take this fact of life seriously will itself have a double edge: the ethical reader will behave responsibly toward the text and its author, but that reader will also take responsibility for the ethical quality of his or her “reading,” once that new “text” is made public. If ethical criticism is to be worth pursuing, it will itself carry powerful ethical force and thus be subject to ethical criteria. (Booth, 10) In his 2001 essay, “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple,” Booth challenges those critics “who think ethical judgments have nothing to do with genuine ‘literary’ or ‘aesthetic’ criticism, and those who think that ethical judgments about stories can never be anything more than subjective opinion.” 11 Booth adamantly insists, and I fundamentally agree with him, that “ethical criticism is relevant to all literature, no matter how broadly or narrowly we define that controversial term; and such criticism, when done responsibly, can be a genuine form of rational inquiry” (Davis and Womack, Booth, 16). In another statement reminiscent of Rorty, Booth writes, Claims about the transformative ethical power of all art are perhaps least questionable when we turn from “all art” to literary art, art that, because its very nature entails language loaded with ethical judgments, implants views 11 Wayne C. Booth, “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple,” in Mapping the Ethical Turn, Davis and Womack, 16. 25 about how to live or not to live. When the word “literature” is expanded to include all stories that we may listen to—not just novels, plays, and poems, but also operas, memoirs, gossip, soap operas, TV and movie dramas fictional and “real,” stories heard in childhood—the power of narrative to change our lives for good or ill, becomes undeniable. (Davis and Womack, Booth, 17-18) Using Stephen King as his example, Booth goes on to discuss the effect that literature, no matter how badly written, can have on its reader. What, he asks, might Stephen King’s three hundred million copies, “have taught the world’s mostly unsophisticated readers: about what actions are portrayed as really contemptible or admirable; . . . about what narrative devices are in effect ethical corruptions” (Davis and Womack, Booth, 18)? Booth’s point is that these things matter, literature matters, and we as critics should always keep ethical criticism as a part of our understanding of the literature and its effect on the reader. Popular literature is influential, and Booth believes that both author and critic must maintain high standards because we are, “at least partially constructed, in our most fundamental moral character, by the stories we have heard, or read, or viewed, or acted out in amateur theatricals: the stories we have really listened to” (Davis and Womack, Booth, 19). Although the stories are made up of characters, these characters exhibit an ethos that could be thought of as a collection of virtues and vices, presented as admirable or contemptible. Though many authors try to disguise this fact by dealing overtly with character qualities not ordinarily thought of in moral terms—such virtues as uncompromising truth or honest probing of postmodern mysteries—I can think of no published story that does not exhibit its author’s implied judgments about how to live and what to believe about how to live. (Davis and Womack, Booth, 19) 26 Booth reminds us that the most successful moral teachers have chosen to tell stories—reinforcing my own claim that there is a power in storytelling which goes far beyond the mere instruction of values or philosophizing. Stories are told because they teach in a particularly effective fashion. Moral statements, ethical prescriptions, religious beliefs and historical enlightenment are all better illuminated through literature.  NORMATIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE HERMENEUTICS  Because it is not the intent of this dissertation to develop a unified field theory in the area of literary hermeneutics, I feel at liberty to approach the debate between normative and descriptive hermeneutics in a way that best serves my purpose of showing how interpretive hermeneutics can be applied to contemporary literature in a way specific to my current goal: demonstrating how literature can be utilized in moral discourse. 12 Much of my present understanding regarding this debate comes from two sources: William Irwin’s Intentionalist Interpretation, and Literature and the Question of Philosophy, edited by Anthony Cascardi. 12 I must at this point make a disclaimer that while I am aware of the multitude of approaches to hermeneutic interpretation, ranging from Aristotle to Levinas, I cannot possibly address all, or even most, here, so I am focusing on basic descriptions of each school. 27 The two schools of thought are best shown in the debates between E.D. Hirsh, on the normative side, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on the descriptive. 13 Irwin explains the conflict: “A normative approach is one concerned with establishing the criteria or guidelines interpreters should follow in seeing the meaning of a text. A descriptive approach, by contrast, is one concerned with depicting the kind of understanding that does take place in interpretation. This phenomenon of interpretive understanding is frequently depicted as beyond our complete control” (Irwin, 2). Therefore, in a normative hermeneutic, what the reader should understand from reading the text is what the author intends us to understand, while a descriptive hermeneutic is only concerned with the nature of how we understand. A normative approach to a poem or story would be to “seek the poet’s intention in composing his work, taking that intention to be the key to the poem’s meaning” (Irwin, 3). We desire to know the meaning and its underlying intent. A descriptive approach “explores the ontology of the phenomenon of understanding” and is concerned with “how interpretive understanding occurs and what its ontological basis is” (Irwin, 3). In this debate between normative and descriptive hermeneutics, as is to be expected, I lean toward the side of normative theory, but as in all things theoretic, there is no black and white, and there must be the possibility of harmony between the two schools. 13 For further reading see E.D. Hirsch, Jr. The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) and Jean Grodin, “Hermeneutics and Relativism,” in Kathleen Wright ed., Festivals of Interpretation: Essays in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Work (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). 28 Normative Hermeneutics When asking the normative question, “how shall we secure the meaning of the text,” the traditional rival answers are “1) discovering the author’s intention or 2) letting the text stand on its own” (Irwin, 3). Advocates for the normative approach known as intentionalism include Hirsch and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Intentionalism asserts that by discovering authorial intention, one gains understanding of the text’s meaning. This is accomplished because it is the author’s “intended communication that is the meaning of the text” (Irwin, 3). Denis Dutton describes Hirsch’s point of view this way: For Hirsch, unless we have a standard of interpretive correctness, criticism loses its status as a cognitive discipline. Without a notion of the author’s meaning as a guide — almost a regulative ideal, it would seem — criticism would be unable to decide between competing interpretations of works of literature (or art). The result, for Hirsch, would be chaos: anybody’s interpretation as good as anybody else’s. Hirsch does not deny, of course, that works of art may mean different things to critics or to audiences in different historical epochs. This is in fact how it is that works of art can have different significances to people. But the meaning of a text is always one and the same thing: it is a meaning that the work had for its maker, the artist or writer. (Cascardi, 195) Although Hirsch argues that the author’s intent is the primary criterion by which we should judge the validity of an interpretation, he does accept that “authorial intention must be manifested in a way that is supported by the text itself” (Irwin, 39). 29 Representing an opposing normative point of view is Monroe C. Beardsley, who asserts that the meaning of a text cannot be determined by its author’s intention because meaning changes and this is simply inconsistent with authorial awareness. Beardsley has named his epistemological criterion for textual interpretation, the principle of autonomy, and according to Irwin, Beardsley believes that “literary works are self-sufficient entities whose properties are decisive in checking interpretations and judgments. In other words, once the author has written the text it flies off on wings of its own; its correct interpretation is not tied to its author but to its own constitution” (Irwin, 6). Denis Dutton adds, Before examining some implications of these arguments, I should note why Beardsley wishes to adduce them in the first place. That authors have intentions, and that those intentions are found embodied in texts, is something he does not seriously question. In this respect, his attitude remains unchanged from “The Intentional Fallacy,” where he and Wimsatt wrote that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” In fact, they define “intention” straightforwardly as “design or plan in the author’s mind.” (Cascardi, Dutton, 196) For my own part, I see a more holistic approach, one which can incorporate both sides of the normative intentionalist controversy. While I accept that the text is a freestanding entity once it has been written, I also believe that author intent can— and does—have an impact on what we gain from the meaning of the text. Intent may be a separate entity from the text, particularly when approaching the text as a solitary philosophical/hermeneutical enterprise, but if we are approaching literature as ethics, 30 author intent is ultimately a part of the text’s inherent value as an ethical prescription. From a purely theoretical standpoint, I understand the hermeneutic arguments in favor of a stand-alone text, particularly when approaching the text from a descriptive perspective. I find it difficult to accept, however, from a normative point of view, at least my normative point of view, that should we actually know what Thomas Jefferson intended when he wrote about a wall of separation between church and state, it would not benefit us 200 years later, particularly when using a Jeffersonian stance as doctrinal support of a particular law or desire to create new law. School vouchers, for example, would prove a much less controversial issue, in fact perhaps not an issue at all, if we knew exactly what Jefferson intended, and if we wished to make his intent influential in our arguments. We may then choose to agree or disagree with him, or add that he also intended this, that, or the other meaning, although he did not directly address the particular issue that may be under discussion. We can also say that what we bring to the table when reading Jefferson influences our understanding of it despite what he intended, which leads us to our discussion of descriptive hermeneutics. Descriptive Hermeneutics Descriptive hermeneutics, developed in the philosophic writings of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, is primarily “concerned with a phenomenology of praxis, with describing what occurs in interpretive understanding.” Questions in descriptive hermeneutics run along the lines of “what is 31 the nature of interpretive understanding? What is its ontological structure?” (Irwin 7). In descriptive hermeneutics, “a text’s meaning is comprised of all its actual and potential interpretations, and the discovery of this meaning is an infinite process” (Irwin, 8). A text can never be fully understood. Gadamer believes that the meaning of a text is its history—inclusive of all the effects of the text and all its possible interpretations. He does not go so far as to say that “a text can be interpreted in any way whatsoever,” but his criteria for what exactly that interpretation can be are often vague, leading to disagreement among his followers (Irwin, 11). Overall, there is an understanding that objective truth is an impossibility in textual interpretation, and interpretation must account for all elements within a text. In order to achieve true understanding of a text, there must be a harmony among all the elements: “The failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed” (Gadamer, 291). Synthesizing the Hermeneutic Approaches Although descriptive and normative interpretations are theoretically opposed, on a realistic level, there is a subtle relationship between the two approaches. On a very basic level, stories are stories. The storyteller, whether first or third person, narrates events that are designed to entertain, entrance, disturb, enlighten, edify and/or amuse us. We as the readers then interpret the story as it speaks to us. 32 Inherently, a story can mean whatever we want it to mean. 14 What we bring to the text as readers—experientially, theologically, historically—becomes the hermeneutic of textual interpretation. From my own perspective, whether the author intends a certain meaning is separate from the meaning the text might actually impart to us, but neither can one be completely extricated from the other. To demonstrate with a simple example, consider the story of Fiddler on the Roof. Let us begin with the premise that the original intent of Shalom Aleichem’s stories was to amuse his readers while exemplifying his changing world. Perhaps he also wished to preserve the reality of shtetl life he wrote about so humorously in 1894. By the time the stories of Tevye and His Daughters were developed into a Broadway play in 1964, the world had drastically changed. The events in a changing Russia that had forced Tevye into leaving his small shtetl had also turned Russia into the Soviet Union and destroyed the entire shtetl culture. When I, as a Jewish woman, watch Fiddler on the Roof, the experiences I bring to it and my understanding of it are entirely different from those of my non-Jewish neighbor. 15 Not to say that we both don’t appreciate the message of tolerance inherent in the story, but because of the separate experiences we bring to the story, our hermeneutic of interpretation is different. I, being Jewish, will also see it as a family history while she, being Puerto 14 This is blatantly apparent with biblical exegesis. Were it not for the myriad ways of interpretation and what an interpretation in turn means to/for us there would be no religious conflicts, at least within a particular religion. 15 My paternal grandparents came to the United States from Minsk in 1914 after my great- grandmother was killed in a pogrom. They also happened to be tailors. 33 Rican, will understand the universality of oppression and prejudice. The personal nature of the hermeneutic does not come from the author’s original intent, but neither can it be separated from the story’s ultimate message and how that message goes on to influence others. And perhaps this is exactly what Aleichem intended. A much more complex example of this melding of both schools would be in how we approach the following passages from Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. 16 The scene begins at a college poetry reading with the vile headmistress, Madame Morrible, reciting a Quell that she has written. A Quell, she explains, is a brief poem that is “‘uplifting in nature. It pairs a sequence of thirteen short lines with a concluding apothegm. The reward of the poem is in the contrast between the rhyming argument and concluding remark’” (Maguire, 83). After reading her first Quell, the room of faculty and students becomes restless. She then begins her next Quell: Alas! For impropriety, The guillotine of piety. To remedy society Indulge not to satiety In mirth and shameless gaiety. Choose sobering sobriety. Behave as if the deity Approaches in its mystery, 16 Like The Poisonwood Bible, Wicked is a political allegory with religious and philosophical overtones, but is an entirely different kind of novel. As I will address in my conclusion, many of the assertions I make regarding literature, ethics, and The Poisonwood Bible can be applied to novels such as this. In some ways, Wicked could be a representational novel for the descriptive school, while, as the following chapters will demonstrate, I feel that The Poisonwood Bible is representative of a melding of the two positions. 34 And greet it with sonority. Let your especial history Be built upon sorority Whose Virtues do exemplify, And Social Good thus multiply. Animals should be seen and not heard. Again, there was mumbling, but it was of a different nature now, a meaner key. Doctor Dillamond harrumphed and beat a cloven hoof against the floor, and was heard to say, “Well that’s not poetry, that’s propaganda, and it’s not even good propaganda at that.” (Maguire, 85-86) This poem causes great upset among the listeners, many of whom are faculty Animals—animals with human reasoning and ability—due to the Wizard’s latest decrees limiting Animal freedoms. Doctor Dillamond, a Goat who teaches biology, is a primary character working on proofs to scientifically connect animals to humans. Elphaba, the book’s green protagonist and Animal rights activist, has been diligently helping the good doctor with his research. She soon comes upon an opportunity to challenge Madame Morrible on the meaning of her poetry. “So the phrase that [Dr. Dillamond] objected to— Animals should be seen and not heard—that was ironic?” continued Elphaba, studying her papers and not looking at Madame Morrible. . . . “One could consider it in an ironic mode if one chose,” said Madame Morrible. “How do you choose?” said Elphaba. “How impertinent!” said Madame Morrible. . . . “Well, I don’t mean impertinence. I’m trying to learn. If you—if anyone—thought the statement was true, then it isn’t in conflict with the boring bossy part that preceded it. It’s just an argument and conclusion, and I don’t see the irony.” “You don’t see much, Miss Elphaba,” said Madame Morrible. “You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. 35 . . . “But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond,” said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up. “In the case of true poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may be true. Animals should not be heard,” snapped Madame Morrible. “Do you mean that ironically?” said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face and did not look up again for the rest of the session. (Maguire, 91) There are many aspects to this interchange that relate to our current discussion. The first, and most obvious, is the meaning of the poem. Allowing the poem to stand on its own, without knowing author intent, we read the poem as a dictum to proper behavior. It is, as Elphaba describes it, “bossy.” In this strictest of contexts, without knowing for certain what the concluding line is meant to mean, we can interpret any number of things: a) the dictum “Animals should be seen and not heard,” means precisely that and Madame Morrible agrees with the current proscriptions against Animal movement in the city, b) that proper behavior does indeed multiply Social Virtue and those who do not follow these imperatives will be nothing more than animals, to be seen and not heard, c) the final line is, indeed, meant to be ironic and that piety has nothing to do with animal rights, or perhaps d) that the poet is particularly bad and the final line has little to do with the rest of the poem, etc. Madame Morrible is a racist (“speciesist”) and has, in fact, written the verse with a particular intent in mind, and she chooses to read the poem among a group of Animals, thus adding additional implications. Does the poem have the same meaning if we do not know this? Does it matter? When Elphaba questions Madame Morrible 36 as to the meaning of the poem, her reply that “one could consider it in an ironic mode, if one chose” sets up yet another layer of understanding both of the poem and the situation between Elphaba and the headmistress. Morrible is giving Elphaba the choice of understanding the context of the poem—as all good poets should—knowing full well that Elphaba will interpret the poem exactly as Morrible intended Elphaba (and the others) to interpret the poem. It was a blatant slur and everyone involved knew it, but because it was spoken in the guise of poetry—and defended in the same vein—Morrible is able to get away with slandering her Animal colleagues. And that, in turn, makes this entire passage ironic, yet another twist on hermeneutic interpretation of text. Finally, there is the added issue that Morrible intended one response but actually produced an entirely separate response. And that in itself gives additional support to Beardsley’s “text with wings” theory. Morrible’s intent was not to increase Animal sympathizers, but that is exactly what turned out to happen. From the question of whether Morrible’s intent matters to the meaning of the poem, we must then take a step back and ask what Maguire’s intention is in setting up this tableau. Does he want us to take a good look at what we call poetry, or even irony, or does he just want to create an interesting little scene that shows Elphaba frustrated and defeated by her horrid headmistress? Does the text stand on its own without knowing the answers to these questions in the same way that the poem stands on its own? And from my own perspective within narrative ethics, I must then ask, what is the difference between the intent of Morrible and the intent of Maguire? 37 Morrible wrote a poem with an agenda that would ultimately, she hoped, cause a specific reaction. The effect of this poem would be to both bring down the Animals and raise the level of awareness concerning prejudice. A sort of dual-edged normative response is created here: is the intent of the author to exemplify the ironic tendencies of poetry or illuminate the sympathetic proclivities of his heroine? These questions dwell in an entirely different category of normative evaluation. In this particular discussion, one must also include the preconceptions we bring to the discussion of Wicked including preconceptions based on our knowledge that the book is a political allegory, and, of course, our a priori knowledge of the movie The Wizard of Oz. 17 Ultimately, we must choose whether to accept, just as Morrible suggests, that Wicked means what we choose it to mean. Clearly the debate is much more complex than I am able to discuss here, but the above section should go a little way toward demonstrating the complexities of the discussion and the many hermeneutic aspects of how one can approach literature. My method in explicating The Poisonwood Bible is not solely to employ a single hermeneutic approach, but to incorporate several in a way that demonstrates how both author intent, the text alone, and what we bring to the text all work in tandem to create a narrative ethic. 17 If we wanted to explore thoroughly the implications of Wicked, we could also bring in the intent of Frank L. Baum in his original series. 38  COMMON MORALITY  As is probably clear by now, I feel that the relationship between is and ought constitutes the soul of religious social ethics. Descriptive statements are important, whether in fiction or reality, only in their relationship to prescriptive evaluations because as normative ethicists our goal is not to quantify what we see around us except as to how it can qualitatively improve our lives. This rather insistent attitude on my part then leads to my next assertion, which is that I believe we do, as a species, have a sense of common morality. The term “common morality” is a loaded one. Books covering a vast range of philosophical possibilities provide quite an array of opinions attempting to define common morality. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr.’s compilation of essays, Prospects for a Common Morality, tries to provide a forum all in one place for many of these differing views. In their introduction, they provide a paradigm which they call “an Enlightenment interpretation of the common or universal morality.” This paradigm has three major foci: 1. certain moral beliefs are required by the structure of human reason; these are universal, at least implicitly, in a conscience of humankind, and they serve as the foundation of morality; 2. these basic beliefs are not derived from a vision of the good, but they regulate how we should seek human flourishing or eudemonia; 3. the content and justification of these moral beliefs are independent of religious conceptions of transcendent powers or states and their relation to human beings; these core moral beliefs provide the normative glue that protects religious and other liberties in the democratic tradition; religious communities, however, can interpret this morality in terms of a larger conception of human existence, and can serve as vehicles for moral education and training. (Outka and Reader, 5) 39 This particular volume of essays is distinctive, claim the editors, because all of the authors within it address issues of cross-cultural, cross-traditional moral agreement; they are concerned with the possibility of a “common morality” in the sense of moral judgments that not only apply, but could be justified, to persons in a variety of cultures. Some address the particular question of what role, if any, religious communities play in the pursuit of a common morality. (Outka and Reader, 4) The essays within the book both agree with and challenge this paradigm, but I am in agreement with David Little, Alan Gewirth, Jeffrey Stout, and others, who believe there is a common morality, and I boldly place Barbara Kingsolver in this camp as well. I think that if one steps completely outside the box and looks at the universal picture, there are basic precepts, granted maybe minimum ones, that we all do agree upon. In his essay, “On Having A Morality in Common,” Jeffrey Stout writes, If moral diversity occurs within a single framework globally shared, and the differences in how people think and talk about moral matters can be explained in terms of deeper similarities, then confidence might be restored in moral truth, in justified moral belief, and in the possibility of cross-cultural judgment. (Outka and Reader, Stout, 215) Stout goes on to say that it is a given that if two groups were similar in their ways of thinking and talking about morality, then we would say they share a common morality, but “there is obviously no such pair of groups to be found. In a trivial sense, each group’s morality is unique, figuring in some respect from others. 40 No ethical theorist denies this” (Outka and Reader, Stout, 216). What Stout then identifies is that there are similarities between groups because the very fact that all moralities are ways of thinking and talking is itself something they have in common, something that guarantees formal and functional similarities of various sorts. That all moralities are about the same kind of topic is also something they have in common, such that the substantive moral commitments of any two groups can be expected to resemble each other in some degree. (Outka and Reader, Stout, 216) Although there is much disagreement regarding common morality, I find the above statements true for me and true for my understanding and elucidation regarding the importance of literature as a means of exposing our similarities in a way that more closely connects us as a moral species. Although many theologians are very concerned about the particular language used in creating this commonality, the language is far less important than the message, and underneath all the lingo there is an intrinsic value to any method of bringing us closer to a cross-cultural, cross-religious understanding of what is ultimately moral. As David Little implies in his essay, “The Nature and Basis of Human Rights,” it is hard to find a moral theory anywhere, no matter how cynical one is, that would be able to callously ignore the torture of children, and if there were, it is not a moral theory. 18 This dissertation does not delve into the debate of whether basic human rights exist, or whether this line of inquiry is worthwhile, except to assert that I count myself among those who believe, 18 David Little, “The Nature and Basis of Human Rights,” Prospects for a Common Morality, pp 80- 81. 41 with Ronald Dworkin and David Little, that “there are universal, and even ‘objective,’ moral standards (and concomitant beliefs) that are in part associated with existing human rights norms” (Little, Outka and Reader, 74). I believe that socially constructed or not, there is a universal moral consensus about a number of basic rights, and I spend time defining my own conception of common morality because I feel the challenges we encounter in understanding the nature of a common morality are exactly what Kingsolver explores in The Poisonwood Bible. Kingsolver addresses cross-cultural and cross-traditional morality within the context of her narrative in a way which serves to elucidate her own views on morality and subjectivity, particularly in the area of basic human rights; that she does this within the framework of Christianity and biblical texts makes it all the more intriguing.  FEMINIST THEORY  In Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing, Laurie Finke writes, During the 1980s, feminist literary criticism was marked by an often contentious split between those pragmatically committed to the recovery of the woman writer and, with her, something usually called women’s experience, and those concerned to explore the implications for feminism of postmodern theories that question the legitimacy of such constructs as the author and experience. (Finke, 1) In Evidence on Her Own Behalf, Elizabeth Say further defines the debate by stating that “despite the fact that nineteenth century women used narrative as a forum for moral debate and that women have continued to do so into the twentieth century, not all stories by women represent equally authentic voices for the process of 42 feminist transformation” (Say, 1). Authenticity is a buzzword that indicates an unwillingness among feminists to name anything feminist just because it is written by a female or is pro-women. “Authentic” voices, writes Say, are only those stories which engage in true moral debate and therefore “represent a transformative vision of women’s lives” (Say, 1). What, then, is an authentic feminist voice, and what kind of feminist methodology is in place for making such an assessment? Alison M. Jaggar writes in “Feminist Ethics: Some Issues for the Nineties,” that any approach to ethics that claims to be feminist must include the following directives: a) a feminist approach to ethics must subvert rather than reinforce women’s subordination; b) a feminist approach must attend to the ways in which women have both resisted domination as well as the ways in which they have colluded with it; c) a feminist approach must take the experience of all women seriously (Jaggar, 77-78). Using Jaggar as her starting point, Say also draws on the work of liberation theologians—“both liberation theology and feminist theology critique the experience of oppression from a spiritual as well as political point of view”—culling five hermeneutic principles from liberation theology to form the basis for her feminist methodology for narrative theology and ethics and proposing her vision of what a feminist hermeneutic of narrative interpretation might look like: These five principles represent the key themes by which I read a woman’s narrative to ascertain whether it represents a transformative vision of society or simply offers a more palatable repackaging of patriarchal reality. The five principles, briefly stated, are that a feminist narrative must 43 provide: 1) A Critique of the Prevailing System; 2) Theology Grounded in Concrete Experience; 3) Theology as Conversation; 4) Theology as Relative and Contextual; 5) A New Vision of Community. (Say, 2) Say emphasizes Jaggar’s point by affirming that “despite the fact that there is often a world of difference between what is feminist and what is feminine, a feminist ethic must reflect a basic respect for women’s moral experience and acknowledge women’s capacities as moral agents” (Say, 2). Jaggar’s assertion regarding the necessity of women’s capacity as moral agents provides another necessary additional criterion to any feminist methodology. Although “moral agency” is a term fraught with diverse interpretations, in this work it will be used in the sense that women are autonomous, rational, intellectual beings, capable of political, social, and economic justice. They are therefore, not the subjects of a moral agency centered outside women’s experience (as much as Nathan Price might wish that to be the case), but are themselves the agents of their own morality. In Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence, Linda Bell adds to our understanding of what a feminist ethics consists in: A feminist ethics is concerned with what is as well as with what ought to be. While every ethic recognizes a gap between what is and what ought to be, most ethics do not recognize, as feminist ethics must, the way this gap makes even ethical theorizing itself problematic. This is so partly because any ethics can be co-opted and used by those in control to maintain the status quo. Thus, a feminist ethics, given its ventral opposition to oppression, must begin and proceed with a constantly watchful eye on the way things are, lest the ensuing theorizing exacerbate current problems 44 and undermine the emancipatory force of its analyses and ideals. (Bell, 20) Kingsolver’s writings conceptualize moral agency in a way that not only satisfies the demands of a feminist hermeneutic, but which, by using narrative, allows its ethical agenda to be available to all readers. Through the narrative of the Price women, we see four women who all come to embrace their own capacity as moral agents, and through their agency, we as readers gain a greater understanding of Kingsolver’s normative ethics of what ought to be. 19 I do not approach my explication of Kingsolver’s novel from a strictly feminist perspective, but I do consider Kingsolver an “authentic” feminist voice whose perspective becomes an important part of the way we as readers come to understand the moral message she is sending. As a feminist theorist, my own perspective will naturally appear throughout this work, and although, as Finke claims, many feminist theorists differentiate between woman author and women’s experience, and the legitimacy of such distinctions, I think they are rather inseparable. As in the above discussion on intentionalist hermeneutics, one’s perspective on a feminist understanding of the novel is largely dependent upon one’s own experiences, the experiences of the writer, and the experiences of the characters which one is reading about (in this case, four women). I think to try and separate 19 Although the women are successful in varying degrees and some might never accept Rachel as having gained a truly “feminist” embodiment of moral agency. 45 writer, experience, and theory (postmodern or not), is to lose a piece of the larger impact of the novel and its ability to be revelatory in any manner.  WILLIAM JAMES AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE  A discussion of William James’ pragmatic understanding of religious experience is important in the context of this dissertation because Barbara Kingsolver spends much of her novel exemplifying James’ conclusions. I find much to like about James, and, consequently, it is inevitable that I will discuss the religious character of the novel through my own understanding of his pluralistic view of religious tolerance. In giving the Gifford Lectures which eventually became The Varieties of Religious Experience, James tells us that “the whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit” (James, 100). The ideas that James presents reveal an empirical approach to religious life and experience that while seeming very basic, were novel then and remain relevant today. As we discussed above with Rorty, James wrote on many topics regarding religious experience— religion and science for example—which I am not going to touch upon here. In this section, I will only address those few points made by James which I think particularly pertinent to my explication of The Poisonwood Bible. William James begins Lecture 2 in The Varieties of Religious Experience with a summation of his view on attempting to define religion: 46 The very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word "religion" cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important to religion. (39) From the outset he immediately identifies himself as having a pluralistic approach to religion, establishing that religion is too often the victim of dogmatism and that he will be leading us to understand the many equally important elements of religion. James then makes several demarcations in his attempt to narrow the field of religion. In the first, he divides the field by explaining that “on one side of [the religious field] lies institutional, on the other personal religion . . . one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view” (James, 41). In the institutional branch, Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion. . . . Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an 47 altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker. (James, 41) These two distinctly different pieces contribute to our understanding of what religion involves and help James clarify the complexity of what we call religion. This differentiation between institutional religion and personal religion will come to be extremely important later when we are trying to understand the chasm between Nathan Price and the villagers of Kilanga whom Nathan is desperately trying to convert to Christianity. In Lectures 4 and 5, James discusses the phenomenon of “healthy- mindedness” and “sick souls.” “The healthy-minded temperament,” James writes, “has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and . . . the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual’s character is set” (James,114). The religion of an individual who leans toward a healthy-minded temperament, “directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them” (James, 114). The best repentance for someone of this mindset “is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin” (James, 114). James offers Spinoza’s philosophy as an example of this type of healthy- minded philosophy and, he claims, “this has been one secret of its fascination” (James, 114). Evil in the healthy-minded view is not seen to be essential to the universe: “it might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had 48 no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last” (James, 117). In contrast with the healthy-minded view, there stands “a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart” (James,116). These people cannot, writes James, “so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence” (James, 118-119). For these individuals, evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. (James, 119) After categorizing and then exemplifying these two opposing views of not only the world and religion, but human nature itself, James asks an extremely important question: “Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?” (James, 120). If one who views the world optimistically might need a different type of religion than one who has a more pessimistic view, an inborn question of religious relativity “of different types of religion to different types of need” naturally arises (James, 120). The claim begs the philosophical question of whether a “true” or “perfect” religion would not in fact 49 take all needs into consideration, but from an empirical perspective, the question is extremely valid and, I think, self-demonstrative given the variety of religious traditions. James believes that life, and religion, must include a balance—an objective understanding of the subjective world. Life is complex and religion is complex, and if a person’s religious needs do not meld with his or her personal needs, the result is dissatisfaction and melancholy. James takes this one step further, explaining that, the practically real world for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues. (James, 131) This description will become important later in our discussion of Nathan Price, a man whose religion falls into the latter, pessimistic category of James’ definitions. The final point to cover when discussing religious experience is its subjective nature. James spends much of The Varieties of Religious Experience discussing the various ways that people come to understand religion. He then inquires as to whether we can consider individual mystical experiences and/or understanding of God as authoritative—is there any “warrant for the truth?” (James, 331). He answers as follows: (1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. 50 (2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically. (3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith. (James, 331) James makes it clear that religious—“mystical” —experience is an individual event peculiar only to the person experiencing that event. These mystical states “are usually authoritative over those who have them. They have been ‘there’ and know” (James, 332). Although this individual authority which emerges from a mystical experience “absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe,” James feels that this state has no authority over anyone outside the experience; it has no jurisdiction over what another person may have experienced and should therefore believe (James, 335). “We have no right,” states James, “to invoke [the] prestige of [religious mysticism] as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world” (James, 333). This view is undoubtedly controversial and vehemently disagreed with, particularly by those who proselytize, but it is important for me to establish James’ extremely clear and resolute thinking on the topic, as I am going to return to this opinion as a means of helping us to reach an understanding of what goes wrong in the religious world of Nathan Price. 51 In James’ discussion about religious experience and faith, he establishes classic religious mysticism as a positive, although rare, element in our understanding of and relationship to God. This positive “religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism,” though (James, 334). James also establishes that “in delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down” (James, 334). In this type of religious experience, all the emotions are pessimistic and although the religious experiences seem the same, they come from the “sick mind”: the same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. (James, 334) Just as it is said that love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, so too is James’ understanding of healthy and sick religious experiences. The religious/mystical experience and its manifestations are deeply rooted in The Poisonwood Bible, and are particularly important, of course, for understanding the religious life and actions of Reverend Nathan Price. When we get to the section on Brother Fowles below, we see the two sides of this healthy/sick dichotomy in action.  CONCLUSION  The primary intent of this chapter is to establish an overview of those thinkers and theorists who have most heavily influenced the explication of this 52 dissertation. Throughout the rest of the work there will be others who make important contributions, but I do not feel it is crucial to single out every author at the outset in order to develop an overall understanding of the factors which have contributed to my own way of doing ethical criticism. The fields of literature, philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, and ethics all provide subtext for the succeeding chapters, as well as for the biblical interpretation on which this dissertation is based. 53 CHAPTER TWO BOOK ONE: GENESIS  LAYING THE FOUNDATION  The Poisonwood Bible is a controversial novel. There are those who believe it is anti-American, anti-Christian, antigovernment, and even hateful to men. It is all these things, yet it is none of them. The novel presents a view of Christianity that one might not appreciate because it forces some looking into the mirror, yet for one to claim the novel is anti-Christian is to ignore its primary message. Christianity becomes an agonist in the story. There is liberation through understanding the true meaning of Christianity, but oppression through its misuse, its false claims to redemption. The very idea that Kingsolver calls her treatise a Bible and presents it for public consumption is a statement in itself. As traditionally understood, a Bible is considered the sacred text of a religion. To claim that title for her novel, she presents a text of sacred stories from which we can all learn while simultaneously challenging our notion of what constitutes a sacred text. Even its very title, The Poisonwood Bible, is a double-edged sword, for Poisonwood, bängala, is both a kind of tree and a mispronunciation of the Kilanga word for “beloved,” which is used throughout the book as a synonym for Jesus. From the opening paragraphs, Kingsolver not only sets up her novel in sections like a Bible, but as we will soon come to see, it becomes a Bible itself with beginnings and stories and judgments and revelations. As in other sacred texts, 54 within The Poisonwood Bible one finds the folly of extremism, the blessing of true Christianity, selflessness, selfishness, death, and salvation. And as does the biblical Genesis, The Poisonwood Bible provides a polemic against the blind faith that can be so destructive, even when acting in the name of God. The story becomes so profound—and so intrinsically bound up with the morality it wishes to impart—that it more than fulfills Newton's demands for reciprocity between life and fiction. Using The Poisonwood Bible as both polemic and political treatise, Kingsolver makes her opinions quite clear about Africa, its political history, and the United States’ horrendous part in this history. She uses five narrators, Orleanna Price and her four daughters, to present this tale of what can happen when religion, politics, and good intentions go astray. As a hermeneutic tool, using five separate narrators allows Kingsolver to bring five different voices and therefore subtexts and influences into the narrative. This proves effective because it allows her to present a story which seems both biased and true. If all accounts are similar, then we as readers can make our judgments as witnesses to the events with what we feel to be objectivity. This narrative structure also reflects the construction of the New Testament Gospels: four narrators telling the same story with four different perspectives, allowing us as readers to feel that all accounts, because they are so similar, contain truth. Orleanna’s telling of the story is always in hindsight. Her parts are separated from her daughters’ narratives and serve to establish the time frame for each section 55 of the book. The story begins in 1959, yet Orleanna narrates from the vantage point of 1986. Her observations are the backward-looking pronouncements of a woman who is desperately trying to reconcile her role in a fatal misadventure. Orleanna sets up the description for the journey we are about to embark upon and provides a way of letting us know that we, the readers, are the ones who will sit in moral judgment on the story: “First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees” (5). 20 We view the group from above, as if we are God sitting in judgment, and with this beginning, Kingsolver immediately requires an ethical engagement with the story. Orleanna speaks in a voice desperate to impart an understanding of the events that have happened—we should know every part of the tale and therefore make what happened real. In the retelling, the “naming” so to speak, she ensures that the events will not have been in vain: someone will learn from her experience. Orleanna also provides the omniscient conscience of the story—she relates the tale as one might read it in a history book, were the book reflective in its telling. She is the historian and the purveyor of “what if?” From her opening observations, she introduces the reader to an alternative vision of history, and in true biblical fashion, her narrative begins with a description of Eden: Consider…an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle’s edge through their fitted brass 20 All page references to The Poisonwood Bible come from the HarperPerennial paperback volume cited in the bibliography. 56 lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doing the same. What would that Africa be now? All I can think of is the other okapi, the one they used to believe in. A unicorn that could look you in the eye. (7-8) What would the world be like if men had been sensible enough to leave well enough alone? Can we consider an unconquered Africa? The ramifications of such an event are so far reaching as to affect not only the Africa of the sixties reflected in this novel, but clearly the uneasy history of the United States as well. Because we are reading this as Americans, we are immediately forced to recognize the complex history of Africa and our own relationship to that ravaged country. Orleanna accepts responsibility for what happened in Africa during their years there—both to the Congo and to her family—while acknowledging that most people consider themselves to be guiltless: I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience as clean as snow. It's easy to point to other men, conveniently dead, starting with the ones who first scooped up mud from riverbanks to catch the scent of a source. Why, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, wasn't he the rascal! He and all the profiteers who've since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no grisly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience. I would be no different from the next one, if I hadn't paid my own little part in blood. I trod on Africa without a thought, straight from our family's divinely inspired beginning to our terrible end. (9) From these opening pages, The Poisonwood Bible becomes ethical narrative and we the readers are established as an intrinsic part of this moral discourse. Kingsolver 57 uses Orleanna to engage us fully in the dialogue and help us to accept that we are necessary to the conversation. This may be Orleanna’s chronicle, but we are a necessary part in fleshing out its full meaning. Without the reader, the Bible is merely another book. Kingsolver presents for us a morality tale which reflects her own understanding of Christianity, Good and Evil, and an understanding of should and ought that she imparts through her stories and characters. Through Orleanna and her four daughters, Kingsolver forms a philosophical vision of what she feels we should instinctively know to be true—that all people and all gods are created equal, but because of the details, our lives are often spectacularly different. “We aimed for no more,” Orleanna claims, “than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters” (10). Kingsolver demonstrates through her novel her agreement with Jeffrey Stout’s belief in the possibility of a cross- cultural moral judgment; The Poisonwood Bible is a multicultural, multiracial, cross- continental treatise which expresses with no equivocation that there is, or at least can be, a universal morality, for if not, then we will continue to flounder in the unformed darkness of chaos. The “common morality” inherent in the novel is so interwoven with the plight of the Price family that we cannot understand the full implications unless we understand the Bible’s role in the telling. By using the Christian King James’ Bible (and, ironically, 58 primarily books from the Old Testament), 21 the biblical references become transformed into moral referents for this new Bible of divine yet catastrophic proportions or, as Orleanna says above, “from its divinely inspired beginning, to [its] terrible end.”  GENESIS: PART I  Orleanna Price Orleanna Price, the novel’s matriarch, begins The Poisonwood Bible’s first flashback by describing for the reader a jungle that we soon equate with the Garden of Eden. Simultaneously, Orleanna addresses an unknown observer in her description of this paradisiacal Africa, an observer whom she wants to be the conscience of the forest, the “eyes in the trees” (5). There are many references to the garden throughout the book, both subtle and overt, and they begin here with the “glide of snake belly on a branch” (5). We immediately understand that this garden, like the biblical garden, will contain sin. This glide of snake plays an important role throughout the work, although we cannot yet realize that this particular snake turns out to be not only bringer of doom, but also redemption, will be both executioner and judge. Kingsolver lays a foundation from the outset that the recipient of Orleanna’s words, whether reader or character yet to be determined, will have to make a moral judgment: “Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they deserve,” these 21 Although it is not my preference to refer to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as the “Old” and “New” Testaments, due to the nature of this dissertation and its primary use of the King James Bible, I will bow to convention. 59 characters who are “on a different path to glory or damnation” (5). In keeping with Newton’s concept of reciprocal relationships between reader and text, Kingsolver’s ambiguous “you” draws in the reader as observer and participant. We are reading the story, but somehow we are also to be a part of the story, thus she binds reader, author and novel into the moral world she is weaving, in both theoretical and practical ways. Although, as a white family, Orleanna recognizes the conqueror within them, she also feels that they landed in Africa like children, like Adam and Eve, believing the world revolved around them and having no real idea of anything beyond themselves. The reference here is also to the very first chapter of Genesis—the Price family landed in a place they thought unformed, and they believed they would be able to mold it, but they quickly discovered that only God can create. They do discover, however, that through human arrogance they can wind up destroying that which God has fashioned. In this opening chapter, we see one of Kingsolver’s first uses of biblical text when Orleanna Price narrates to her long-dead daughter Ruth May: “Your bright eyes bear down on me without cease, on behalf of the quick and the dead.” This expression, well known to Orleanna and reader alike, is kept alive by the King James translation of Acts 10:42, which speaks of Jesus as judge “of quick and dead,” and also by the continued recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, which asserts that Jesus “shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” In this appeal to her “uncaptured favorite child,” Orleanna gives Ruth May permission to be judge, as Jesus is judge, 60 of all that has happened to the Price family—it is also a plea to Ruth May, and reader, to look at what happened from all sides and perspectives. Kingsolver’s use of the “the quick and the dead” illustrates early on Orleanna’s melding of Christianity and the Kilangese belief that the souls of the dead get absorbed into the last material thing they focused upon. Orleanna seems to accept that Ruth May, upon her death, transmuted into an omniscient serpent of sorts that observes all, and that can pass judgment and confer forgiveness. Orleanna wants the judgment, however, not to be simply of her as a mother. She wants the judgments to be of all things we are about to encounter—of the men who tamed Africa, of her husband’s arrogance, of political complicity in the Congo, and of her as a mother. Simultaneously, though, Orleanna also wants us as reader to dwell within the story, to understand what has happened, and to make our own judgments. Kingsolver wants the same—she wants the reader to understand and appreciate the judgments the characters make and act upon because we are there with them and understand the events that have led to that understanding. This motif comes full circle at the conclusion of the book when Ruth May, as prophet/green mamba, does make her final pronouncements. Because the book is told in flashback, we get many allusions from the outset that gradually begin to clarify themselves. We learn that Orleanna wants to be forgiven, and we eventually learn that through Ruth May, in the implied role of Jesus-Forgiver-Redeemer, the book begins with a plea for forgiveness—“I want you to find me innocent…I’ll live or die on the strength of your judgment” (8-9). An 61 implication perhaps that Orleanna now understands that it is people who have to judge each other. If Orleanna cannot feel forgiven by God if she does not feel forgiven by Ruth May, does this equally reflect upon our notions of forgiveness? It is, in fact, a very Jewish concept. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, Jews must ask forgiveness of their friends and family—anyone they may have hurt during the previous year, before they may ask forgiveness from God. Orleanna is clear-sighted in retrospect about what happened in Africa: “Maybe I’ll even confess the truth, that I rode in with the horsemen and beheld the apocalypse, but still insist I was only a captive witness. What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself?” (9). The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, described in the book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, appear when the Lamb (Jesus) opens the first four seals of a scroll with seven seals. As each of the first four seals is opened, a different colored horse and its rider is seen by the apostle John, as described in Rev 6:1-8. Orleanna describes herself as a captive along for the ride: she is conquered territory just as Africa is. The apocalyptic vision of Jesus as told to John regarding the End of Days is reflected in the forthcoming story, but it is Orleanna who rides in with the four horsemen to reveal the conquered nature of Africa. Her revelation regarding conquerors and slaughter reflects both a personal and historical apocalyptic truth. In this opening passage, Kingsolver also establishes the primary themes which are prevalent throughout the book—blame, guilt, sin, redemption, and 62 forgiveness—all of which are heavily religious and biblical in nature, and all of which are reflected from the King James Bible into Kingsolver’s Bible.  THE THINGS WE CARRIED: KILANGA 1959  Leah Price Whereas Orleanna narrates to an unknown judge, an undefined “you,” the daughters’ narratives are written in journal form, describing first each of their own experiences while in the Congo, and then its aftermath. There is only an implied reader when the daughters speak, as if they are writing a letter to their best friend. This convention allows us as readers to observe the situations as impartial witnesses, to take our place as Orleanna has asked—to become judges of the events. While all four daughters in The Poisonwood Bible are integral to the story, Leah Price comes out most clearly as the protagonist. She is the daughter who changes the most in the story, and the one whom we most closely connect with Kingsolver’s voice 22 . Leah begins her narrative with a description of the Price family packing to go on their mission to the Congo: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle." Leah lists the items that they bring, calling them “the full measure of civilization’s evils we felt obliged to carry with us" (13). The Price family goes to the jungle prepared for what they think will 22 Although all the women reflect Kingsolver’s point of view, Leah’s is the most straightforward. The other narrators more subtly reflect the point that Kingsolver wants to impress upon us as readers. Leah is very overt in her reflections about the way things should be. 63 be every contingency, including hunger and illness. They came from Bethlehem, as did Jesus, which immediately connects them in our minds with the mission of Jesus. Later, Kingsolver goes even further with this allusion when Orleanna describes how they wound up in Bethlehem: I was so pregnant with Rachel that our nomad state seemed disreputable. One night we simply chose Bethlehem, Georgia off a map. . . . I tried to laugh about it, for here we were: man and swollen wife, and no more room at the inn. (197) Leah establishes in the first three paragraphs the mission of the family and the relationship between Nathan Price and his wife: “[Father’s] tone implied that Mother failed to grasp our mission, and that her concern with Betty Crocker confederated her with the coin-jingling sinners who vexed Jesus till he pitched a fit and threw them out of church” (13). Orleanna “wouldn’t go against him, of course,” but as we will see over and over again, she is the one who should have been the missionary. Although she does not grasp the situation that Nathan has put them in, she does understand how to relate to people. She understands that feeding the people will gain more friends than treating them as if they were lepers to be cured. This is a subtle yet recurring theme regarding both Orleanna and missionaries. Kingsolver, whose own parents were missionaries, wants to imply from the beginning (and will explicitly demonstrate later) that it is not the mission which is offensive, but the method. When they finally arrive in Africa, Leah continues her narration: “Father surveyed our despair as if he’d expected it all along, and left it up to wife and kids to 64 sort out, suggesting only that we consider the lilies of the field, which have no need of a hand mirror or aspirin tablets” (14). This reference to Mathew 6:28, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin,” demonstrates early on Nathan’s use of biblical references to make his point. It also shows how frequently misused his references are. The immediate response to this quotation, “‘I reckon the lilies need Bibles though,’” muttered by his eldest daughter, Rachel, is indicative of a number of things as well. We as reader/participant can see both the sarcasm and the truth in her comment. We gain an initial view of Rachel from Leah that, overall, is accurate. Rachel is self-centered, but always practical. She is angry with her father for making them leave most of their belongings at home, but making sure they brought their Bibles. This is practical considering the mission that they are on, and at this point in the story we think that Rachel is being petulant. As it turns out, however, the Bibles are one of the things that could have been left home, for all the use they are to them there. Leah observes that “Rachel never does grasp Scripture all that well” (14-15). Rachel does, however, grasp Scripture better than Leah might think, or at least Rachel has a sense of the idea behind the Scripture. This is another way that Kingsolver shows us, the reader, that sometimes the spirit of the words is more important than the words themselves. Rachel does grasp the irony in the idea that the lilies of the field get by with nothing, and that perhaps Reverend Price could get by without Bibles, especially as he is going somewhere where they do not speak or read English. This provides another recurring theme—the value of the text as opposed to the value of the Word; is it the text itself that is 65 meaningful/sacred, or is it the meaning behind the words which gives the text its value? From the very beginning, Leah has a somewhat separate take on everything. She was excited to come to Africa, even though she would have to give up her life as an American teenager: “My heart pounded for I expected everything: jungle flowers, wild roaring beasts. God's kingdom in its pure unenlightened glory” (17). Leah has an expectation from the novel’s beginning that Africa is God’s glory just the way it is. We never get a sense from her that she wishes to tame the natives, just that she wants to revel in its beauty and power. She sees that the Congo can still be seen as a kind of Eden. She also shows us her father’s understanding of his role in Africa: “Heavenly Father, please make me a powerful instrument of thy perfect will here in the Belgian Congo. Amen” (18). Nathan sees his role in the Congo as a commanding presence doing God’s work; his family is entirely incidental. Leah closes her introduction by explaining, In all our layers of clothing we must have resembled a family of Eskimos plopped down in a jungle. But that was our burden, because there was so much we needed to bring here. Each one of us arrived with some extra responsibility biting into us under our garments: a claw hammer, a Baptist hymnal, each object of value replacing the weight freed up by some frivolous thing we'd found the strength to leave behind. Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God— which fortunately weighs nothing at all. (19) The Word of God proves to create the greatest imbalance in their lives and those of the Congolese, and its weight of responsibility actually becomes quite 66 heavy. This can also be interpreted as foreshadowing that the Word of God will prove to have no weight with the Kilangese—at least not the Word of Nathan’s God. With these words we are introduced to another theme of the novel: balance. Kingsolver weighs the balance of tangible and intangible, secular and holy, men and women, reason and faith. Ruth May Price As we can see from Orleanna’s above descriptions of Ruth May, her role in this book is complex. Everything Ruth May talks about is in a biblical context. The Bible (at least her Sunday School teachings) colors her worldview. Her narrative begins with her initial reaction to the Kilangese people from her own, sheltered, six- year-old white Baptist Georgian perspective: “God says the Africans are the Tribes of Ham. Ham was the worst one of Noah’s three boys: Shem, Ham, and Japheth” (20). God, Ruth May says, made them slaves and that is why they turned out black; “their day for the zoo is Thursday. That’s in the Bible.” After her descriptions of the Congolese, Ruth May identifies herself: “My name is Ruth May and I hate the Devil” (21). She identifies things as “black and white,” good and bad. She shows us the either/or of a child’s perspective. We also get the idea that her world is divided in this way because that is how her father has always divided things. She has been taught that some things are just meant to be—they are a part of God’s plan. Because she is a child, however, Ruth May’s vision is skewed, as is her version of the Bible. This works for Kingsolver in several ways—1) we know that Ruth May’s way of 67 seeing the Bible is that of a child. On a very basic level, this sets up the idea that if the reader agrees with Ruth May’s perception, their biases/prejudices are simplistic and childlike—that blacks are that way because of Ham, and God meant it to be that way; 2) Because Ruth May is the judge, she is also able to see what’s going on in a way separate from the others. She may see things more clearly—as a child does. Children often see things for the honest way that they are, but they also have distorted ideas. Kingsolver can use Ruth May to both advantages this way. We are also immediately struck that the Prices’ world is going to turn completely upside down. They come from a place where blacks and whites have their place and are going to a world where they, as the whites, are the outsiders, yet they are not excluded. The openness of the villagers and their willingness to accept the Price family provides an example of the socially constructed biases inherent in the world the Prices come from. Rachel Price Rachel, although the eldest, also offers naïve descriptions, but in an entirely different way from those of Ruth May. Ruth May does not have the maturity to really understand what she is seeing, and her observations are often nonsensical. Rachel’s observations are completely impulsive. Because Rachel says whatever she thinks in an entirely uncalculated and shallow way, we as the reader both believe her and find her unbelievable. Although Rachel is primarily self-serving, this convention allows Kingsolver a way to reflect the family in a way such that we as reader can 68 understand the spectacle of what it might be like to watch the Price family arrive in Africa. Rachel sees the situation very clearly from the beginning: Man oh Man, are we in for it now, was my thinking about the Congo from the instant we first set foot. We are supposed to be calling the shots here, but it does not look to me like we’re in charge of a thing, not even our own selves. (22) From the moment they stepped into Africa, they were no longer in charge of anything. This was actually true from before they even left. No one wanted them to come; their trip was not sanctioned by the Baptist church, but Reverend Price, thinking he knew better than anyone else, came anyway. Rachel seems very aware of this (even if Orleanna is not), but no one ever listens to Rachel because she comes across as so shallow. She is quite right though to recognize that they have very little control over anything or anyone in the village, and their “mission” is virtually doomed from the start due to Nathan Price’s “conqueror’s” attitude. Although Christianity is nothing new to the villagers, its influence has been absorbed into their culture rather than having transformed it. The villagers greet the Price family with Christian songs, but also in their native attire. This fact, observed rather cynically by Rachel when they arrive, will come to have great significance as Kingsolver’s observations on religious subjectivity, situational ethics, and common morality continually develop: They were such weird songs it took me awhile to realize they followed the tunes of Christian hymns, “Onward Christian soldiers” and “What a friend, I have in Jesus,” 69 which made my skin crawl. I guess they have a right to sing them, but here's the thing: right in front of our very eyes, some of the women stood up there in the firelight with their bosoms naked as a jaybird's egg. Some of them were dancing, and others merely ran around cooking, as if nakedness were nothing special. They passed back-and- forth with pots and kettles, all bare-chested and unashamed. (24) There is again a use of language which parallels the Garden of Eden. The natives are naked and unashamed, and it is the Christians who need to teach them that they should be embarrassed by their nakedness. It has already been established that missionaries are not new to this village, and the Christian hymns being sung in greeting confirm the Kilangese familiarity with Western Christian culture. Upon the Price family’s arrival, Reverend Price planned a prayer meeting to prove, in Rachel’s malapropian portrayal, “that God had ensued us here and aimed to settle in,” when in fact it is the people of Kilanga who let the Prices know exactly where they were to fit in—that the Kilangese were in charge and were welcoming the Price family, not the other way around: “You are welcome to our feast. We have killed a goat to celebrate your coming” (26). It is clear to the reader and the Price women that it is the villagers’ house and the Prices are the guests. This is a fact completely lost upon Reverend Nathan Price, however, and as will be demonstrated in the passages below, because Nathan’s sole purpose in coming to Kilanga is to bend the people to his Christian vision, we can already guess at the inevitable catastrophe. 70 The following passages illuminate a number of issues that become clearer and clearer as the moral discourse of the book develops. Kingsolver sets up a tension between Reverend Price and the village immediately, and by reflecting the scene through Rachel, on the one hand, and the biblical text Nathan chooses, on the other, we get a very immediate understanding of how the scene will play out. When a village leader asks Reverend Price to “please offer with us a word of thanks for this feast,” Nathan takes it as a summons to begin his first sermon: Slowly Father raised one arm above his head like one of those gods they had in Roman times, fixing to send down the thunderbolts and the lightning. … Then he began to speak. It was not so much a speech as a rising storm. “The Lord rideth,” he said, low and threatening, “upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt.” Hurray! They all cheered, but I felt a knot in my stomach. He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life. “Into Egypt, he shouted…”and every corner of the earth where His light…has yet to fall!” He paused for breath and began again, swaying ever so faintly as he sang out: “The Lord rideth in the person of his angels of mercy, His emissaries of holiness into the cities on the plain, where Lot dwelled amongst the sinners! … I shuddered. Naturally I knew Chapter 19 of Genesis, which he’d made us copy out again and again. I detest the part where Lot offered his own virgin daughters to the rabble of sinners, to do as they might, just so they’d forget about God’s angels that were visiting and leave them be. What kind of trade is that? And his poor wife, of course, got turned into a pillar of salt. But Father skipped over all that and went straight to the dire consequences: The emissaries of the Lord smote the sinners, who had come heedless to the sight of God, heedless in their nakedness.” (26-27) 71 Nathan stops and points to one of the congregation—“her big long breasts lay flat on her chest like they’d been pressed down with an iron, but she seemed heedless of it” (27). Although the woman is initially frightened and then puzzled by the attention, she finally returns to cooking. Nathan continues his sermon: “Nakedness,” Father repeated, “and darkness of the soul! For we shall destroy this place where the loud clamor of the sinners is waxen great before the face of the Lord” No one sang or cheered anymore. … And now Father was using his gentler, simmering down tone. “And Lot said unto them, ‘Up! Get ye out from this place of darkness! Arise and come forward into a brighter land!’ “O Lord, let us pray,” he concluded… “Lord grant that the worthy among us here shall rise above wickedness and come out of the darkness into the wondrous light of our holy father. Amen.” (28) The reaction of the villagers is one of stunned silence. Their “expressions had fallen in slow motion from joy to confusion to dismay” (28). Some of the villagers slowly start to leave, while others just stare at the Price family, waiting for them to begin eating what turns out to be an inedible feast. Orleanna hisses to the girls to be polite or she’ll thrash them: “This was Mother who’d never laid a hand on us in all our lives! Oh, I got the picture, right there our first night in Africa. … I shut my eyes tight, but even so, the tears ran down. I wept for the sins of all who had brought my family to this dread dark shore” (29). Through this account, Kingsolver accomplishes a number of goals. The first is to establish what will prove to be ongoing antagonism and miscommunication between Nathan and his Kilangese congregation. We have had some idea of what 72 Nathan is like from previous accounts, but this firmly establishes his character. Nathan criticizes their native ways, makes them embarrassed about their lifestyle, and Rachel’s description of his “numerous deadly weapons beneath that clean white shirt” foreshadows what will turn out to be literal as well as figurative offenses (26). Nathan was welcomed without malice or judgment by the Kilangese, and he did not reciprocate in kind. He did not offer either Christian charity or tolerance, and this was not a good way to begin, either for the congregation or for his children. In this passage we also see the beginning of Kingsolver’s constant treatment of light and dark, echoing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and biblical allusions of light and dark. 23 Nathan talks about light and dark within the sermon, alluding both to the darkness of the people and the darkness of sin. Rachel picks up on this theme of darkness, bemoaning the fates that had brought them to the “dread dark shore” of Africa. All the early descriptions of Nathan Price both foreshadow the ruin he will wreak and demonstrate that he does not have the respect of his children (except for Leah, at least initially). Although the varied religious understandings come at different points in the novel for the different characters, they are all forming their own opinions of their religion. Rachel’s unusual word usage may be a part of her self-absorbed nature, but it also reflects her intuition. Misnaming Mt. Sinai with a 23 See for example, Into the heart of light: Barbara Kingsolver rereads Heart of Darkness (sic). Pamela H. Demory. Conradiana 34.3 (Fall 2002): p.181 (14). 73 poison and demonstrating that she considers Moses as having ways to wreck her life alerts the reader to Rachel’s own current position regarding her father’s Southern Baptist Christianity. Kingsolver also slips a feminist critique into this passage. Rachel, familiar with Genesis 19, immediately comments on the fact that Lot offers his virgin daughters to distract the townspeople from the angels visit. “What kind of trade is that?” she asks. Rachel’s ability to ask such a question is another demonstration of her ability to see a situation for what it is, as well as providing Kingsolver a vehicle with which to ask such questions. To a reader unfamiliar with feminist criticism, these subtle questions within the context of a larger story seem innocent or merely stylistic convention, but they provide a forum for questioning that a reader may be unexposed to. These are exactly the kinds of questions that women have been asking about the Bible and its meaning for their lives today. Feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza would call Rachel’s observation an evaluative hermeneutic. Schüssler Fiorenza maintains that Christian feminists have a difficult time believing in a God who will save them and yet oppresses them at the same time (Schüssler Fiorenza, 87). What kind of God would allow such a thing? What kind of father can be considered righteous, as Lot clearly was meant to be, if he is offering up his daughters? We are also meant to remember, as part of our collective memory, that it is Lot’s wife, the compassionate parent—not the one who offered sex for distraction, but the one who felt sympathy for those lost in the destruction—who perishes for that compassion, just as Orleanna will come to pay for hers. In another parallel yet 74 ironic reference, it is Rachel who “weeps for the sins” of those who had brought her family to this place of darkness. She does not weep for the sinners whom Nathan is trying to save, but for those who are responsible for trying to save them, and her language, reflective again of Kingsolver’s play with the biblical style, makes her words sound biblical, or even á la Conrad, although they are not. Kingsolver’s language is very poetic, further contributing to the stylistic development of her Poisonwood Bible. Finally, by using a Bible story we think we are all familiar with, Kingsolver again establishes hermeneutic connections between her Poisonwood Bible, the Hebrew Bible, and what the reader already understands and brings to the table about the story of Lot. As Sodom and Gomorrah are considered to be the essence of depraved civilization, lacking in even ten righteous souls, Nathan’s comparison of the villagers to the citizens of Sodom requires that we make an assumption that we are unable to support at this point in the story—an assumption that the villagers are somehow depraved. Such a hypothesis shows how quickly Nathan jumps to conclusions based on the villagers’ style of dress while completely disregarding their hospitality. He judges them not on their behavior but on their attire. Rachel establishes for the reader the source of Nathan’s sermon: Genesis 19. What she also does is reveal to any reader who thoroughly knows the Bible that Nathan plays fast and loose, so to speak, with his biblical verses. The story of Lot does come from Genesis 19, but very little else that he says actually comes from that chapter. His opening quotation is from Isaiah 19:1: “Behold, the Lord rideth upon a 75 swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it.” 24 Nathan’s closing lines before he prays are based upon Isaiah 60:1-3: 1: Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. 2: For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. 3: And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising. To this melding of the three chapters, Nathan adds his own preconception: the villagers are iniquitous because they are naked. When Adam and Eve discover (literally) their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, they cover themselves out of modesty because they are now aware of themselves as sexual beings, not because they are sinful. In all 108 biblical references to nakedness, the word is not equated with sin or wrongdoing, but is used either to refer to modesty, poverty or sexual relations. 25 Nathan’s seamless melding of biblical verses and personal beliefs, in true fire and brimstone fashion (“hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher,” claims Orleanna), establishes another layer of religious subjectivity, another way for Kingsolver to establish that religion is what we make it. Nathan’s sermon seems to come straight from the Bible. He quotes it as Scripture and uses biblical language. He has come to a village that does not know the Bible well enough, if at all, to 24 Because Kingsolver uses the King James Version with Apocrypha in The Poisonwood Bible, I am likewise using that as my biblical source. 25 There is even one passage where David exposes himself while dancing before God, and God apparently does not find this offensive: 2 Samuel 6:14. 76 challenge its authenticity as Scripture, and even his own children do not recognize that he has created a falsehood to suit his own needs. While a reader unfamiliar with the story of Lot, or the details of the story (Sodom is not in Egypt, for example), will appreciate the tale Kingsolver weaves at its surface level—Nathan is charismatic and insulting—anyone well-versed in the Bible will gain the additional information that Kingsolver is revealing Nathan’s manipulation of the Scripture to suit his own purposes. The majority of readers probably lie somewhere in the middle, and it is to them that Kingsolver offers the hint that perhaps Nathan isn’t exactly what he seems, nor is the religious authority that he touts actually authentic. Kingsolver employs the biblical knowledge that we already bring to this novel to suggest at the possibly ambiguous nature of scriptural authority. This discussion reappears later when we learn of Nathan’s affinity for the Apocrypha. Adah Price Adah is Leah’s twin, yet she is Leah’s opposite. Born with hemiplegia, she limps and rarely speaks. She has much to say, however, and is both the book’s cynic and philosopher. Adah chooses to be an observer of life and to see the world backward, often reflecting it, in mirror-like fashion, for the way it actually is rather than how we might perceive it. Adah sees Africa as an elemental place: “Everything that comes of morning undoes itself before nightfall: rooster walks back into forest, fires die down, birds coo-coo-coo , sun sinks away, sky bleeds, passes out, goes dark, nothing exists. Ashes to ashes” (30). Like her sisters, Adah is greatly influenced by 77 her religious upbringing, but her biblical allusions tend to be sarcastic, tongue in cheek, or full of double entendres. Adah is the sister who sees most clearly the dynamic that exists among the members of the Price family and their relationship with Africa and to each other. As Orleanna does in the opening, Adah makes her own observations about judgment: And to the east of us, behind the river, a rising rumple of dark green hills folded on each other like a great old tablecloth, receding to pale, hazy blue. “Looming like the Judgment,” says our mother, pausing to wipe her damp forehead with the back of her hand. “It’s a place right out of a storybook,” my twin sister, Leah, loves to declare in response. . . . “And yet this is our own family, the Prices, living here!” Next comes this observation from my sister, Ruth May: “Nobody here’s got very many teeth.” And finally, from Rachel: “Jeez oh man, wake me up when it’s over.” And so the Price family passes its judgments.” All but Adah. Adah unpasses her judgments. I am the one who does not speak. Our Father speaks for all of us, as far as I can see. (32) Orleanna sees the landscape “looming like the Judgment,” a judgment that will eventually consume her. The storybook nature of their environment holds the dual meaning of their physical surroundings and the story of which they are all a part. Because she is cynical about religion, Adah is the opposite of Leah in this area as well. Leah adores her father, whereas “Our Father” is Adah’s condescending way of referring to Reverend Price. She can see that he is a dictator in their house, and she equates Nathan with the overbearing God he believes in and represents. It is also 78 an ironic moniker, in that while “Father” is traditionally a description for a benevolent God, this is far from how Adah uses the term. Adah is also cynical about her twin and describes their relationship in a way that further illuminates her relationship with religion: “My twin sister, Leah, and I are identical in theory, just as in theory we are all made in God’s image” (34). In the womb, Adah speculates, “[Leah] grew strong as I grew weak. (Yes! Jesus loves me!) And so it came to pass, in the Eden of our mother’s womb, I was cannibalized by my sister” (34). Within this description, we find references to Ruth May’s friends who told her in stereotypical fashion that they’d “better not go to the Congo on account of the cannibal natives would boil us in a pot and eat us up” (21). It also reflects Adah’s bitter and cynical feelings about Jesus as a redemptive figure—what kind of God could allow a child to be crippled while her sister remained strong? Adah often uses her differences to her advantage, however, as we see in this reflection upon her decision to keep her thoughts to herself: Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations… It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. (34) Adah becomes the voice of the weak and the belittled; she is Kingsolver’s mouthpiece against rash judgments and stereotyping, and as can be seen in both her initial statement about her family and her closing statement about everyone else, she 79 feels it is her place to expose the hypocritical nature of those who would make such judgments. Nathan’s Garden Continuing with the biblical theme, Leah begins her next chapter with, “In the beginning.” Nathan plans to grow a garden which, she explains, will be his “first African miracle” (35). Leah has always believed that everything her father does is pretty much perfect and blessed by God: “My father needs permission only from the Saviour, who obviously is all in favor of subduing the untamed wilderness for a garden” (36). Nathan uses every opportunity as a teaching tool, and Leah soaks it all in because she is so desperate for her father’s approval. We also see her beginning to think much more on her own: “I believe in God with all my might, but have been thinking lately that most of the details seem pretty much beneath his dignity” (37). Kingsolver continues to reference Genesis as Nathan Price persists in his role as creator. Nathan’s determination to bring American vegetables to the Congo illuminates his arrogance. He tries to make something work when it is only in the realm of God to do so. As they start hoeing the earth, Nathan asks, “Leah, why do you think the Lord gave us seeds to grow, instead of having our dinner just spring up out there on the ground like a bunch of field rocks?” Without waiting for a response, he tells her, “Because the Lord helps those who help themselves” (36-37). This is another example of Nathan not quoting from the Bible, but quoting as if it were from the 80 Bible. This axiom is first attributed to Algernon Sydney in “Discourse Concerning Government,” and second to Benjamin Franklin in a 1757 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Ironically, it is a controversial proverb in Christian communities because God is meant to help those who put their faith in the Lord, and the way the expression currently reads implies that one does not need God’s support. More specifically, the Lord helps those who cannot help themselves, but who depend upon God. 26 Having completed his moral lesson to Leah, Nathan proceeds “to hack out a small, square dominion over the jungle” (38). Leah continues by describing her complete faith in her father and in God: “I knew God’s scale to be vast and perfectly accurate. . . . I vowed to work hard for His favor, surpassing all others in my devotion to turning the soil for God’s great glory” (38). Although she speaks of God, we sense that it is really her faith in Nathan that she is speaking of. As they continue planting, they are watched closely by Mama Tataba, “a little jet-black woman” whose job is to live with them “and earn a small stipend by doing the same work she’d done for [their] forerunner in the Kilanga Mission, Brother Fowles.” Brother Fowles “left some mystery in his wake,” apparently entering “into unconventional alliances with the local people, and too he was a Yankee” (38). Overhearing her parents, she learns “he was New York Irish, which tells you a lot, as they are 26 For example, the following text from Proverbs. 3:5: Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. 3:6: In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy path. 81 notorious for being papist Catholics. Father explained to us that he had gone plumb crazy consorting with the inhabitants of the land” (38). Nathan considers Brother Fowles crazy for fraternizing with the natives, but as we will see in the next chapter, Brother Fowles is among the saner characters in this novel, or at least one of the more rational. There are both foreshadowing and irony in Leah’s comment, for it is Nathan who eventually goes insane. Leah does not feel that her family will be in any personal danger because “the Underdowns insisted that the Mission last no more than one year—not enough time for going plumb crazy but only partway, I guess, even if things went poorly” (39). Brother Fowles “had been in Kilanga for six years, which really when you think about it is long enough for about any kind of backsliding you could name” (39). This comment on Brother Fowles’ “backsliding” is also filled with foreshadowing and irony as Leah is the one who eventually makes the Congo her home. This scene is crucial to the book because in it we learn of Nathan’s prejudice, paternalism, and pompous attitude toward the native people. It is also in this scene that Leah gets her first glimpses of her father as the man he really is. After relating what she knows of Brother Fowles, Leah returns to the task at hand—planting the beans. Nathan is creating furrows for the seeds and when Mama Tataba tries to help them, Nathan absolutely refuses to listen. “What you be dig for? Worm grub?” . . . “We’re cultivating the soil, sister,” he said. 82 “That one, brother, he bite,” she said, pointing her knuckly hand at a small tree he was wrestling from his garden plot. White sap oozed from the torn bark. My father wiped his hands on his trousers. “Poisonwood,” she added flatly, emphasizing the descending syllables as if she were equally tired of all three. My father mopped his brow again and launched into the parable of the one mustard seed falling on a barren place, and the other one on good soil. . . . Mama Tataba seemed not to be listening. She pointed again at the red dirt. “You got to be make hills.” He stood his ground, my father, tall as Goliath and pure of heart as David. . . . All this while inspecting Mama Tataba with Christian tolerance, taking his time to formulate the message. “Mama Tataba,’” he said at last, “I’ve been tending the soil ever since I could walk behind my father.” When he says anything at all, even a simple thing about a car or a plumbing repair, it tends to come out like this—in terms that can be interpreted as sacred. Mama Tataba kicked the dirt with her flat, naked sole and looked disgusted. “He won’t be grow. You got to be make hills,” she stated. . . . I was shocked. In Georgia, I’d seen people angered by my father before, or intimidated, but not contemptuous. Never. (39-40) When Mama Tataba is contemptuous of Nathan’s stupidity, Leah is shocked because she has never seen anyone behave that way toward her father before. Leah asks her father what Mama Tataba means by her warnings, and he answers confidently, “‘Leah, our world is full of mysteries’” (40). Mama Tataba tries to warn Nathan both about the Poisonwood Tree and about planting in hills, but Nathan has no interest in either lesson. At this point in the novel, Leah perceives his reaction to Mama Tataba as good Christian tolerance. Her father knows best and he has “the job of his life cut out for him, bringing the Word to a place like this” (40). Leah’s 83 biblical metaphor of her father as both Goliath and David adds another ironic twist to the situation, for indeed, he may have David’s heart of gold, but he is much more the arrogant bully as represented by Goliath. Leah gets her first answer to her question about Mama Tataba’s warning the following morning: Among all of Africa’s mysteries, here were the few that revealed themselves in no time flat. My Father woke up the next morning with a horrible rash on his hands and arms, presumably wounded by the plant that bites. Even his good right eye was swollen shut, from where he’s wiped his brow. Yellow pus ran like sap from his welted flesh. He bellowed when Mother tried to apply the salve. “I ask you, how did I earn this?. . . Great God Almighty, Orleanna. How did this curse come to me when it’s God’s own will to cultivate the soil!” (41) Even though Nathan got himself into this predicament, he absolutely refuses to take responsibility for his actions. All he sees is that he was trying to do God’s work and that he has somehow now been cursed for it. Nathan does not understand that if God helps those who help themselves, perhaps God also helps those who accept the help of others. Nathan storms outside and discovers that Mama Tataba has reshaped the garden by pushing the earth into hills the size and shape of burial mounds. Nathan, who still refuses to be wrong, reshapes them right back. We as readers have learned by now that Nathan means well and that his beliefs are strong, but we also know at this juncture that he is pretty much as the girls are painting him, even through Leah’s rose-colored glasses. He is arrogant, implacable, intransigent, always right, and always using God and the Bible to back 84 up his position. Several days after the Poisonwood incident, and after he regains his “composure and both his eyes,” Nathan instructs Leah that Mama Tataba hadn’t meant to ruin the demonstration garden; there was such a thing as native customs, and they would “need the patience of Job. ‘ She’s only trying to help in her way,’ he said” (41). What should have been a learning experience regarding the land and people becomes transformed into a self-absorbed martyrdom: Nathan believes he is being submitted to undeserving hardships reminiscent of the trials of Job. Kingsolver wants us to see very clearly the view Nathan has of himself as a soldier in the army of God; he is a man who is willing to tolerate anything for his King. By equating himself with Job, Nathan actually highlights the differences between his situation and that of Job. The trials that Job endured were great—both against his property and his person—and the patience with which he tolerated them (despite constantly bemoaning his fate) is what makes his story redeeming. Job had no part in creating his misery, unlike Nathan who has brought his misfortunes upon himself. Nathan’s belief that he is enduring some Job-like test serves Kingsolver’s purpose in bringing the story of Job to mind in all its differences, not similarities, to Nathan. Leah greatly admires Nathan for his “grace” under this pressure to be tolerant of Mama Tataba. She explains her admiration in yet another revealing and ironic passage: Some people find [Father] stern and frightening, but that is only because he was gifted with such keen judgment and purity of heart. He has been singled out for a life of trial, as Jesus was. Being always the first to spot flaws and transgressions, it falls upon Father to deliver penance. Yet 85 he is always ready to acknowledge the potential salvation that resides in a sinner’s heart. I know that someday, when I’ve grown large enough in the Holy Spirit, I will have his wholehearted approval. (41) Leah has previously established that Nathan, like David, is pure of heart. At this juncture she elevates her estimation of her father to that of Jesus. Nathan is no longer a mere man who with the support of God’s blessing can do anything, he is now God-like himself and has the ability to judge, deliver penance and offer salvation. Leah perceives that it is her own spiritual shortcomings that have prevented her from gaining Nathan’s—and Jesus’—approval, and if she continues to open her heart enough to truly embrace the Holy Spirit, then one day Nathan will love her. The idea that Nathan can actually see into a person’s heart because of his keen judgment and purity of heart, that he can be equated in any way with Jesus, is farcical, and Kingsolver places this description of Nathan following his intolerant behavior towards Mama Tataba to underscore this fact. Jesus was a loving and forbearing man, completely unlike Nathan. We will come to see later in The Poisonwood Bible that Leah turns out to have the biggest heart of all the Price family; she is truly filled with the Holy Spirit as Jesus would have understood it, both in her self-sacrifice and her good works for others. While Leah constantly strives to improve her position in Nathan’s eyes, Nathan constantly works to aggrandize himself in the sight of God. As we later learn, this is his distorted way of seeking God’s forgiveness. 86 In contrasting Nathan to both Job and Jesus, Kingsolver puts us in mind of two of the more tolerant figures in the Bible and by doing so creates another situation in which we bring our previous knowledge to bear on the message that she wishes to impart. 27 Throughout The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver wants us both to be involved with the story but also to act as judges for the story. This intentionalist understanding of the biblical stories and their vast differences in Nathan’s story provides another opportunity for reciprocity between reader and text, between what we know to be the way Nathan should behave and how he actually does. Kingsolver points out, through our preexisting knowledge of the Bible, that true Christian tolerance would look quite different from the way he is treating this native woman who is only trying to help them plant their beans.  GENESIS: PART II  Easter in July In one of the earliest chapters of The Poisonwood Bible, Reverend Price organizes an “Easter” service that turns out to be disastrous on many levels. Through this Easter service, Kingsolver is able to establish a number of facts regarding the Price family that prove illuminating for the rest of the novel. The event is narrated by 27 Granted, Job liked to complain an awful lot, but the mythic patience that surrounds him supports the message that Kingsolver wishes to communicate. 87 Rachel, and while the reader has already become a bit wary of self- centered Rachel as a trustworthy narrator, she has also proven to be very insightful. The church that exists in Kilanga is a large, wide-open hut. Rachel tells how “Father had put up an altar made of palm leaves in front, . . . but you could still see black char and stains from . . . the welcome feast. It was an unpleasant reminder of Sodom and Gomorrah, and so forth” (44). Rachel has retained the allusions to Sodom and Gomorrah that Nathan made when they first arrived. They had come in late spring, far from any holy day, and Nathan had been disappointed until he discovered that the Congolese have no calendar or ways of marking the days. They just “count to five, have their market day and start over” (45). Rachel tells us that Nathan “had nothing to lose by announcing his own calendar and placing upon it Easter on the Fourth of July. Why not? He said he needed a focal point to get the church geared up” (45). In deciding that he needed a focal point and that it should be Easter, the message Kingsolver sends to the reader is two-fold and in some ways contradictory. On the one hand, because Easter is such a solemn and important Holy day, Nathan chooses it for his pageant. On the other, however, Kingsolver shows us the arbitrary nature and ultimate meaninglessness of dates, particularly in this context. Just as Christmas was originally chosen for a specific purpose rather than when Jesus was 88 most likely to have been born, Kingsolver’s message here is multifaceted. 28 It is designed to jolt the reader with the seeming absurdity of the proposition, to demonstrate the ultimate unimportance of a date (it is the act that is important), and most important, to show us that it is not the sacredness of Easter that is important to Nathan, but his ability and desire to use the day as a rallying point. She increases the irony of the message by having Nathan choose the Fourth of July—a particularly secular holiday—as the day for his pageant. The Kilanga people do not understand the sacred nature of Easter and use the Easter pageant as an opportunity to play dress up and act in a play. They see the Passion story as only a story and want first to play Jesus rising from the dead (“Father opposed that on principle”) and then to dress up like the Roman guards laughing “with pagan satisfaction because they had managed to kill God” (45). Rachel explains that she is uncomfortable with the natives because, we aren’t all that accustomed to the African race to begin with, since back home they keep to their own parts of town. But here of course, with everyplace being their part of town. . . . I didn’t see there was any need for them to be so African about it. (45) Rachel is the white-blonde counterpart to their black African skin (“I have sapphire blue eyes, white eyelashes, and platinum blonde hair that falls to my waist”) 28 It is generally believed, based upon the biblical descriptions of the shepherds in the fields and the location of the stars, that the most likely time for the Nativity would have been in the spring. December 25 was chosen by the early Christians in Rome to replace (or at least join) the already celebrated birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. They figured that it would be easier to celebrate both births on the same day rather than try to garner support for an entirely new god’s birthday. 89 and both her physical characteristics and straight-forward observations regarding race and color serve to put the reader in the position of understanding how out of place the Price family is (47). Rachel may not like where she is, but she does recognize that she is a guest in someone else’s home, a fact lost on her father. Rachel’s ability to accept that she is part of this different world—the African world—allows the reader an opportunity, should there be any similarly existing prejudice, to gradually begin seeing things from another, more tolerant, perspective. Rachel continues with her account of the “Easter” pageant: When the men with their bloodstained spears came jingling down the church aisle of our church pageant on Easter Sunday, it represented progress, I’m sure, but it wasn’t what Father really hoped for. He had envisioned a baptism. The whole point of Easter in July was supposed to be an altar call, followed by a joyful procession down to the river with children dressed all in white getting saved. (46) Nathan planned to dunk the children under, one by one, envisioning the river “would be jam-packed with purified souls” (46). The men, however, said “no, that was not to be,” and the women were so opposed to getting dunked in the river, “even on hearsay, they all kept their children extra far from the church that day. So the dramatic elements of the pageant were lost on most of the Kilanga” (47). The Easter picnic on the Fourth of July became “one long drawn-out eternity of a Congolese afternoon” (48). There was nothing special about the picnic and, in fact, it serves to separate Nathan even further from the Kilangese. The riverbank turns out to be a slick, muddy, smelly tangle of bushes and Rachel’s description of the river creates some very vivid imagery: 90 The river Kwilu is not like the River Jordan, chilly and wide. It is a lazy, rolling river as warm as bathwater, where crocodiles are said to roll around like logs. No milk and honey on the other side, either, but just more stinking jungle laying low in the haze, as far, far away as the memory of picnics in Georgia. (48) By alluding to the song lyrics of the traditional gospel children’s song, “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” 29 the reader immediately gains a greater understanding of Rachel’s naïveté regarding Nathan’s ill-conceived plans for the perfect ritual and her still childlike view of baptism. We also gain more insight into Nathan’s rigid and distorted views regarding religion and, in particular, his Southern Baptist religion. According to the Southern Baptist Faith and Message, Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer's faith in a crucified buried and risen Saviour, the believer's death to sin the burial of the old life and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus. It is testimony to his faith in the final resurrection of the dead. 30 The important point here is that baptism is the immersion of a believer. If one is immersed without the belief, it becomes a meaningless act and certainly not an act of salvation. The Price family has only been in Kilanga for a month or so when this Easter pageant takes place, and so far, Nathan has yet to take anyone into his fold. 29 Jordan's river is chilly and cold, hallelujah Chills the body but not the soul, hallelujah… The river is deep and the river is wide, hallelujah Milk and honey on the other side, hallelujah 30 The Baptist Faith and Message, article VII, “Baptism and The Lord’s Supper.” Taken from the Official Website of the Southern Baptist Convention., http://www.sbc.net/bfm/bfm2000.asp. 91 Nathan is so caught up in the mechanics of his faith that he has lost the message that accompanies the action. As was apparent when he chose a random date to perform his baptism, in insisting upon the baptism of a group of people for whom it is meaningless focuses on the letter rather than the spirit of his Baptist faith. A key question underlying this scene is why Nathan would WANT to baptize the villagers if they do not believe? Although this scene may appear to be set up to poke fun at Nathan—to show how out of touch he is—I believe it also underscores Kingsolver’s belief that religion must have meaning or intention. In Hebrew, the word for intention or mindfulness is Kavanah. Kavanah is an essential part of meaningful action. If a person prays but without intent, she is just going through the motions—just reading the words—and this has no value. Nathan’s willingness to baptize the villagers without their mindfulness of its significance serves to underscore just how meaningful Kingsolver feels the baptism ritual is, and her hermeneutic is to impress this mindfulness upon the reader as they ingest Nathan’s unfortunate approach to the situation. In addition to Kingsolver’s use of the children’s song as a literary device, Rachel’s juxtaposition of the River Kwilu with the River Jordan reveals her (and our) understanding that baptism is supposed to be done with sacred/holy water. Rachel sees the sacrament in the ritual of baptism, and she is very clear that this is definitely not her river Jordan where John baptized Jesus. It is not even anything close for the villagers and, in fact, the Kilangese see the river as anything but sacred. Nathan was hoping to transform their perceptions because it was the only river at hand, but he 92 has not yet earned their trust or their faith in him as a sacred leader, and they have certainly not accepted Christianity as their faith. Kingsolver’s Jamesian view of the subjective nature of religion is first reflected in this scene—clearly the religious values Nathan holds dear are not reflected in the mystical experience of the villagers, nor can Nathan force baptism into that mystical role. Although the baptism is a dismal failure, Orleanna continues with the picnic, walking through the crowd passing out thighs and drumsticks to the little children who acted just as pleased as punch, licking their fingers and singing out hymns. Yet, for all her slaving over a hot stove, Father hardly noticed how she’d won over the crowd. His mind was two million miles away. He mostly stared out at the river, where no one was fixing to get dunked that day, whatsoever. Just big mats of floating plants going by with stilty-legged birds walking around and around on top, every one of them no doubt thinking he’s king of the world. (49) Nathan ignores the fact that while he has been unable to garner any interest from the villagers, Orleanna has discovered a way to connect to the people. Over and over we will see that Nathan chooses not to see what is in front of his nose. Like Jesus feeding the crowd as a first way of winning them over, Orleanna is gaining the trust of the villagers. Nathan’s myopic focus on the failed baptism ritual precludes him from gaining any insight into his congregants. Although the crocodiles, Rachel’s “floating plants,” are in full view of the family, Nathan continues to insist upon the baptism, consequently showing the 93 Prices’ ignorance about the people they have come to “save.” Crocodiles represent death and the unknown for the Kilangese, but Nathan stands, like the crocodile birds, thinking he is the king of the world, not realizing the perilous position which he is actually in. Finally, Rachel ends this chapter by proclaiming that, while the picnic was festive (it is still only a Fourth of July picnic to her), “it was nothing in terms of redemption” (49). The theme of redemption again returns in an unexpected place. From the beginning of the novel we are set up to understand that the Price women are on a “different path to glory or damnation” (5), and throughout the novel, redemption, salvation, and damnation will all eventually fall outside the traditional religious understanding that it is God alone who redeems. Although Rachel describes this scene in terms that make it appear that it is the Kilangese villagers who were not redeemed, the subtext here is that Nathan is the one who is not redeemed, in either action or deed, and that he will ultimately be the one who requires redemption for his actions. Not only is Nathan unsuccessful in his desire to baptize the villagers, but on the whole, “in terms of redemption,” Easter had become as irrelevant as the day it was placed upon. Ruth May and Tolerance Ruth May, the youngest Price child, gives us the history of the people in the village. Ruth May is able to tell with child-like candor exactly what happens in the village without the cynical judgment we find with Rachel. Ironically, we learn about 94 the harsh realities of life in the Congo from the child who will ultimately be doomed by it. Ruth May looks around her and describes things as she sees them. In describing their closest neighbor, Mama Mwanza, who lost her legs years ago in a fire, Ruth May is fairly astonished that no one even seems to take notice: Mama says that [losing her legs] was the poor woman’s bad luck, because now she has got to go right on tending after her husband and her seven or eight children. They don’t care one bit about her not having any legs to speak of. To them she’s just their mama and where’s dinner? To all the other Congo people, too. Why, they just don’t let on, like she was a regular person. Nobody bats their eye when she scoots by on her hands and goes on down to her field or the river to wash clothes with the other ladies. . . . All the other ladies have big baskets on their heads, too, so nobody stares at Mama Mwanza one way or the other. (51-52) Nobody stares at Mama Mwanza, but they do stare at the Price family. Rachel gets stared at the most because she is so fair. Orleanna understands the staring but gets tired of the family being looked upon as “freaks of nature” (52). Ruth May explains that “here nobody stares at Adah except just a little because she’s white. Nobody cares that she’s bad on one whole side because they’ve all got their own handicap children or a mama with no feet, or their eye put out” (53). The Price family cannot help but stare at the afflicted Africans, however, and even Orleanna soon learns to identify individuals by their afflictions, albeit in a purely descriptive way. This depiction of the Kilangese attitude toward physical differences is Kingsolver’s first important passage in helping set up a comparison between the more tolerant attitude of the villagers and we far more judgmental Americans. 95 Kingsolver sets up the everyman aspect of her story as a way of drawing in the reader to again identify that maybe “other” attitudes are the way things should be, and that we, the non-“other” Western readers, are the ones who could learn something from the very people who we see as different. Ruth May’s description of how the villagers view Adah is meant to serve as a revelatory moment for the reader—to jar us into recognizing within ourselves that we also make judgments based upon how people look. Kingsolver’s message of subjectivity here is clear—we cannot expect that what we consider “normal” is normal for the rest of the world, nor should we judge others on the fact that they are different. By establishing a connection between our behavior and that of the Kilangese—everyone stares but for different reasons—Kingsolver provides a first step toward establishing an understanding of those dissimilar to ourselves and suggests a small commonality between us. As stated above, I believe one of Kingsolver’s goals is to help us to see those values, particular morality, which are common to us all. Nathan, as is to be expected, sees the afflictions of his neighbors purely in terms of salvation: Father said, “They are living in darkness. Broken in body and soul, and don’t even see how they could be healed.” Mama said, “Well maybe they take a different view of their bodies.” Father says the body is the temple. . . . She took the pins out [of her mouth] and said to him, “Well, here in Africa that temple has to do a hateful lot of work in a day.” She said, “Why Nathan, here they have to use their bodies like we use things at home—like your clothes or your garden tools or something. Where 96 you’d be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees! (53) Although they have not been in Africa very long, Orleanna has come to realize that they must transform their expectations and understanding of the people they are living among. They must learn to understand and accept the Kilangese just as the Kilangese accept them for who they are, despite their strangeness. Nathan stubbornly refuses to do that. Although in this chapter Ruth May comments on the physical description of the villagers, the lesson will soon be extended to the spiritual essence of the book: what is considered normal in the religious realm is likewise subjective. Adah’s Use of Language and The Verse In this chapter, Adah continues to be the voice that shows us the hypocrisy of religion. She begins with a quote: “It was neither diabolical nor divine; but it shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood with ran forth” (55). She then tells us how she relates to the quote— “Living in the Congo shakes open the prison house of my disposition and lets all the wicked hoodoo Adah’s run forth”—and challenges Leah to tell her what biblical book the verse is from. Leah responds with, “‘The book of Luke. I’m not sure which one.’” This delights Adah to no end, for it is from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a book with which she has an affinity: “I have a strong sympathy for Dr. Jekyll’s dark desires and Mr. Hyde’s crooked body” (55). Kingsolver’s identification of the biblical verse with the common novel illustrates again how we 97 tend to quote things without always knowing where the quote comes from. Perhaps more important is Kingsolver’s point regarding the authority with which we invest such quotations. If this quote had been from the Bible, would it be more or less effective in getting across its intent? If we were to do an experiment and tell one group that it was from the Bible and another that it was from The Strange Case, would that alter its authority? If we were to switch the example and claim that a biblical quote was derived from that novel, would that affect its meaning? The argument I think Kingsolver makes here is that the power, or lack thereof, of an aphorism should not be in its source but in its meaning. This is not generally the case, however, and we often ascribe much more meaning to something based on who said it or from where it came. As in the above illustration where Nathan combines three biblical chapters to fit his own needs, Kingsolver takes many biblical quotes out of context and both renders them meaningless and far more meaningful by placing them in a new context which becomes entirely valid on its own. Adah’s use of Robert Louis Stevenson demonstrates just the first of many such experiments with authority that Kingsolver employs throughout the novel. Adah also reveals to us a little more about Orleanna at this point: she is a woman who has reined herself in for the sake of Nathan and her children, but she is also a free-spirited woman who is being oppressed. Orleanna rebels in small ways by allowing the girls to read behind their father’s back and, more important, by giving them a different perspective on their religion. 98 Mother has a pagan’s appreciation for the Bible, being devoted to such phrases as “purge me with hyssop,” and “strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round,” and “thou hast put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness.” Likely she would run through the fields dressed in sackcloth, hunting hyssop amongst the wild bulls, if not obligated to the higher plane of Motherhood. (56) The image we get here of Orleanna is quite different from the harried, put-upon minister’s wife. Adah clearly recognizes the sacrifice of self that Orleanna has made for her children and her husband. As a mother in the 1950s, Orleanna’s sacrifice is to be expected. As the novel progresses, we get a gradually clearer picture of Orleanna and come to feel for her sacrifice yet also question her obedience. Our unease with her servitude increases until she finally asks the question we have been asking all along—why did she stay? Adah’s observations about her mother give us an early hint that Kingsolver wishes us to apply a feminist lens to her novel. She opens the door to our view of how the Bible has oppressed women, even while showing us that women can still find something redeeming within it. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, concerned with the importance of biblical hermeneutics on social structures, believes that the continuing cultural-political influence of the Bible has been . . . largely overlooked by many in the contemporary feminist movement, who have written off both organized religion and traditional family rather than branding the patriarchal structures and elements within biblical religion and family. Such a feminist wholesale rejection of religion has played into the hands of the present conservative political backlash. (Schüssler Fiorenza, 69) 99 Branding patriarchy as a religious structure is the first step in acknowledging the cultural-political influence of the Bible. Kingsolver clearly establishes throughout The Poisonwood Bible just how clearly the Bible influences both Nathan’s and the women’s perceptions of themselves and the world in which they find themselves. Adah’s earliest “Mother memories” involve a lighthearted Orleanna who would lie “laughing blue-eyed in the grass, a child herself” (56). All this changed, however, when she discovered that her children were gifted: Mother seemed sobered by this news from our teachers, as if she had earned a special punishment from God. She became secretive and efficient. She reined in our nature walks and settled down to business with a library card. She need not have troubled with secrecy, for all Our Father noticed. Upon hearing [the news], he merely rolled his eyes . . . [and] warned Mother not to flout God’s Will by expecting too much for us. “Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,” he still loves to say, as often as possible. “It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.” (56) Adah bemoans that she “shall never have the opportunity” to have her leather wrecked by being sent off to college, but she does thank her elementary school teacher for having the wisdom to recognize that she was gifted (being the other half of Leah’s gifted brain) and thus spared the “discard heap” of special education. In this passage, Kingsolver reemphasizes that a crippled body does not mean a crippled mind. Adah, it turns out, is the quicker of the two girls, and back in Bethlehem, she made herself famous by being able to do sums faster than the cash register. She is the 100 brilliant, insightful, all-seeing alter-image of her more pragmatic twin, and she offers insightful observations to the reader which reflect in a seemingly objective, if wry, way the reality of how girls are treated because it is “God’s Will.” Her account continues with the biblical language we will come to associate with Adah: “When the rainy season fell on us in Kilanga, it fell like a plague. . . . A pestilence of rain we received” (58). All the rain awakens the African Grey Parrot, Methuselah, that they have inherited from Brother Fowles, and we are introduced to more key religious elements in the novel: On the first day of rain, [Methuselah] raised his head and screeched through the roar of the storm his best two phrases in our language: first, in Mama Tataba’s side-slant voice, “Wake up Brothah Fowels! Wake up Brothah Fowels! Then in a low-pitched growl, “Piss off Methuselah!” The Reverend Price looked up from his desk by the window and made note of the words, “Piss Off.” The morally suspect ghost of Brother Fowles was thick upon us. “That,” the Reverend declared, “is a Catholic bird.” Mother looked up from her sewing. My sisters and I shifted in our chairs, expecting Father to assign Methuselah “The Verse.” (59) In this one small passage, the reader gains additional insight into Brother Fowles and his different way of doing things, Nathan’s view toward Christians other than he is, and further clues concerning Nathan’s approach to Christianity. Nathan immediately brands the bird Catholic, just as he did Brother Fowles, because of the bird’s language. The family is so uncomfortable that the bird’s behavior has roused Nathan’s ire that they all sit in dread waiting what will happen next. Much of the 101 final groundwork is now to be laid for the rest of the novel as Adah explains The Verse: The dreaded Verse is our household punishment. Other lucky children might merely be thrashed for their sins, but we Price girls are castigated with the Holy Bible. The Reverend will level his gaze at you and declare, “You have The Verse.” Then slowly, as we squirm on his hook, he writes on a piece of paper, for example, Jeremiah 48:18. Then say ye good-bye to sunshine or the Hardy Boys for an afternoon as you, poor sinner, must labor with a pencil in your good left hand to copy out Jeremiah 48:18, “Come down from your throne of glory and sit in the mire, O daughter that dwells in Dibon,” and additionally the ninety- nine verses that follow it. One hundred full verses carried out in longhand because it is the final one that reveals your crime. In the case of Jeremiah 48:18, the end is Jeremiah 50:31, “Lo! I am against you, O insolence! saith the oracle of the Lord, the God of Hosts; for your day has come, your time of reckoning.” Only upon reaching that one-hundredth verse do you finally understand you are being punished for the sin of insolence. Although you might well have predicted it. (59) Kingsolver is brilliant here in her model of how the Bible can be used for ill as well as good. She turns the traditional use of Bible quotes on its head. The idea that a minister would use the Bible as punishment is, in itself, an unusual and rather negative portrayal of Christian faith. The Bible should be considered a tool of comfort, of teaching love and understanding, and to have it be used in this manner is certainly an abuse. This is perhaps the most damning thing we have yet to learn about Nathan, but at this stage it is also no surprise. Kingsolver shows us here her awareness that the Bible is linguistically useful on many levels. Nathan Price believes that his daughters have sinned in some way and that the Bible always has an 102 appropriate verse to teach them about the evil of their ways. While Nathan may see this as effective, it promotes in the reader an opposite reaction. At some level, it is even reminiscent of Pollyanna, who was able to do exactly the opposite and find a “glad text” to suit any situation, highlighting the negative way that Nathan uses the Bible. Kingsolver shows through this example that she believes that the intent of the Bible is that it should be used for Good and not Evil. Her theology throughout The Poisonwood Bible is that Christianity and the use of the Holy Bible should be about love and redemption. Nathan’s Christianity, however, is about sin, retribution, and his own skewed version of salvation. All the girls, especially Rachel, “live in terror of the cursed Verse” (60). Adah explains that Nathan sometimes has them copy from “Old King James, but prefers to use the American Translation that includes his peculiarly beloved Apocrypha. That is one pet project of the Reverend’s: getting other Baptists to swallow the Apocrypha” (59). It seems strange that Nathan, such a devout Baptist, would prefer the Apocrypha, but he does so because it contains the complete accounts of the prophet Daniel, from which he quotes extensively. This is an ironic fact about Nathan because he believes Catholics to be depraved, yet he prefers the Catholic canon. This proves particularly interesting in light of the use that Nathan makes of the Bible. Alongside her discourse on the nature of biblical authority, Kingsolver adds another interesting discussion: what is the authority of the Apocrypha? She makes an assumption within the novel that her readers are familiar with the concept of 103 Apocrypha, books with disputed canonical status which have been omitted from the Jewish and Protestant Bibles. 31 Do biblical stories have the same authority if they are apocryphal? I would venture to say that Kingsolver thinks that they have as much, or as little, authority as the rest of the Bible because her use for the Bible is primarily a pragmatic one—use the Bible for what it can teach us about how to treat each other. It is a vision of community and acceptance, just as Jesus taught. 32 Nathan picks and chooses what portions of the Bible he wants to use, whether canonical or not, even whether accurate or not, and this causes us as readers to reflect upon how we perceive the authority of the Bible and its meaning for us. The underlying questions in this passage force us into a hermeneutic dialogue with the text and our faith regarding our own understanding of authority. Adah continues: But in the case of the cursing parrot that first long, rainy day, Methuselah could not be made to copy the Bible. Curiously exempt from the Reverend’s rules was Methuselah, in the same way Our Father was finding the Congolese people beyond his power. Methuselah was a sly little representative of Africa itself, living openly in our household. One might argue, even, that he was here first. (60) Kingsolver returns here to the idea first alluded to by Orleanna in the opening chapter that Americans are usurpers in Africa. We have yet in the novel to get to 31 I do not know if that assumption can be supported within the general Protestant public. 32 Of course, Nathan does not focus on the positive teachings of Jesus and the New Testament, another strange fact about this Baptist minister. 104 most of the politics, but this is an example of how she opens the door just a crack to let us take a peek at the rebellion to come. We also see a glimmer here of Nathan’s inability to connect with the villagers. Methuselah represents Africa and the Africans—they were here first and will continue to live as they always have, just as Africa will always be as it has always been. Adah closes this chapter describing the incessant rain with more biblically influenced language: “The deluge finally stopped just before sunset. The world looked stepped upon and drenched, but my sisters ran out squealing like the first free pigs off the ark, eager to see what the flood had left us” (61). They found that the flood had “swamped the flat bed and the seeds rushed out like runaway boats. . . . Most had already sprouted in the previous weeks, but their little roots had not held them to the Reverend Farmer’s flat-as-Kansas beds against the torrent.” Adah cynically recounts that after the flood, Nathan and Leah replanted the ruined garden: No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds. (63) Up until now, we have seen Nathan as belligerent and unreasonable. By revealing that he is willing to learn from his mistakes, Kingsolver shows a little more humanity in him—he may not be a rigid stereotype after all. Her language underscores, however, just how unwilling he was to accept the advice of Mama 105 Tataba (and that he would never admit he was wrong) while simultaneously foreshadowing the burial that is yet to come. Leah, Methuselah, and the Cake Mix Rachel’s birthday comes in late August, and all Orleanna’s Betty Crocker plans for a sweet sixteen party come undone. Humidity causes the transported cake mix to become “transfigured like Lot’s poor wife who looked back at Gomorrah and got turned to a pillar of salt” and Orleanna, cursing, pounds it against the stove to show Leah what has happened. The aftermath of Orleanna’s outburst comes a little later through the mimicking Methuselah: The first time my father heard Methuselah say, “Damn,” his body moved strangely, as if he received the spirit or a twinge of bad heartburn. . . . Mother excused herself and went into the house. Rachel, Adah, and I were left on the porch, and he looked at each of us in turn. We had known him to forbear with a silent grimace when Methuselah said, “Piss off,” but of course that was the doing of Brother Fowles. The mote in his brother’s eye, not the sin of his own household. Methuselah had never said, “Damn” before, so this was something new, spoken right out very chipper in a feminine tone of voice. “Which one of you taught Methuselah to say that word?” he demanded. I felt sick to my stomach. None of us spoke. For Adah that’s normal, of course, and for that very reason she often gets accused when none of us speaks up. And truthfully, if any of us was disposed to use curse words, it would be Adah, who could not care less about sin and salvation. . . . I myself would not curse, in or out of Methuselah’s hearing or even in my dreams, because I crave heaven and to be my father’s favorite. 106 . . . “I fail to understand,” said Father, who understands everything, “why you would have a poor dumb creature condemn us all to eternal suffering.” (66) In this passage, Kingsolver again emphasizes Nathan’s distorted view of salvation. It seems almost pathetic that Nathan believes a bird mimicking a forbidden word will condemn them all to eternal damnation. Leah, who has been so greatly influenced by Nathan’s perceptions, also sees this incident in terms of sin and salvation, and I think Kingsolver intends that we find this passage both revealing and amusing. We understand the passion with which Nathan believes in the evil of this incident, yet it is hard to take Nathan seriously, and we feel compassion for the girls. The passage also underscores Leah’s view of Adah, her irreligious other half, and her desperate desire to win her father’s approval. Nathan knows that Brother Fowles can no longer be blamed for Methuselah’s sins, and because he does not know whom to blame (or does but will not admit it), he makes all three girls write The Verse: “The Lord will forgive you if you ask,” he said very disgusted and quiet. . . . “Our Lord is benevolent. But that poor African bird can’t be relieved of what you’ve taught it. It’s an innocent creature that can only repeat what it hears. The damage is done.” . . . “If there’s anything to be learned from this, it’s about the stink and taint of original sin. I expect you’d better think about that while you do The Verse.” Our hearts fell. “All three of you,” he said. “Book of Numbers 29:34.” . . . “I already knew how Numbers 29:34 came out, as I’d gotten it before. The hundredth verse winds up at 32:32, 107 with how when you sin against the Lord you get found out, and to watch what proceeds out of your mouth” (67). 33 The passage that Nathan chooses for the girls has nothing to do with the sin and taint of original sin (an Augustinian concept to be found only in Christianity), but rather is about going to war for God. It follows the retelling of the Israelites disinclination to cross into the land of Israel and God’s punishment of forcing them to wander the desert for 40 years. When the 40 years are up, Moses once again tells them they must create an army for God: 20: And Moses said unto them, If ye will do this thing, if ye will go armed before the LORD to war, 21: And will go all of you armed over Jordan before the LORD, until he hath driven out his enemies from before him, 22: And the land be subdued before the LORD: then afterward ye shall return, and be guiltless before the LORD, and before Israel; and this land shall be your possession before the LORD. 23: But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out. While this passage has nothing to do with what comes out of one’s mouth, it does apply to the fact that someone must have said “Damn” and now her sin is about to be found out: We all knew very well who had been the one to yell that word Damn! She’d said it over and over when she wept over the wreck of her useless cake mixes. . . . Once in a great while we just have to protect her. Even back when we were very young I remember running to throw my arms around Mother’s knees when he regaled her with words and 33 The passage Leah refers to is actually 32:23. I am not sure if this is a typo or Kingsolver just miswrote it. 108 worse. For curtains unclosed or slips showing—the sins of womanhood. . . . My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God’s foot soldiers, while our mother’s is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit. (68) From this we see that even Leah, who fiercely loves her father and is adopting his religious fervor, if not his style, sees that his faith is harsh and relentless. Leah recognizes, and informs us should we have still missed it up to now, that her mother’s faith is warm and comforting. This flashback also discloses another glimpse of how Nathan treats his wife, and what petty infractions he considers “the sins of womanhood.” Despite her best effort to idolize Nathan, Leah’s perception of him is gradually becoming more realistic. Kingsolver spells out for us Nathan’s perception of himself as a foot soldier of God as she sets up the dichotomy between the husband and wife’s two styles of faith. By dividing them into “bronze breastplate” and “second-hand coat,” Kingsolver dramatically symbolizes the differences between how Nathan sees Christianity and how Kingsolver believes it should be. Adah, bangäla and the Apocrypha Deciding that the best way to reach the hungry villagers might be through their stomachs, Nathan promises them “the bounty of the Lord, more fish than they had ever seen in their lives” (70). Nathan orders all the men to go out in canoes and throw dynamite into the river. Nathan also goes out into the river: “The word of Christ is beloved!” he cries, standing precariously in his boat. “Tata Jesus is bangala!” So determined he is to win or force or drag them over to the 109 Way of the Cross. Feed the belly first, he announced at dinner one night, seized with his brilliant plan. Feed the belly and the soul will come. (Not having noticed, for a wife is beneath notice, that this is exactly what our mother did when she killed all the chickens.) But after the underwater thunder, what came was not souls but fish. (70) . The plan turns out to be disastrous as there is no ice to keep the fish fresh, a fact which slipped his mind and forced him to perform “a backward version of the loaves and fishes, trying to stuff ten thousand fish into fifty mouths, did the Reverend Price” (70). Two things are particularly significant in this passage. The first is that we get the first attempts by Nathan to speak in the Kilangese language: “Tata Jesus is bangala”— Father Jesus is beloved. This becomes crucial in later chapters when we learn the intricacies of the language. The second is Adah’s reference to her mother’s act of feeding the villagers which goes completely unnoticed by Nathan. Orleanna’s banquet was quite successful, whereas Nathan’s was not, and Adah’s reference to the backward version of Jesus’ miracles of the loaves underscores again Nathan’s inability to connect with the villagers. At communion the following Sunday, he is careful to avoid any “disturbing allusions to eating flesh and drinking blood” (70). In his attempts to make himself more understood by the villagers, Nathan finally employs a translator, and we are first introduced to Anatole, who will become integral to the story: The church service lasts twice as long now because the Reverend has to say it once in English, and then the schoolteacher Tata Anatole repeats it all in Kikongo. Our Father finally caught on, nobody was understanding his horrible stabs at French or Kikongo, either one. (70) 110 The sermon Nathan chooses on that Sunday is the apocryphal story of Susanna, the beautiful and pious wife of the rich man Joakim. While bathing in her garden, two of Joakim’s advisors saw her naked, devised an evil plan, and demanded that she lie with them or they would accuse her of meeting a man in the garden. The righteous Susanna naturally refuses even though she knows this means she will be stoned for adultery. Not finding the particular inspiration in this story that Nathan likely intends, Adah comments, “We were not supposed to wonder what kind of husband was this Joakim, who would kill his own lovely wife rather than listen to her side of the story” (71). Nathan pauses dramatically in his telling of the story and continues: “But God would not let this happen,” the Reverend growled, like a dog awakened by a prowler. Then rising an octave like “the Star Spangled Banner”: God stirred up the holy spirit of a man named Daniel!” Oh, hooray, Daniel to the rescue. Our Father loves Daniel, the original Private Eye. Tata Daniel (he called him, to make him seem like a local boy) stepped in and demanded to question the two advisors separately. Tata Daniel asked them what kind of tree Susanna was supposedly standing under when she met this man in the garden. [The two men’s stories then contradict each other and Susanna is saved by Daniel]. How stupid, that they had not even conspired to get their stories straight. All the evildoers in the Bible seem spectacularly dumb. I watched Tata Anatole…and I realized this slick trick schoolteacher could be saying anything under the sun. Our father would never be the wiser. So they stoned the dame and married two more wives apiece and lived happily ever after. I yawned, uninspired yet again by the pious and beautiful Susanna. I was unlikely ever to have her problems. (70) 111 We see here from Adah that her father uses examples from the Bible that are not only useless to the villagers (and her acknowledgement that Anatole could be telling them anything) but that are useless to his daughters. This is the first of the three stories from the Greek Translation of the book of Daniel that Kingsolver uses (“Bel and the Serpent” and “The Three Holy Children” being the other two). As discussed above, Protestants do not use this apocryphal version of the Bible, yet Nathan finds Daniel—whose name means “God will Judge”—particularly inspiring. So much of Nathan’s modus operandi stems from his personal experience with what he believes to be God’s justice, that his affinity with Daniel makes complete sense. Kingsolver’s use of these apocryphal stories both within her text and as chapter titles reinforces the ambiguous nature of the biblical text. Her use of Daniel instructs us from within a biblical context, yet it also demonstrates that she can effectively teach a separate lesson from outside that context. This story is traditionally used, as Nathan uses it, to promote righteous behavior among women. If a woman remains pure and stands up for what she believes in, even upon threat of death, her virtue will save her in the end. And Daniel, a man of God who acts in the name of Justice, the “original Private Eye” as Adah calls him, represents the idea that Truth will always prevail. By putting this story in Adah’s mouth, Kingsolver twists the story’s meaning, however, forcing the reader to question, as Adah does, what lesson we actually gain from the allegory. When Adah asks what kind of man would rather kill his wife than listen to her, Kingsolver again employs a hermeneutic of 112 suspicion that is no different from any other feminist theological questioning of the Bible. How are we to trust a story in which such a thing could happen to a virtuous woman? What if Daniel had not been there to save her? We understand through implication that it is only because God intervened through Daniel that Susanna was saved. Nathan does not dwell on Daniel’s admonition to those who condemned Susanna—“Are you so stupid, Sons of Israel, as to condemn a daughter of Israel unheard, and without troubling to find out the truth?” (Daniel 13:48) — which makes Kingsolver’s use of this passage even more interesting. Daniel stands up for the right of Susanna, a woman, to be heard, but this element is completely lost on Nathan and not even worth mentioning by him. Kingsolver’s use of these stories in the mouth of Nathan also compels us to consider questions of canon. Although these Daniel stories are not canonical within the Protestant tradition, they are still considered biblical, causing them to fall into a nebulous no-man’s land with regard to sanctity. If these stories are sanctified to Catholics but are not within the Protestant canon, do they still carry the weight of the canonized stories? biblical stories are valuable in regard to their instructive worth, and those stories which are apocryphal seem equally valuable—although perhaps not equally holy—despite the fact that they are not canon. This novel helps us see the value in canon and Apocrypha, by using canon and Apocrypha, and it demonstrates that there is an inherent value in the story whether or not it is considered canon. The reality is that most people reading this novel would probably be unaware that the stories Nathan uses are in fact apocryphal, unless they are very well-versed in the 113 book of Daniel. This in itself makes Kingsolver’s point that stories are valuable for the lessons they teach (or do not teach), not for where they originate. After the story of Daniel, Nathan returns to the topic of baptism. When the service concludes, Mama Tataba takes the girls back to the house, shouting at the girls that Reverend Price better give up the idea of baptism. Adah comments that, “Our Father could not seem to accept what seemed clear enough even to a child: when he showered the idea of baptism—batiza—on people here, it shrunk them away like water on a witch” (73). This immediate connection with the Wizard of Oz is apropos. Water is described as destructive rather than redemptive, and by connecting with this well-known work of fiction, Kingsolver again emphasizes the folly of Nathan’s actions in his unceasing attempts to baptize the villagers, whom we now know for certain do not understand him or his motives. Leah’s Sense of Justice In the final chapter of Book One, Leah has several enlightening conversations with her father that prove to be turning points in her spiritual development and personal maturity. One day in late July, Nathan suddenly turns to her: “Leah, do you know what they spent the last Bible convention in Atlanta arguing about? . . . They debated about the size of heaven, at the Bible convention. How many furlongs it is. How many long, how many wide— they set men with adding machines to figuring it out. Chapter twenty-one of Revelation sets it out in reeds, and other books tell it in cubits, and not a one of them quite matches up.” Inexplicably, he sounded put out with the men who brought their adding machines to the Bible 114 convention, and possibly with the Bible itself. I felt extremely uneasy. “Well, I sure hope there will be room enough for everybody,” I said. . . . “There will always be room for the righteous, he said. “Amen,” I breathed, on safer ground. (77-78) Nathan’s sudden confiding in Leah comes as a surprise to her. She is not used to Nathan speaking candidly to her about anything, but the fact that he is speaking to her in tones of disapproval regarding his fellow ministers throws her. Kingsolver’s belittlement of the Bible convention comes through loud and clear in this paragraph, a role she does not usually give to Nathan. If he is disappointed, or even disgusted, with the topic of the last Bible convention, how much more so should we who see ourselves as more rational be with it? Leah takes him off the topic, hoping to move him onto safer ground, but Nathan continues, making Leah even more uncomfortable by talking about righteousness and justice: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, and the Lord delivers him out of them all. But you know, Leah, sometimes He does not deliver us out of our hardships but through them.” “Heavenly Father, deliver us,” I said, although I didn’t care for this new angle. Father had already bent his will to Africa by remaking his garden in mounds, the way they do here. This was a sure sign to God of his humility and servitude, and it was only fair to expect our reward [that the plants would now bear fruit]. So what was this business of being delivered through hardships? Did Father aim to suggest God was not obligated to send us down any beans or squash at all, no matter how we might toil in His name? That He just proposed to sit up there and consign us to hardships one right after another? Certainly it wasn’t my place to scrutinize God’s great plan, but what about the balancing scales of justice? (78) 115 Nathan sees himself as the afflicted righteous man whom God is putting through the paces. Although he does not say it, he is again like Job who puts up with trial after trial to prove his devotion. Leah isn’t so happy about this, and this exchange highlights her naïve notions of justice: if God were truly a just God, their toil should be bringing them runner beans. Leah’s childish idea that God might be obligated to send down squash for the sake of “the balancing scales of justice” will eventually seem as ludicrous to her as it is to the reader. Mixing the metaphors of God’s justice with the scales of Justitia, the Roman Goddess of Justice also emphasizes Kingsolver’s point that Leah is a bit confused. 34 By the beginning of August, Nathan is desperate to baptize the villagers. He sees this as his only tangible means of accomplishing his mission in Kilanga, and “his first sermon in August waxed great and long on the subject of baptism” (79). After the sermon, Mama Tataba goes out and gives Nathan a good talking to, after which she storms back into the house and informs Orleanna that she quit. “I won’t be stay here,” she declared. “You send a girl get me at Banga you need be help. I go show you cook eel. They got a big eel downa river yesterday. That dish a good be for children.” That was her final advice for our salvation. (79) Although it is only a brief allusion, Kingsolver again puts in our minds differing ideas of salvation. To Nathan, it requires baptism; to Mama Tataba, salvation comes 34 I particularly like this mixed metaphor because it introduces both a feminist and legal element to Leah’s imagery, both factors that become much stronger as the book develops. 116 from keeping children healthy. When Leah returns outside, she finds her father staring down at a wasp in his hand, and he gently tells her that there aren’t any pollinators for the beans—they have all the wrong bugs. Leah senses his befuddlement and sense of betrayal at this revelation: We sat together looking through the crooked stick fence at the great variety of spurned blossoms in my father’s garden. I felt so many different things right then: elation at my father’s strange expression of tenderness, and despair for his defeat. We had worked so hard, and for what? I felt confusion and dread. I sensed that the sun was going down on many things I believed in. (80) Nathan then explains to Leah why Mama Tataba was yelling at him so adamantly—a girl from the village had been killed the previous year: “She got killed and eaten by a crocodile. They don’t let their children step foot in the river, ever. Not even to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb.” My own baptism, and every one I have witnessed so far, took place in something like a large bathtub or small swimming pool in the Baptist Church. The worst harm that could come to you might be that you would slip on the stairs. . . . “I fail to understand,” he said, “why it would take six months for someone to inform me of that simple fact.” The old fire was seeping back into this strange wistful husk of my father. I felt gratified. (81) Nathan had been informed in more subtle ways that the villagers would not go near the river, and the very presence of the crocodiles during the picnic should have been a clue to him, but he needed it spelled out for him, which is what Mama Tataba finally does. These interchanges between Leah and her father presage a shift 117 in the relationship of Leah and Nathan, but also of Leah to God. They demonstrate Nathan’s dawning understanding that this dark place is something he will never come to understand. This could be a turning point for him in accepting the reality of this mission he has chosen to accept. He now knows, at least he has been informed, that baptism in the river is an impossibility, and he seems to better understand that he has less power, even in the army of God, than he once thought he held. After Nathan’s revelation to Leah, Methuselah calls from the cage on the porch. “Ko ko ko!” Methuselah called. “Come in!” my father retorted, with impatience rising in his craw. “Wake up, Brother Fowles!” “Piss off!” my father shouted. I held my breath. He shoved himself straight to his feet, strode to the porch, and flung open the door of Methuselah’s cage. . . . “You’re free to go,” my father said. (82) Methuselah backs away from Nathan, so Nathan takes the bird out and hurls him up into the air. When he hurled the bird up at the treetops, it didn’t fly at first but only sailed across the clearing like a red-tailed badminton shuttlecock. . . . [Suddenly] in a burst of light Methuselah opened his wings and fluttered like freedom itself, lifting himself to the top of our Kentucky Wonder vines and the highest boughs of the jungle that will surely take back everything once we are gone. (82) This closing description of Methuselah flying like freedom itself to the highest boughs foreshadows the end of the book, for ultimately, the jungle does take 118 back everything—both what belonged to it and what did not. The name Methuselah—Metushelach—is believed by many to come from two roots: The word metu, derived from the word mot meaning “death” and the “u” suffix meaning “their”—“their death”—and the word shelach , meaning “to send something.” In the Bible, Methuselah dies the year that God sends the Great Flood. Some believe that his name is a prophetic harbinger of this disaster. 35 Methuselah comes to represent, with his name and his red feathers, both hope for a brighter future and a recognition that although freedom has wings, it can be easily ensnared. When Nathan tells Methuselah to “piss off” it clearly marks a change in Nathan and Leah’s perception of him. Leah begins to see her father in a new way, one that is not entirely positive, but one that is definitely more realistic. Leah’s naïve sense of justice will soon be replaced with an entirely different understanding and valuing of what is Just. This is the true start of Leah’s moral maturation, and it becomes clearer from this point forward that Leah will be the one to lead us gently where Kingsolver wants us to go. 35 http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/emagazine/010.html. There is also a translation of Methuselah’s name to mean “man of the dart,” but the harbinger definition is far more interesting. 119 CHAPTER THREE BOOK TWO: THE REVELATION Orleanna: Sanderling Island At the beginning of “Book Two: The Revelation,” Orleanna’s flashback becomes more revealing, more feminist, and more political in nature. Looking back, Orleanna acknowledges that she felt frightened and powerless—more particularly, she was frightened of power, particularly the power to stand up to her husband. Part of what The Poisonwood Bible explores is the point at which a woman has had enough and takes back her power—or takes it in the first place. It is a novel of agency, for all the girls find their woman’s voice in one way or another. Even Ruth May ultimately takes some power when she becomes “the eyes in the trees” at the conclusion of the book. In this sense, it can be considered a feminist novel. What places it back into a universal context is not just that Orleanna finds her voice but her recognition that she always thought the Bible prescribed in some way what her behavior must be, and that Nathan, as that voice of the Bible, was who she must obey. She recalls a particular incident and remarks: Until that moment I’d thought I could have it both ways: to be one of them and also my husband’s wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars. 120 We would all have to escape Africa by a different route. (89) Orleanna realizes for herself and her daughters that they must leave Africa, and she feels guilt about this, for as she was righteously flag waving, the Congo was falling apart around her. Orleanna cannot stop imagining the deaths of her children, and when sleep eludes her, she looks to “the words of the Psalms to numb [her] mind” (95): Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine honour dwelleth. Gather not my soul with sinners, nor my life with bloody men. Redeem me. (95) In quoting Psalm 26, verses 8, 9, and 11, Orleanna excludes verse 10, which speaks specifically about the bloody (bloodthirsty) men “in whose hands is mischief, and their right hands full of bribes. But as for me I will walk in mine integrity. Redeem me, and be merciful unto me.” This is a psalm in which David reminds God that he has lived with integrity and stayed away from wicked men, and therefore to redeem him. Orleanna uses it as a comfort—she loves her religion, yet needs strength to bear living with Nathan. She unfortunately is coming to see him as one of the “bloody men,” and she asks for God’s redemption. The stories of the Bible open her mind to the strangeness of the world she now inhabits, such as the common sight of Pygmies out hunting in the forest. She explains that “perhaps it was reading the Bible that had set my mind in such an open frame, ready to believe in any bizarre possibility” (95). The implications of this 121 comment are that the stories in the Bible are so far-fetched that we are capable of believing anything, and that they are just that—stories. Seeing Pygmies hunting and legless women seems no less strange than plagues of frogs or water springing from stones. Orleanna has found herself in a place where she must believe. Kingsolver’s explanation that accepting such strange happenings in one’s every day world is no less fantastic than what one reads in the Bible encourages the reader to consider that biblical stories may indeed be true, or at least contain elements of truth within them. In introducing this idea through Orleanna, Kingsolver presents us with a different kind of narrative theology, one that challenges traditional ways of understanding Bible stories: perhaps the Bible isn’t about trying to figure out what God wants by understanding the biblical narrative (as it is normatively approached in both Christianity and Judaism), but about understanding what we want and/or need from God by telling our own stories with the Bible as our guide. If we can accept the strange truths in the Bible, we can more readily accept the strange truths in the world around us. Through Orleanna, Kingsolver also now introduces the reader, in a seemingly factual way, to the strife taking place in the Congo. President Eisenhower spoke of having everything under control; the Kennedy boy said Uncle Ike was all washed up and we need look no farther than the Congo—Congo!—for evidence of poor U.S. leadership, the missile gap, and proof of the communist threat. The likes of Eleanor Roosevelt declared we ought to come forth with aid and bring those poor children into the twentieth century. And yet Mr. George F. Kennan, the retired diplomat, allowed that he felt “not the faintest moral responsibility for Africa.” It’s not 122 our headache, he said. Let them go communist if they feel like it. (95) Kingsolver has alluded to the political situation in the Congo before now, but this news report begins to tell us what is actually occurring. Orleanna laments that she knows things are falling apart for the Congo, but “it was beyond me to weigh such matters, when my doorstep harbored snakes that could knock a child dead by spitting in her eyes” (96). Orleanna tells this story after her child has died by snakebite, and she feels the need to justify her disinclination to be concerned about anything beyond her front door because the concerns at her front door are so immediate. She also explains that Nathan does not take any of her concerns seriously, however; they “have the Lord’s protection . . . because [they] came to Africa in His service” (96).With such a dismissal by her husband, Orleanna voices the dilemma of her faith: Yet we sang in Church, “Tata Nzolo”! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I never could quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment. Under that uncertain roof, where was the place for my girls? No wonder they hardly seemed to love me half the time—I couldn’t step in front of my husband to shelter them from his scorching light. They were expected to look straight at him and go blind. (96) 123 In describing the complexities of synthesizing Nathan’s God of Wrath with a God of Forgiveness, Orleanna reveals the dilemma of religion within so many people. The issue is not only whether the vengeful God of the Hebrew Bible can live in harmony with the forgiving Jesus but how we reconcile that they are meant to be the same God. Can religion be both life-insurance and life sentence? Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of these questions is in discovering how we are meant to pass along our beliefs to our children, especially if we are uncertain in those beliefs. Because Nathan is such a strong religious presence in the Price household, Orleanna has a difficult time separating what comes from the Bible and what comes from Nathan. Even more difficult for her is reconciling her interpretation of the Bible with Nathan’s interpretation. Orleanna blurs the lines between God and Nathan, describing the Tata Nzolo in her own children’s house: the light emanating from Nathan’s self-righteousness is blinding. It’s hard to imagine a mortal man more unwilling to change his course than Nathan Price. He couldn’t begin to comprehend, now, how far off the track he was with his baptismal fixation. The village chief, Tata Ndu, was loudly warning people away from the church on the grounds that Nathan wanted to feed their children to the crocodiles. Even Nathan might have recognized this was a circumstance that called for reconciliation. But reconciliation with Tata Ndu was a mighty cross to bear. (96-97) In addition to the villagers’ refusal to be baptized,—Nathan finally conceded to merely “sprinkling” the sinners—Nathan was having to cope with other appalling differences of religious opinion. Tata Ndu wanted a renunciation of Brother Fowles’ 124 “peculiar ideas about having only one wife at a time. Imagine, Tata Ndu said, a shamefaced chief who could only afford a single wife!” (97). The chief expected Nathan to “disavow any such absurdities before he could endorse [the] church” (97). Without the chief’s blessing, there would be no congregation, but such concessions, Orleanna explains, would compromise Nathan’s religious integrity: 36 Nathan burned. There is no other way to say it. Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all, he declared to the sky, squinting up at God and demanding justice (97). 37 Unfortunately, Nathan believes that God owes him a congregation who will listen to the word of God (HIS word of God), and anything less than this is an injustice. Quoting Psalm 34:19, Nathan re-associates himself with holy men of the Bible—in this case, David. We already know that Nathan considers himself a righteous man, and now he is afflicted with still more “injustice”: the Kilangese congregation is settled in their pagan polygamous ways. Nathan wrestles with this burden of multiple wives until, Orleanna tells us, he is “reborn, with a stone in place of his heart. Nathan would accept no more compromises” (97). Nathan again determines that God is testing him like Job, and the point of that particular parable was that Job had done no wrong to begin with. Nathan felt it had been a mistake to bend his will, in any way, to Africa. To reshape 36 I would assume here that such concessions would compromise any believer’s religious integrity. 37 Psalm 34:19. This psalm is said by David after he feigns madness in front of King Abimelech so that he may be freed. I have to believe that Kingsolver chose it not only for its content, but for its ironic allusion to Nathan’s incipient insanity. No reader could be expected to know this about the psalm, which is why I have included this footnote. 125 his garden into mounds; to submit . . . on the subject of river baptism . . . It had all been a test of Nathan’s strength, and God was displeased with the outcome. He would not fail again. (97) Feeling that he has done no wrong, Nathan becomes even more stiff-necked and notices his family less and less: While my husband’s intentions crystallized as rock salt, and while I preoccupied myself with private survival, the Congo breathed behind the curtain of forest, preparing to roll over us like a river. My soul was gathered with sinners and bloody men, and all I was thinking of was how to get Mama Tataba to come back, or what we should have brought with us from Georgia. I was blinded from the constant looking back: Lot’s Wife, I only ever saw the gathering clouds. (98) This is an excellent closing passage to look at the symmetrical nature of Kingsolver’s storytelling and her use of biblical quotes fore and aft. Whereas in the opening quote, Orleanna asks God to keep her away from sinners and bloody men, she now casts herself among these sinners for being concerned with only her own small world. In similar parallel constructions, she now admits that she was blinded, but not by Nathan, as she feared for her daughters, but by her own selfish needs. Although Nathan sees himself as Job, Orleanna casts him in the role of Lot. As we saw above in Chapter Two, Lot is not a character of whom Kingsolver thinks especially highly. By alluding to the story of Lot’s wife and the destruction of these cities, we get another example of how Kingsolver creates an alternate understanding of the biblical allegory. This time she twists the well-known story so that the outcome is reversed: Nathan is the one hardened with “rock salt,” and although 126 Orleanna sees herself not hardened, but blinded by the constant looking back, she is the one who moves on and is eventually redeemed.  THE THINGS WE LEARNED: KILANGA, JUNE 30, 1960  Leah and the Social Construction of Belief Leah begins the previous section, “The Things We Carried,” with “We came from Bethlehem.” She begins this section with “In the beginning we were just about in the same boat as Adam and Eve” (101). As did Orleanna in her opening remarks, Leah continues the Garden of Eden analogy by explaining that their need to learn the name of everything connects them with the first family’s need to name everything. In the Bible, naming traditionally instills power, but in this situation, the naming demonstrates their powerlessness. Leah is in awe that her very own African backyard “resembles the Garden of Eden,” and she decides that when she is a grown-up lady in America she will have her own backyard garden: “I shall tell all the world the lessons I learned in Africa” (101). Kingsolver presents us with some irony and foreshadowing here. Leah does learn many lessons in Africa, but not the ones concerning gardening that she thinks she will take back to America. What Leah learns is far more important and far more lasting. It is Orleanna, and not Leah, who goes back to America to tend her own backyard garden. In this passage, Kingsolver inserts a lesson about naming and the social construction of belief. In addition to naming the plants and animals, they must also learn the names of the people in their community. They come to recognize their 127 neighbors by the clothes they wear: “People wear the same thing day in and day out, and that’s how we recognize them, by and large. Mother says if they really wanted to put one over on us, they’d all swap outfits for a day” (102). The villagers wear clothes they receive from relief organizations, and what strikes Leah is the fact that there is no connection to whether the clothes they wear are for women or for men. When she sees a man wearing a woman’s sweater, she ponders the arbitrary nature of such labeling: But if you think about it, how would [Tata Boanda] or anyone here ever know it’s a lady’s sweater? How do I even know? Because of the styling, though it’s nothing you could plainly describe. So is it even a lady’s sweater, here in the Congo? I wonder. (102) This description goes hand in hand with Rachel’s description of the clothing from Chapter Two (Easter in July). Kingsolver demonstrates here that the subjective value we put on things depends upon our experience of them. In the West, we have clearly-defined understandings of what differentiates women’s and men’s clothing. In this Congolese village where they have no such associations, Kingsolver asks us to question whether the distinctions become invalid: does the sweater remain a woman’s sweater because it was once so named? If it is renamed as something other, does it become other or does it retain its original designation? Although it may seem like a strange analogy, this discussion does apply to our discussion of biblical authority—if we allow our correlation to cross from sweaters to canon. Although the Bible is sacred for much of the world, does it remain holy if there is no one to say it is holy? At some level, these are merely philosophical acrobatics—does the tree 128 falling in the forest make a sound if there is no one to hear it?—but they have much further-reaching implications when discussed in a religious context. Because so much of our reality is socially constructed, we cannot have reasonable expectations that another culture will accept our reality as valid for them. Nathan brings the Bible to the village as a hallowed source of Truth, but the tribal chief looks upon it as one more thing to negotiate. As we also see, Nathan’s own family has very different understandings of what the Bible is, depending upon their own experiences with it; as Paul Simon sings, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” 38 In bringing up a subject as banal as sweater associations, Kingsolver gently suggests that things aren’t always as they appear to be, and allows the reader to ponder, in a non-threatening manner, the nature of such subjective labels. How can one object to a discussion about gender designations when it is applied to clothing? This opens a doorway, however, for later discussions regarding sanctity and naming, such as when the villagers vote on whether to accept Jesus as one of their gods. Leah moves from reflecting about the sweater in question to describing the marital status of the man wearing the sweater, and she begins to recognize the complexities of religion and the social construction of belief: There is something else I must confess about Tata Boanda: he’s a sinner. Right in the plain sight of God he has two wives, a young and an old one. . . . Father says we’re to pray for all three of them, but when you get down to particulars, it’s hard to know what outcome to pray for. He should drop one wife, I guess, but 38 “One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Floor,” Words & music by Paul Simon, 1973. 129 for sure he’d drop the older one, and she already looks sad enough as it is. The younger one has all the kids, and you can’t just pray for a daddy to flat-out dump his babies, can you? I always believed any sin was easily rectified, if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart, but here it gets complicated. (102-103) As Leah begins to understand the religious reality of living in a different culture, Kingsolver continues her dialogue with the reader concerning situational ethics. One of the arguments I believe Kingsolver makes is that we cannot judge a culture by biblical standards when those values are so entirely foreign to that culture. Reading about life in the desert when they have no idea what a desert is—or Jesus offering loaves of bread when they have no concept of bread—can’t produce a meaningful understanding of the lessons the Bible is meant to impart. Nathan’s expectation that quoting the Bible will win over the Kilangese merely through the power of the words is both naïve and arrogant. Ultimately, his failure relates back to the baptism—the villagers do not see the value of being baptized in the river because their river is filled with crocodiles. As much as Nathan may deem the river holy for the purpose of spiritual redemption, this particular religious perception will never become a reality. The villagers in fact, now believe that Nathan is trying to feed their children to the crocodiles and thus trust him even less. The idea of religion as subjective is likely new to many readers. While in the United States we are exposed to many different religions, most of them are understood by us from within the context of our Western understanding. We may not believe the stories in the Bible, whether we be Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, but 130 from a Western perspective, we at least understand from where they originate. We may disagree with other versions of our same religion, but we understand the basic concepts behind the variations in belief. Kingsolver offers a perspective on religion that we may not have been exposed to before, or at least may not have thoughtfully considered. As a moral theorist, she show us that differences in religious belief—and acceptance of that belief—can stem from an entirely different social and religious reality and that such belief can indeed be subjective. By running the reader through Leah’s perceptions, Kingsolver again has an effective way to introduce ideas in a non-threatening manner. As Leah turns 15, the Price family has now been in Africa for 8 months. She considers Africa “a heavenly paradise” and sometimes wants to live there forever, but also admits, “it’s not purely paradise here, either. Perhaps we’ve eaten the wrong fruits in the Garden, because our family always seems to know too much, and at the same time not enough” (103). The imagery is wonderful as Kingsolver continues the Garden of Eden analogy. Leah’s growing understanding that the more they learn the more they need to learn signifies her maturation, and the concrete imagery keeps her (and the reader) connected with her biblical roots. Leah’s world-view is being turned on its head—she is beginning to see that things are not the way she has always been taught, and therefore, we also see that the world is not necessarily the way it has been presented. Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you see it. Their eyes look happy and sad 131 at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they’ve already seen most of what there is. Married eyes. (107) Her new knowledge is introduced in small ways—bigamy, married teenagers, a pet chameleon which is not allowed in the house (“which is funny,” she says, “because I found him inside the house” (106). Even this small comment on the chameleon is a meaningful one. It shows how, in a subtle way, the Prices were always trying to order their life in Africa as it would have been in Georgia. Kingsolver wants the reader to question, just as Leah is beginning to question, the Western values that they have brought with them. Leah begins to change for good when she develops her friendship with Pascal, a small boy who teaches Leah the names of everything, including bängala, the “Poisonwood tree that was plaguing [them] all half to death” (112). This is also the first time the reader learns about bängala, although we have heard Nathan use a similar word earlier: Tata Jesus is bangäla, meaning beloved. Through the naming, Leah begins to adapt to the Kilangese culture, and she becomes the more politically vocal part of Kingsolver’s worldview. From here Leah becomes the voice of justice, of the way things ought to be, and the questioning and realistic voice of the varieties of human experience: It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games—“Mother May I?,” “Hide and Seek”—and [Pascal’s]: “Find Food,” “Recognize Poisonwood,” “Build a House.” And here was a boy no older than eight or nine. He had a sister who carried the family’s baby everywhere she went and hacked weeds with her mother in the manioc field. I could see that the whole 132 idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress. For the first time ever I felt a stirring of anger against my father for making me a white preacher’s child from Georgia. (114-115) Leah is beginning to recognize that the way things are in the Congo cannot be the way they are in the United States, for not only is their entire world view different, but what they need is different. She also notices that it is the sister who stays at home working in the fields and caring for the baby while Pascal, though only eight or nine, is able to go off and play with the strange white neighbors. Leah is also beginning to see that her “white preacher child” upbringing in Georgia, similar to many Americans reading this novel, in no way prepared her for the realities of this world. Anatole Comes to Dinner: Religious Subjectivity Through Anatole, the village schoolteacher and translator for Nathan’s sermons, Kingsolver continues exploring the religious subjectivity that permeates the novel. As translator, Anatole is in a unique position to provide a bridge between the Prices’ Christianity and the Kilangese polytheism. The Kilangese polytheism includes shamanism and animism, and is a view of religion that we, as Westerners, do not really understand. Kingsolver provides a perspective on the Kilangese religious understanding that is both enlightening and jarring. 133 One evening when Anatole is invited to dinner, he tries to explain to Reverend Price the religious reality in the village: Anatole leaned forward and announced, “Our chief, Tata Ndu, is concerned about the moral decline of his village.” Father said, “Indeed he should be, because so few villagers are going to church.” “No, Reverend. Because so many villagers are going to church.” Well, that stupefied us all for a special moment in time. (128) This comment is also meant to stupefy the reader—how could increased attendance at the church possibly cause moral decline? Nathan is stymied only for a moment, however; he regroups and goes on: “Brother Anatole, I fail to see how the church can mean anything but joy, for the few here who choose Christi-an-ity over ignorance and darkness!” Anatole sighed. “I understand your difficulty Reverend. Tata Ndu asked me to explain this. His concern is with the important gods and ancestors of this village, who have always been honored in certain sacred ways. Tata Ndu worries that the people who go to your church are neglecting their duties.” “Neglecting their duties to false idolatry, you mean to say.” (128) For Nathan, Christianity is a religion of individual enlightenment and personal salvation. It is also a religion of faith. The ignorance and darkness Nathan speaks of to Anatole is not literal but about the state of the congregation’s souls. In Nathan’s worldview, when one’s soul is in harmony with Christian ideals (and when one has been baptized), then that person will be removed from the darkness and ignorance of sin into the light of salvation. This is not the situation for the Kilangese, 134 however. Their religion is not about faith and salvation, but about homage and practicality. Anatole sighed again. “This may be difficult for you to understand. The people of your congregation are mostly what we call in Kikongo the lenzuka. People who have shamed themselves or had very bad luck or something like that. Tata Boanda, for example. He has had terrible luck with his wives. The first one can’t get any proper children, and the second one has a baby now who keeps dying before birth and coming back into her womb, over and over. No one can help this family anymore. The Boandas were very careful to worship their personal gods at home, making the proper sacrifices of food and doing everything in order. But still their gods have abandoned them for some reason. This is what they feel. Their luck could not get any more bad, you see? So they are interested to try making sacrifices to your Jesus.” Father looked like he was choking on a bone. (128-129) In a very creative way, Kingsolver has introduced us to a different idea of the function of religion—that its usefulness as a faith is directly correlated to how practical it is for our lives. We are also beginning to better understand the villagers’ tolerance for Reverend Price’s religion. “Tata Ndu is happy for you to draw the bad-luck people away,” he said. “So the village’s spirit protectors will not notice them so much. But he worries you are trying to lure too many of the others into following your corrupt ways. He fears a disaster will come if we anger the gods.” “Corrupt, did you say,” Father stated, rather than asked, after locating where the cat had put his tongue. “Yes, Reverend Price.” “Corrupt ways. Tata Ndu feels that bringing the Christian word to these people is leading them to corrupt ways.” “That is the best way I can think of to translate the message. Actually he said you are leading our villagers 135 down into a hole, where they may fail to see the proper sun and become trapped like bugs on a rotting carcass.” (129) Nathan then asks Anatole whether he agrees with the village chief that Nathan is leading the villagers to “partake of the meat of a rotten corpse” (129). Anatole neatly evades the question, explaining that he translates faithfully every week, and that if Nathan “fears the rivals of [his] church, he should know that there is another nganga, another minister here. People also put their trust in him” (130). Nathan responds that, of course, there is another preacher—“The Lord is our Shepherd.” Anatole brushes this response aside and explains that Tata Kuvudundu is the minister to whom he is referring. “Anatole, what do you mean by calling him a preacher?” Mother asked. “We kind of thought Tata Kuvudundu was the town drunk.” “No, Mama Price, he is not. He is a respected nganga, a priest of the traditions, you might say. He is quite a good advisor to Tata Ndu.” “Advisor, nothing,” said Father, raising halfway up out of his chair and staring to get his Baptist voice. . . . “He is a rare nut, is what he is. A nut of the type that never falls far from the tree! Where I come from sir, that is what we call a witch doctor.” (131) At this point, we learn the reality of what it means to be a religious leader in this community and the value that they place upon their preachers. Nathan is given equal time as long as the order of things is not upset, however, even the witch doctor has more clout than Nathan does. This all has grave ramifications for Nathan and the Price family. Nathan is here to save the villagers, to bring them salvation and a place 136 in the Kingdom of heaven. The villagers see him not as a spiritual guide but as an alternative path to fertility. Anatole told Father he ought not to think of Tata Kuvudundu as competition. He said barrenness and adultery were serious matters that probably ought to remain separate from Tata Jesus. But he assured us that many people in Kilanga remembered the missionary times. When Brother Fowles had gotten practically the whole town praying to Jesus, and it was their recollection that the gods hadn’t been too angry over it, since no more bad things had happened in Kilanga than usual. Well, that did it. Remembered the missionary times? This was a nerve shock even to me, to hear that the villagers thought Christianity was like some old picture show that was way out of date. (133) Now we truly have the crux of the issue. It is not that Nathan has less influence than Tata Kuvudundu—he has no clout as a minister at all. The villagers do not even perceive him as a missionary the way they did Brother Fowles. Even harsher, when (the “papist”) Brother Fowles was living in the village, he had been able to get almost the whole village to pray to Tata Jesus. One can only imagine what the villagers now believe about the point of Christianity and Nathan’s purpose in being there if adultery and infertility are concerns too serious for Tata Jesus. They looked upon Jesus as another God who might be able to help them in their need. They do not know what power Jesus might wield, but it might not hurt to pray to this foreign god. The villagers’ previous associations with Jesus had been positive ones through Brother Fowles, a minister who understood the value of inclusion and synthesis rather than exclusion and separation, so they are willing to try again. 137 Brother Fowles was willing to let Jesus live alongside the Kilangese gods, however, and this did not prove threatening to Chief Ndu or the village lifestyle. [Father] told Anatole he respected and valued his help (meaning: I’ve had about enough of your lip, Buster Brown) but was disappointed by the villagers’ childlike interpretations of God’s plan (meaning: you’re just as big of a dingwit as the rest of them). He said he would work on a sermon that would clear up all the misunderstandings, then he announced that this conversation had come to an end, and Anatole could consider himself excused from the table and this house. Which Anatole did, without delay (133). Nathan does not understand the meaning of Anatole’s visit, and believes that if he just explains the situation better, then the villagers will begin to see the light (literally). Orleanna, however, sees right through Anatole’s veiled attempts to placate Nathan and understands both the situation regarding the place of Nathan’s church in this superstitious village and Anatole’s purpose in explaining it to them. “Well, that puts a whole new outlook on things, doesn’t it?” Mother asked, in the very quiet silence that followed. I kept my head down and cleared off all the last things except the Big Blue flowered platter in the middle of the table, which I couldn’t reach without crossing into father’s atomic danger zone. “I wonder what outlook you might think that to be,” he said to Mother in that same special voice, for bad dogs and morons. She brushed her hair out of her face and smiled at him as she reached across for [her beloved] china platter. “Well for one thing, sir, you and the good Lord better hope no lightning strikes around here in the next six months!” (133) Through Anatole’s explanation of moral decline, we learn how the villagers believe that they and their faith are interconnected. The concept of religious 138 pluralism is completely foreign to this village where so much depends upon everyone else. If too many of the villagers stray to a random religion, then it is bad for the morality of the entire village. It is not what or who they are praying to in Nathan’s church that proves problematic, but the idea that too many diverse beliefs are somehow causing the moral decline of the village as a whole. The villagers really have no context for religion outside of their own experience. Perhaps this is the greatest piece of moral discourse that Kingsolver takes on in regard to religious subjectivity. The experience of each of the characters influences his understanding of the gods and of what they "know" to be religious Truth. The Kilangese villagers' experience of Jesus, for example, directly relates to whether Jesus is a positive influence in their lives; for them, the only true religion is religion that provides for their welfare. They go to Nathan’s church hoping for a change of luck, and when this does or does not happen, they adjust their understanding of Jesus as a divinity within their lives based on what they intuit to be true about this divinity. The discourse with Anatole and Nathan also serves to introduce the idea of a religion of utility and a certain flexibility in worship. The Kilangese religious realm is still ruled by its ancient beliefs in animism and magic, and they maintain a belief that their ritual actions will result in a concrete effect. Most monotheistic Westerners 39 reject this manifestation of “practical magic,” and while we may believe that it is God’s will if we are infertile and pray to be healed, we do not generally 39 I am fully aware of the many religions in the United States and Europe who do, indeed, practice forms of practical magic and witchcraft, and I refer specifically to the monotheistic majority. 139 consider the idea of praying to an alternate god who might answer our prayers, nor do we consider making physical sacrifices to our current god. 40 The idea that Nathan’s religion is not useful or magical—and in fact could be considered detrimental—to the people of Kilanga allows the reader insight into a belief system that is entirely “other” from that with which they are familiar. Many readers, particularly those who believe as Nathan does, will find this “practical” religion offensive and will be just as outraged as Nathan. What is important here is not whether one agrees or disagrees with either Nathan or Tata Ndu, but that we as readers are exposed to the reality that there are differing beliefs in other places which, when read about in a compassionate manner, can be understood with compassion rather than dismissed as irrelevant “voodoo.” In emphasizing this seeming fickleness toward one’s deities, Kingsolver reiterates that not everyone perceives religion the same way. She also provides us with an opportunity to think about our own view of religious subjectivity and even perhaps to consider our personal relationship with God. If we pray to God and are ceaselessly disappointed, do we abandon our faith for greener pastures or do we, like Nathan, relentlessly attach ourselves to that faith in the hopes that we will one day be rewarded? We are coming to understand the theological place that the villagers come from and also why Christianity is such a foreign concept to them. We may completely disregard 40 Although many people "bargain" with God, which could be construed as similar cause and effect religion if one wanted to argue the point. 140 their understanding of religion for our own lives, but we come closer to understanding that their beliefs constitute another “variety of religious experience.” Adah Is Eaten By a Lion When Anatole leaves the Price house, both the Price family and reader have a glimpse into the way religion manifests itself in this community. As discussed above, religious experience for this village is predicated on its value to their lives. In this chapter, Adah relates what occurs when it is believed that she has been killed by a lion. Tata Ndu considers Nathan a religious rival, and when he comes to give the family the bleak news of Adah’s death, he actually looks pleased. Nathan, upon hearing that Adah has been ripped apart by the lion, rises and says, in a commanding voice, “Let us all pray to the Lord for mercy and understanding.” Tata Ndu did not bow his head but raised it, not happily but proudly. Then I understood that he had won and my father had lost. Tata Ndu came here personally to tell us that the gods of his village did not take kindly to the minister of corruption. As a small sign of Their displeasure, They ate his daughter alive. (140) Adah comes forward and reveals that she has not been killed by the lion that stalked her, and the following morning they heard that a yearling bushbuck had been killed in her place. Adah speculates on the fickleness of fate and the reality of religion: “I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of the faintest stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires” (141). Nathan gets drawn into the 141 religious associations that are part of the village worldview—his God has succeeded in a place where he is considered corrupt. Adah sees that it is merely the capricious nature of life and fate that allows one person to live while another dies, and that allows one god to succeed where another fails. She completely understands the nature of village worship and how Fate, a prominent part of the theological pattern of this novel, has so much influence over religious belief. In the next chapter, Leah recounts another view of Adah’s experience with the lion which emphasizes Kingsolver’s views on religious subjectivity: On the bright side, the event provided a great boost for Father’s church. People seem to think that if Jesus could stop the lion from gobbling up a poor lame girl he must be staying awake pretty good for the Christians – ha! Just when everybody was thinking their regular African gods were aggravated with us and fixing to teach us a lesson. The way they see it, it was kind of a wrestling match between the gods, with Jesus and Adah coming out on top. Father of course says this is superstitious and oversimplifying matters. But as luck would have it, he’d preached the parable of Daniel and the lion’s den just a few days before, so naturally now they are knocking each other over to get to church on Sunday. (150-151) Although Nathan tells them it is superstition, he is quite pleased with the fact that Adah has risen from the dead to prove the superiority of Jesus. Religion here is again demonstrated for its usefulness, both for the villagers—Jesus saved Adah from the lion, and for Nathan—his god is superior. In Daniel 6, it is Daniel’s innocence and devotion to God which saves him from being eaten by the lion, and it is ironic 142 that Nathan would use this incident to promote his religion. 41 It does not seem as if he perceives Adah’s reprieve as an opportunity to demonstrate a newfound understanding of the people and their need for practical religion; it is more of a hypocritical show of one-upmanship. Much of Genesis is about this very kind of wrestling match between the God of the Hebrews and the gods that have been worshiped until then, and Kingsolver’s creation of a story that contains so many biblical elements is clever and effective. 42 Adah’s experience reflects Orleanna’s above-discussed statement that so many things are believable because we read fantastic stories in the Bible. With Ruth May’s version of Adah and the Lion, Kingsolver adds another layer of complexity to the relationship between Adah’s experience and events from the Bible: There’s all these extra people going to church now. Nelson says it’s because the lion tried to eat up Adah, but Jesus turned her into a bushbuck at the last minute. Like in the Bible, and right when the lion’s mouth bit down on the Adah that turned into a bushbuck, the real Adah disappeared from there and turned up okay on our porch (154). 41 Daniel 6:19: “Then the king arose very early in the morning, and went in haste unto the den of lions. 20: And when he came to the den, he cried with a lamentable voice unto Daniel: and the king spake and said to Daniel, O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions? 21: Then said Daniel unto the king, O king, live for ever. 22: My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions' mouths, that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocence was found in me; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt.” 42 See for example, Genesis 32:24-28; Jacob wrestling with the “man” of God and prevailing. Later in the book, we see this wrestling in the story of Bel and the Serpent. Although Daniel wins in the Bible, the serpent wins in Africa. There is a direct correlation between the parables and metaphors. 143 Nelson is an extremely superstitious boy sent by Anatole to help the family after Mama Tataba quits. Through Ruth May’s naïve understanding of the Bible and Nelson’s superstitious nature, the story of Daniel and the Lion is transformed into a distorted version of Abraham’s binding of Isaac. 43 This is a beautiful turn of phrase that Kingsolver uses changing Adah into the Akedah, the binding. Both linguistically and metaphorically, Adah is the sacrifice that was not made, although in many ways, she sacrifices herself. If we phonetically switch the letters around in the word, akedah becomes Ki Adah—either like Adah, or because of Adah. 44 Either way, Adah becomes a sacrifice for Nathan; it is through her that the villagers venture back to the church. Ruth May continues explaining the practical aspect of this latest incident: All the little Gods are mad at Jesus right now, and they’d like to hurt one of us if they could. If Jesus doesn’t look out. . . .They’ve a lot of them started going to hear Father talk about Jesus and figure out what’s what. But Nelson says they’ve got one foot in the door of the church and one foot out. If something bad happens to one of us, out they’ll go. (155) Ruth May’s acceptance that the other gods are mad at Jesus draws us into her sphere of belief that these other gods may possibly exist. We consciously know that this is not what we personally believe, but Ruth May is so innocent in her belief that 43 “And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.” Genesis 22:13 44 This only works in the phonetic pronunciation of Akedah. In Hebrew, Ki is spelled with a Kaf, not a Kuf, but I liked the associations well enough to leave it in. 144 we do not immediately judge her as being foolish or wrong. She allows us another entrée into that perception of belief that is held by the villagers. Kingsolver’s combination of Bible and Kilanga perceptions weave together the possibility that other perspectives may be valid, even if we do not subscribe to them. By using two biblical stories that we are familiar with—one from Genesis and one from Daniel— Kingsolver binds us as reader to her story, her characters, and to the Bible, and she provides another example of how the Bible is used for its own purpose by everyone, even Nathan. The Tower of Babel In a chapter largely concerned with the politics of Africa, Rachel describes a January visit by Frank and Janna Underdown. They have come to tell Nathan that the Congo is going to have an election in May and declare its independence from Belgium in June. They also remind him that his mission to the Congo was not sanctioned, and that he would be wise to take his family back to Georgia. Orleanna is shocked to learn that their mission was not approved, but Nathan of course has had his own agenda from the outset, including a trip to the Congo despite being advised against it. When hearing about the election, Nathan in his arrogance insists that there cannot possibly be an election: “This is not a nation, it is the Tower of Babel and it cannot hold an election. If these people are to be united at all, they will come together as God’s lambs in their simple love for Christ. Nothing else will move them forward. Not 145 politics, not a desire for freedom—they don’t have the temperament or the intellect for such things.” (168) Nathan’s response demonstrates yet again that he has no true understanding of the people of the Congo or even any sympathy for them. His reference to the Tower of Babel is ironic in that he is the one unable to communicate with them. When the Underdowns tell them that the Mission League has to send the Prices home, Rachel interprets Nathan’s response: Well. If there’s one solitary thing Father does not like it’s being told what to do. “My contract expires in June,” he announced to all concerned. “We will stay through July to help welcome the Reverend and Mrs. Minor when they come. I’m sure Christian charity will be forthcoming from America, regardless of any problems Belgium may have with its fatherly hand.” “Nathan, the Minors. . .” Frank started to say, but Father ran right over him and kept going. “I’ve worked some miracles here, I don’t mind telling you, and I’ve done it single-handedly. Outside help is of no concern to me. I can’t risk losing precious ground running away like a coward before we have made a proper transition!” (168) Nathan refuses to acknowledge that there might be a way other than his own, and his flat-out dismissal that anyone else in his family or in the village may have helped him with whatever small victory he is referring to shows his unrelenting overconfidence. We also get another glimpse here of Nathan’s need to be heroic: only cowards run away when there is a job to do, and he will not let God see him as a coward. He claims that he knows what he sees, yet he has steadfastly refused to “see” what has been going on around him. He refuses to accept that the villagers will 146 not be baptized or that his congregation is made up primarily of outcasts. He refuses to see that there is no spiritual relationship between the Kilangese and the Bible or to Christ. When the Underwoods tell the family that there will be no more missionaries and that there will be no transition, it does not faze Nathan. Orleanna tries to say that she and the girls would like to go home, but Nathan shoots her down, looking “like a mean boy fixing to smash puppies with a brick” (168). Nathan is told that it may be years before the mission resumes, but “Father stared at the trees giving no indication he’d heard his poor frightened wife, or any of this news. Father would sooner watch us all perish one by one than listen to anybody but himself.” This pronouncement of Rachel’s confirms to the reader that something tragic will inevitably occur before the Price family leaves the Congo. When Frank Underdown states that perhaps Nathan does not understand how serious the situation is, Nathan indicates otherwise: “I believe I understand perfectly well,” Father said, turning around suddenly to face them. In his khakis and rolled up white shirt sleeves he looked like a working man, but he raised one hand above his head the way he does in church to pronounce the benediction. “Only God knows when our relief may arrive. But God does know. And in His benevolent service we will stay.” (169) In his pronouncement, Nathan again echoes phrases from the Bible and, like Job, Nathan awaits God’s relief. Unlike Job, Nathan brings the inevitable hardships upon himself in his non-benevolent desire to fulfill his mission. 147 Waiting for a Child to Die Poet/philosopher Adah shares her affinity for William Carlos Williams while describing the terrible diarrhea that has afflicted the village. She informs us that Williams wrote “The Red Wheelbarrow” while waiting for a child to die, but “waiting for a child to die is not an occasion for writing a poem here in Kilanga: it isn’t a long enough wait” (170). 45 The villagers, particularly children, are dying in alarming numbers. There is a funeral almost every day, and the wailing mothers lead the funeral march past the Price home into the forest to bury their dead. Adah cynically observes, “Our Father forbids us to watch. He doesn’t seem to mind the corpses so much as the souls unsaved. In the grand tally Up Yonder, each one counts as a point against him” (171). Nathan is not sympathetic toward the dying children or their bereaved parents. The kakakaka epidemic is just one more in a string of events that does not concern Nathan, except in the numbers of people whom he no longer has an opportunity to “save.” Nathan’s brand of Christianity, it turns out, is perhaps not so unusual, as Adah describes her Sunday-school upbringing: 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 Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is 45 so much depends/ upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens. “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, 1923. 148 gained by the luck of the draw. . . . Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn? (171) As always, it is Adah who voices the rational questions: she presents the difficulties with religion as they are presented to her. The questions she asks are the questions that many people ask. Can religion really be so arbitrary? Does a child who has never heard the word of Christ really become condemned for eternity? Does salvation truly only come to those who have been fortunate enough to be born in the right place? It seems to Adah that this is what Nathan believes, and he has taken it to be his personal mission to bring the word of God to as many geographically unfortunate souls as possible. As a five year old child, Adah seriously considered the implications of such a religion when she asked the teacher about the problem of such a “hit and miss Savior” and was punished: 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 other children still did, apparently. As I limped back to my place, they turned their eyes away from my sinner’s stippled knees. How could they not even question their state of grace? I lacked their confidence, alas. I had spent more time than the average child pondering unfortunate accidents of birth. (171) By putting these questions into the mouth of a child who is, herself, the result of an “unfortunate accident of birth,” we can look at the questions without being defensive. It is only Adah who asks them—it is only a child who wants to know the 149 answers because life has been so difficult for her. This allows Kingsolver a certain leeway that she might not have if she were just to openly talk about how arbitrary religious dogma can be. This way she lets us know her feelings about it, through Adah, and we as reader can reflect upon the ethical consequences: if salvation does seem to be an accident of birth, in what way does that reflect a merciful God? Do we also believe that those who have not heard the Word of God are condemned? Kingsolver wants us to make the connection between the nameless, faceless, supposedly graceless souls of the Congo and the people in the village whom we have met. Adah continues her narrative by reflecting that the Kilanga language is even more cynical than her own: the word nzolo, for example, is used in three different ways, at least. It can mean “most dearly beloved,” or is a thick yellow grub used for fish bait, or is a tiny potato. And so, she observes, when “we sing at the top of our lungs in church: ‘Tata Nzolo!’ To whom are we calling?” She believes it must be the god of small potatoes, for “that other Dearly Beloved who resides in north Georgia does not seem to be paying much attention to the babies here in Kilanga. They are all dying” (172). The bacterial disease that is decimating the village, a disease that “turns the body to a small black pitcher, pitches it over, and pours out all its liquid insides,” has been transmitted downstream by the heavy rains. There are rules, it turns out, for all matters of hygiene in Kilanga—rules that are matters of religious observance, they are baptism and communion. Even defecation is ruled by African gods, who command that we use only the bushes that Tata Kuvudundu 150 has sanctified for those purposes—and believe you me, he chooses bushes far away from the drinking water. Our latrine was probably neutral territory, but in the points of bathing and washing we were unenlightened for the longest time. We have offended all the oldest divinities, in every unthinkable way. “Tata Nzolo!” we sing, and I wonder what new, disgusting sins we commit every day, holding our heads high in sacred ignorance while our neighbors gasp, hand to mouth. Nelson says it was our offenses that brought on this rainy season. Oh, it rains, it pours. Noah himself would be dismayed. (172) In this passage, we again see religion from a different perspective. We have already begun to understand that religion is a matter of practicality to the Kilangese, and Adah picks right up on that in her description of the sanctity of hygiene. Going to church is not nearly as important as bathing in the correct place. Her use of “baptism and communion” reflect her awareness that the every day actions of life reflect the will of the gods. The gods want the people to survive and stay healthy, so therefore any behavior that jeopardizes that outcome will anger the gods. Kingsolver wants us to understand that what is sacred to the villagers is survival, and the vivid imagery of the Price family behaving in sacred ignorance emphasizes her point yet again that sanctity is subjective. Whether realistic or not, the perception is, as James would observe, “peculiar to the person experiencing the event.” The Price family has angered the gods by behaving in a sacrilegious manner, and they are now being punished. Kingsolver adds another lovely Adah twist by immediately following the description of the African gods with a reference to Noah. Kingsolver then offers yet 151 another ironic allusion as Adah continues with her cynical yet acute description: “Even when everyone defecates righteously, there are villages upstream from us. Downstream is always someone else’s up. The last shall be first” (172-173). In the book of Matthew, Jesus declares that in the world to come, “the last will be first, and the first last. For many are called, but few are chosen.” 46 Those who follow the path of righteousness will achieve salvation. Adah’s use of Matthew in discussing bathroom habits highlights again her understanding of the relative nature of sanctity. Adah’s view of righteousness is practical and mundane, and she concludes that no matter how one is situated, one person’s last is another one’s first. Referring back to William Carlos William, a theme that will recur again, Adah describes the village’s resident holy man, the man Nathan refers to as the witch doctor: The doctor poet in our village is the nganga Kuvudundu, I think. The rare nut, Our Father calls him, a thing, a seed to be cracked. The pot calls the kettle black. The nganga Kuvudundu is writing poems for us alone. So much depends on the white chicken bones in the calabash bowl left standing in a puddle of rain outside our door. . . . I saw a kindness there, and believe he means to protect us, really. Protect us from angry gods, and our own stupidity, by sending us away. (174) In paraphrasing Williams, Kingsolver sets up a certain way of understanding the poetic and off-kilter perception of Kuvudundu that we need in order to understand his actions throughout the rest of the book. Kuvudundu has a need to 46 Matt 20:16 (also in Matt 19:30; Mark 10:31, Luke 13:30). 152 protect his village and sees Nathan and his family as a threat. Adah sees that the relationship between Kuvudundu and Nathan reflects the connection between the Congolese and the Americans: I know about this kind of story—the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionable vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyone feel much better. Khrushchev is said to be here dancing with the man- eating natives, teaching them how to hate the Americans and the Belgians. It must be true, for how else would the poor Congolese know how to hate the Americans and the Belgians? After all, we have such white skin. We eat their food inside our large house, and throw out the bones. Bones that lie helter-skelter on the grass, from which to tell our fortunes. Why ever should the Congolese read our doom? After all, we have offered to feed their children to the crocodiles in order for them to know the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory. (174) Adah’s insight here cuts right to the bone. There is no reason whatsoever for the Congolese to feel anything but antipathy toward the Americans and the Belgians. The Congolese have been painted as cannibals and are pawns in the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. This paper does not address most of the political statements within The Poisonwood Bible, but here we can see how Kingsolver melds the political and the religious—the Congolese understandably have great antipathy toward the Price family, Nathan, and his mission. The nganga Kuvudundu dressed in white with no bone in his hair is standing at the edge of our yard. He of eleven toes. He repeats the end of his own name over and over: the word dundu. Dundu is a kind of antelope. Or it is a small plant of the genus Veronia. Or a hill. Or a price you have to 153 pay. So much depends on the tone of voice. One of these things is what our family has coming to us. Our Baptist ears from Georgia will never understand the difference. (175) Adah knows which of these things her “family has coming” to them. They are to pay the “price” of what they are doing there— of not understanding the difference between what is wanted and what is needed, of trying to feed the children to the crocodiles, and of trying to bring Christianity to a corner of the world that wants nothing more than to bury its children in peace. Patrice Lumumba In June, the Underdowns send a letter to tell the Price family that they will be sending a special Mission plane to take them home. Nathan is determined to stay, even though Orleanna “tries to explain to him day in and out about how he is putting his own children in jeopardy of their lives, but he won’t even listen to his own wife (176). Patrice Lumumba wins the election, and Kingsolver describes the outcome of the election and the details of the new government. Rachel wants to go home and “start scrubbing the deep-seated impurities of the Congo” out of her skin. Leah goes to Leopoldville with Nathan to watch the inauguration of Lumumba. As they drive through Leopoldville, she notices the vast inequality between the blacks and the whites: Leopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make their homes out of sticks or tin or anything in the world they can 154 find. Father said that is the Belgians’ doing and Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment. (183) This is another ironic bit of writing that I think is very effective. Kingsolver does not have to come out and say how ridiculous this bit of logic is, but we immediately recognize the correlation between the streets of Leopoldville (and the United States) in 1960 and just about every American city still today. Nathan’s comment that “Americans would never stand for this treatment” shows that his delusions extend beyond his religious fervor right into his distorted view of American justice. Leah is mesmerized by Lumumba’s speech, and we see more of her political awakening. She describes the incredibly lavish house in which the Underdowns live and the unending supply of food from the night before. Leah has not had anything so wonderful in a long time and eats until she could burst. At the same time, she recalls that the poor skinny houseboy for the Underdowns was caught trying to steal some sugar: I thought about the kilo of sugar he’d tried to stash under his shirt. With so much else around, why wouldn’t Mrs. Underdown just go ahead and give it to him? Was she actually going to take all her sugar back to Belgium? (184) Leah concludes the chapter recalling Lumumba’s speech, which makes a tremendous impact on Leah: “We are going to show the world what the homme noir can do when he works for freedom. We are going to make the Congo, for all of Africa, the heart of light” (184). The allusion to Conrad’s heart of darkness is evident, and it returns as another leitmotif in the novel. 155 Hope Is the Thing with Feathers “Book Two: The Revelation” concludes with Adah’s poetic description and prophetic comment, “So much depends on the single red feather I saw when I stepped out of the latrine” (185). She tells us it is early morning on June 30, 1960— Independence Day for the Congo. Adah wonders, Does anyone here know about the new freedom? These women squatting, knees wide apart in their long wrapped skirts, throwing handfuls of peppers and small potatoes into hissing pans over cook-fires? (185) This is the part of Adah that alerts us to reality—it is an often hidden feminist part. Independence is not going to make much difference to these women’s lives, to the cooking and the nursing and the children dying. Women have traditionally never been the ones concerned with politics or war or independence because they cannot afford to be. Here in this village as well, it is the women who look after the minutiae of the living. Independence means nothing to them as Adah looks down and sees “one red feather” (185). Citing Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers,” Adah admits that she has often thought about “Hope!”: I have pictured it many times—Hope!—wondering how I would catch “such a thing one-handed, if it did come floating down to me from the sky. Now I find it has fallen already, and a piece of it is here beside our latrine, one red plume. In celebration I stooped down to pick it up. (185) Adah follows the red feathers and finds Methuselah: At last it is Independence Day, for Methuselah and the Congo. O Lord of the feathers, deliver me this day. After a 156 lifetime caged away from flight and truth, comes freedom. After long seasons of slow preparation for an innocent death, the world is theirs at last. From the carnivores that would tear me, breast from wishbone. (185-186) Adopting a biblical tone of supplication, Adah acknowledges that Methuselah has perished by the same civet cat which set upon her, but from which she was delivered. This reprieve is part of what sets her apart; the cat did not tear her breast from wishbone as it did poor Methuselah. At the conclusion of The Poisonwood Bible’s “Genesis,” Nathan lets Methuselah fly free, and hope becomes the thing with feathers. In this final paragraph of “The Revelation,” Methuselah’s death becomes the prophesied metaphor for impending disaster, not only to the Price family, but for Africa as well. Methuselah’s freedom is a double-edged sword—his freedom has brought about his death, just as it inevitably will for Lumumba and many of the Congolese people. Methuselah has perished on the very day of Congolese independence, and what he leaves to the world is “only feathers, without the ball of Hope inside. Feathers at last at last and no words at all” (186). 157 CHAPTER FOUR BOOK THREE: THE JUDGES Orleanna Price, Sanderling Island, Georgia We know by now that although Kingsolver has set up the reader to be judge, it is Ruth May to whom Orleanna is speaking in these opening monologues. She continues her plea to judge her leniently: “Listen little beast, judge me if you will, but first listen. I am your mother. What happened to us could have happened anywhere, to any mother” (191). Orleanna protests that “from time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land,” and she weeps at the fact that no matter what poison Nathan rained down upon the girls, they would, “without cease…bend to his light.” As in the previous section, Nathan is described by Orleanna as a blinding light that no one could escape. She knew by this point in the narrative that Nathan was a terrible force in her household, especially for her daughters: A wife may revile such a man with every silent curse she knows. But she can’t throw stones. A stone would fly straight through him and strike the child made in his image, clipping out an eye or a tongue or an outstretched hand. (191) There are no weapons against such a force in one’s own household, but fortunately, Orleanna reflects, The day does come, finally, when a daughter can walk away from a man such as that—if she’s lucky. His own ferocity turns over inside her and she turns away hard, 158 never to speak to him again. Instead, she’ll begin talking to you her mother, demanding a world of indignation: How could you let him? Why? (191) Orleanna desperately attempts to explain why she continued to behave as she did, even as she saw her daughters slowly come to realize that Nathan was possessive of everything about them and their mother. Orleanna finally comprehends that she must get out of Africa if she is ever to have the respect of her daughters. Kingsolver’s feminist framework continues in earnest, particularly in respect to biblical themes. Orleanna acknowledges that she believed herself to be “an inferior force” and, more damning in her own eyes, she explains that “there was another thing too, awful to admit. I’d come to believe that God was on his side. Does this make me seem lunatic? But I did believe it; I must have” (192). Orleanna feared Nathan, and, in a sentence as ambiguous as one Adah might write, Orleanna declares she “feared Him, loved Him, served Him” (192). While we know that she is speaking about Nathan, she uses the same God language that we see from her in the previous chapter and from Adah throughout. 47 As in the previous chapter, Orleanna again turns to the Bible, but now she finds it disturbing: In the depths of my sleepless nights I would turn to the Bible for comfort, only to find myself regaled yet again. Unto the woman God said: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. 47 Adah’s continuous references to Nathan as “Our Father,” for example. 159 Oh mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms. (192) This passage is one of Kingsolver’s more overt comments on the misogyny inherent in the Bible. While previously the allusions have been much more subtle, Orleanna’s bitterness here clearly demonstrates the turn she is taking in regard to authority—both Nathan’s and the Bible’s. Kingsolver chooses a relatively well- known biblical verse for the point she wants to make this time: Genesis 3:16, Eve’s punishment for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Kingsolver’s choice of Bible chapter is again perfect for the context in which she uses it here. Not only does it demonstrate why Orleanna would want to “drink poison” after reading that she has no reprieve from her husband’s iron-fisted rule, but it highlights Orleanna’s awakening. Her eyes have been opened, just as Eve’s have, and she truly begins to see the evil in her husband’s rule over the family. This chapter from Genesis also “explains” the enmity between women and snakes and gives Kingsolver yet another reference that foreshadows Ruth May’s death by snakebite. 48 48 “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). There are a multitude of references in The Poisonwood Bible to snakes and their many roles in the Bible and the Congo, but in deference to brevity, I have chosen to eliminate all but the most important of them. 160 Orleanna’s narrative moves from her bitterness about Nathan’s oppression to the history of how she became oppressed. She begins by telling us about her happy childhood, and how growing up in Jackson, Mississippi during the Great Depression, wasn’t so different from the Congo thirty years later, except that in Jackson we knew of some that had plenty and I guess that did make us restless from time to time. In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had—a Frigidaire? A washer-dryer combination? Really, they’d sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn’t occur to them to feel sorry for themselves. Except when children died—then they wept and howled. Anyone can recognize the raging injustice there. But otherwise I believe they were satisfied with their lot. (192) As she did through Leah’s observations above, Kingsolver compares the United States with the Congo in a way that helps us as outsiders to understand the differences in how the world is perceived based upon different experiences of the world. It does not occur to the Kilangese to feel sorry for themselves because they have no other reference point. It is believed by many that television is responsible for the enormous jump in crime during its rise in American households, not for the violence that becomes emulated, but for the exposure to lifestyles of which most people were previously ignorant. 49 If one does not know what she is missing, she 49 See for example, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992. 161 cannot desire it. 50 Orleanna recognizes, and Kingsolver wants to be sure that we recognize it as well, that coming in and teaching a culture about all the things they are missing, including the salvation of Jesus, is not necessarily what is best for that culture. 51 Orleanna continues her childhood reminiscences, including an enlightening description of her doctor father’s faith: I don’t think Dad ever forgave me, later on, for becoming a Free Will Baptist. He failed to see why anyone would need more bluster and testimony about God’s Plan than what he found, for example, within the fine-veined world of an eyeball. That, and a good chicken dinner on Sunday. (193) Orleanna’s father sees religion the way many scientists do, in the incredibly complex and miraculous structure of the Universe—what more does one need to prove God’s existence than to look at the construction of the human body or the interdependence of the natural world? This is the religious background that Orleanna comes from, and Kingsolver is clear that she considers this a perfectly viable, if not preferable, way to approach religion. This merging of science and religion conforms to most of what Kingsolver tries to express throughout The Poisonwood Bible. Her message is clear that we must be able to synthesize all parts of religion with what 50 This, as we well know, is how television commercials work today. We do not know we need cleaner, whiter bathroom floors until some woman on television explains it to us. 51 This is a theme common to Kingsolver’s novels and her essays as well. The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, and Animal Dreams, for example, all deal with the invasion of commercial values and norms into Native American culture, and the destruction of native land. 162 works best in the environment we are a part of, rather than forcing a particular view of religion onto a place where it clearly does not work or belong. Orleanna met Nathan at a revival meeting and, being seventeen and bursting with the possibilities of life, she and her friends enthusiastically embraced this new element in their lives: We threw ourselves at Jesus with our unsaved bosoms heaving. We had already given a chance to all the other red-necked hooligans in Pearl by then, and were looking for someone who better deserved us. Well, why not Jesus? (193-194) This description is charming and informative, and it emphasizes the whimsical and capricious nature of a teenage girl who has such a completely different view of Jesus than that presented throughout most of The Poisonwood Bible. The contrast between Orleanna’s reasons for seeking Jesus and Nathan’s relentless talk of heaven and hell again highlight Kingsolver’s utilitarian view about the nature of religion, even in this unexpected context. Orleanna reveals that she used religion as a way to entertain herself for a week, and Nathan used it as a tool of courtship: [He would] read to me from the Psalms and Deuteronomy while I shelled beans. How say ye to my soul. Flee as a bird to your mountain? Those words were mysterious and beautiful, so I let him stay. My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear “Christ almighty in the craphouse!” at any dress with too many buttons. Now here was one from whose mouth came, The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times and He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Oh, I wanted those green 163 pastures. I could taste the pale green sweetness of the blade of wheat, stripped and sucked between my teeth. (194) 52 Orleanna is wooed with the sexual imagery of the Bible, and she believes that is Nathan’s intention as well. Orleanna’s aunt presumes the same, and wants to know if Nathan intends to marry Orleanna: The idea of marriage suited him well enough so that he owned it as his. I hardly had time to think about my own answer—why it was taken to be a foregone conclusion. And even if anyone had been waiting for my opinion, I wouldn’t have known how to form one. (195) Orleanna reveals her inability to know whether or not she should marry Nathan. As happens so often, she did not have enough information to make a rational decision, and she thought the reality of the decision she did make would turn out far differently. Orleanna and Nathan were married in 1939, and when Nathan was drafted in 1941, he was eventually sent to Luzon in the Philippines where he was struck with a shell fragment. He managed to crawl to a pig sty that night and in the morning, out of pure luck, he was picked up by a PT boat and brought to a hospital in Corregidor, where he wrote lighthearted letters to Orleanna about his salvation by the grace of God and a Jap hog manger. . . . That was the last I would ever hear from the man I’d married—one who could laugh (even about sleeping in a manger), call me his “honey lamb,” and trust in the miracle of good fortune. . . . He hadn’t yet heard what happened to the rest of his company. In a few days the news would begin to reach Corregidor. . . . It would 52 Psalms 11:1; 12:6; and 23:2, respectively. 164 permanently curl one soldier’s heart like a piece of hard shoe leather. (196) While he was in the hospital, Nathan learned that his entire “company died, to the man, on the Death March from Bataan” (197). As she does with many of the other historical events in this novel, Kingsolver meticulously describes the Bataan Death March, which serves to educate the reader about an element of World War II history of which we might not otherwise be aware. The news about his company changes Nathan forever, not only in the way he relates to Orleanna, but also in how he sees himself and his relationship with God. He came home with a crescent-shaped scar on his temple, seriously weakened vision in his left eye, and a suspicion of his own cowardice from which he would never recover. His first words to me were to speak of how fiercely he felt the eye of God upon him. He pulled away from my kiss and my teasing touch, demanding, “Can’t you understand the Lord is watching us?” (197) After his return, Nathan’s sexual relationship with Orleanna is also changed forever. He is “made feverish by sex” and then blames Orleanna afterward for her “wantonness” (198). Nathan sees Orleanna’s ensuing pregnancy as an undeserved blessing and, with each additional pregnancy, he becomes more profoundly embarrassed. He became more and more “a tyrant before men” and a child before his God. Not a helpless or pleading child, but a petulant one, the type of tough boy who’s known too little love and is quick to blame others for his mistakes. The type who grows up determined to show them all what he can do. He meant personally to save more souls than had perished on the road from Bataan, I think, and all other paths ever walked by the blight of mankind. (198) 165 Kingsolver has now given us a thorough background into why Nathan’s theology developed the way it did. She does this for several reasons, I think. First, she wants to demonstrate that Nathan’s relationship to God and to religion in general is not what she would consider the norm, and she wants to be sure that we understand what has driven him to act in such “crazy” ways. By giving him such a background, we are meant to consider such religious zealotry to be aberrant, even though we see it constantly in our day-to-day lives. Kingsolver also gives us the means to become more sympathetic toward Nathan. He is not only a patriot who lost all his comrades and has survivor guilt—a phenomenon well documented now but little understood then—but he can almost be forgiven his strange way of manifesting this guilt. What cannot be forgiven is how he jeopardizes his family with his zealous and crazy behavior. Nathan’s dramatic post-traumatic change exemplifies the difference between the Jamesian “healthy-minded” preacher Nathan began as and the “sick soul” that he becomes. Nathan’s personal demons create a need for him to live habitually “on one side of the pain-threshold” because he no longer can tolerate life on the other side (James, 120). The effect of Nathan’s pathologically sick soul is heavily felt by his family, and Orleanna explains Nathan’s trauma as a way of explaining her own helplessness. She details how, on the outside, she still appeared to be Orleanna, “but now every cell of me was married to Nathan’s plan. His magnificent will. This is how conquest occurs: one plan is always larger than the other” (199). Orleanna is describing Nathan, but Kingsolver is also reminding the reader that we are still in Africa: this is a story about conquest and submission, about 166 who should wield power and who does wield the power. Just as she describes her occupation in previous chapters, Orleanna still sees herself as conquered territory. Just as a slave does not rise against its master, she is too tired to rail against Nathan: For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night. There it is. And you wonder why I didn’t rise up and revolt against Nathan? I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet, that’s why. (200) Orleanna is both exhausted from the children and from Nathan’s incessant belief that everything he or Orleanna does is in direct sight of God: “Nathan believed one thing above all else: that the Lord notices righteousness, and rewards it. My husband would accept no other possibility” (200). She becomes more and more lost in the world of Nathan Price until she no longer sees any part of the girl she used to be. I encountered my own spirit less and less. By the time Ruth May was born, . . . Nathan was in full possession of the country once known as Orleanna Wharton. I accepted the Lord as my personal Saviour, for he finally brought me a Maytag washer. I rested in this peace and called it happiness. Because in those days, you see, that’s how a life like mine was known. (201) Again we see the imagery of Orleanna as the conquered country, but we are also given an explanation of how life was for women during the nineteen-forties and fifties. Kingsolver seems to want to be sure that religion is a constant hum in the background of her narrative, particularly in the context of Orleanna’s still-practical connection to her religion. In adding the commentary about religion and its ability to 167 bring Orleanna a washing machine, personal salvation is again seen in the practical terms of what is useful. Nathan’s preaching brought an income, so Jesus remains a valuable part of Orleanna’s life. In the final passage of this flashback from Sanderling Island, Orleanna alludes to all the elements from the Congo that so shaped her life: It took me a long time to understand the awful price I’d paid, and that even God has to admit the worth of freedom. How say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain? By then I was lodged in the heart of darkness, so thoroughly bent to the shape of marriage that I could hardly see any other way to stand. (201) Orleanna again makes the analogy that her life history parallels that of the Congo: she is lodged in the heart of darkness. In again echoing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kingsolver accomplishes several goals. First, she is able to associate her own descriptions of the horrific treatment of the Africans found in The Poisonwood Bible with Conrad’s classic novel of the inhumanity of imperialism. Many of the examples Kingsolver gives throughout The Poisonwood Bible serve to shock us into realizing how appalling Western behavior has been toward the natives of this country. This is particularly valuable because few people voluntarily read Heart of Darkness today, 53 and part of her goal in writing this novel is to make people aware of the human rights violations imposed upon the people of the Congo at the hands of Belgium and the United States in the quest for wealth. Orleanna’s “heart of darkness” description of her marriage weds her to this allusion of oppression and 53 Although it is still required in many high school and college English classes. 168 furthers Kingsolver’s metaphor equating Orleanna’s oppression with that of the Congo. Kingsolver brings Orleanna’s transformation completely around with the repetition of Psalm 11 from her courtship with Nathan: How say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain? Whereas in the beginning of her personal narrative, the verse is used to woo Orleanna, here she uses it ironically to indicate just how much she would like to flee to the mountain but cannot because, like Methuselah, she is trapped by the reality of her domesticity: 54 Like Methuselah, I cowered beside my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found, like Methuselah, I had no wings. This is why, little beast. I’d lost my wings. Don’t ask me how I gained them back—the story is too unbearable. I trusted too long in false reassurances, believing as we all want to do when men speak of the national interest, that it’s also ours. In the end, my lot was cast with the Congo. Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom. (201) Kingsolver ensures that we understand the connection she makes between Orleanna, freedom, oppression, Nathan, and the Congo by not only using Methuselah as the metaphor for freedom, but by precisely spelling out that connection. Orleanna casts her lot with the Congo because, like so many women and so many oppressed nations, she has no other choice. 54 The final verse of Psalm 11 is also revealing, for it is almost the mantra for Nathan throughout the book: “For the righteous LORD loveth righteousness; his countenance doth behold the upright.” Nathan is obsessed with what he considers righteous behavior. It is this behavior which ultimately serves to oppress, not free, Orleanna and his daughters. 169  THE THINGS WE DIDN’T KNOW: KILANGA, SEPTEMBER 1960  Tata Chobé Returning from their visit with the Underwoods in Leopoldville, Leah reflects back on the first time they landed in Kilanga and the feast that had awaited them there: “what an abundance of good protein had been sacrificed in our honor. A shameful abundance, really” (205). With this comment, we see how much Leah has matured in the time that she has been in Kilanga. She recognizes the sacrifice that was made on behalf of her family, and how unappreciative they all were because they did not know the reality of life there in the Congo: “I silently pledged to the Lord that I would express true gratitude for such a feast if ever one should happen again” (205). The Price family is now fyata, without money, and it takes a while for the village to accept that a white family can be poor. Of all the villagers, only Mama Mwanza feels sorry for the family, and she shares what little she has with her newly destitute neighbors. The Price women tell her they have nothing to give back, but Mama Mwanza waves them off: Whenever you have plenty of something, you have to share it with the fyata, she said. (And Mama Mwanza is not even Christian!) Really, you know how bad things are when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.” (206) In another example of Good and Right behavior, Kingsolver is careful to voice through Leah that “Christian” charity is actually universal and cross-cultural. The 170 moral commitment that Mama Mwanza makes to feeding the poor is no different from that of any other religious group that places charity or good works high on its priority list. Leah’s comment that Mama Mwanza “is not even Christian” just serves to emphasize the functional similarities between the vastly religiously different families. 55 The family is struggling terribly and Orleanna has “lost all will to live and spends her time on the bed curled up with Ruth May” (207). Superstitious Nelson believes that someone has put a kibáazu, a curse, on Orleanna and Ruth May, and that soon it would spread to all the women in the house. Leah tries to explain that they do not believe in voodoo, and a theological discussion ensues: I explained to Nelson that his voodoo was absolutely nonsense. We don't believe in an evil god that could be persuaded to put a curse on somebody. “No?” he asked. “Your god, he didn't put a curse on Tata Chobé?” . . . “Tata Chobé?” I was wary of this conversation but curious to know how well he learned the teachings of the Bible. . . . “Your god put a kibáazu on Tata Chobé. He gave him the pox and the itches and killed all his seven children under one roof.” “Oh, Job,” I said. “Why that wasn't a curse, Nelson. God was testing his faith.” “Okay, fine . . . Somebody is testing faith for your mother and your little sister. The next one he will be testing is [Rachel].” (207-208) 55 And while Nathan would probably not have made a charitable contribution in kind, there is no doubt that Orleanna would have felt it her Christian duty should the situation be reversed. 171 In another demonstration of how religion can be interpreted differently based on different perceptions of the world, Kingsolver is again effective in showing how Bible stories can teach a lesson different from the expected one when seen from another perspective. Nelson’s interpretation of Job is diametrically opposed to Nathan’s intention in teaching Job and again serves Kingsolver’s goal of demonstrating the subjective nature of religious belief. While we may understand, as Leah does, that the story of Job is about testing Job’s faith, the terrible calamities that fall upon Job can most certainly be seen as a curse, particularly to someone whose understanding of divinity has much more to do with appeasement of the gods than with personal salvation and righteous behavior. Nelson’s reality is that one must pay homage to the gods or suffer the consequences, and he is truly concerned for the Price family: I repeated to Nelson that, however he might interpret the parable of Job, our family doesn't believe in witch- doctor ngangas and evil-eye fetishes and the nkisis and gree-grees people wear around their necks, to ward off curses and the like. “I'm sorry, Nelson, I told him, but we just don't worship those gods.” To make our position perfectly clear, I added, baka veh.” This means, “We don't pay for that,” which is how you say that you don't believe. . . . I could see that he seemed truly sad for us. He clicked his tongue the way Mama Tataba used to and told me, “Leba, the gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.” (208) In a wonderfully ironic manner, Kingsolver is able to play the two beliefs off each other. Nelson accepts the story of Job, but in his own interpretation. Leah tries to explain that as Christians they do not accept Nelson’s understanding of the story, 172 and turning on its head the Kikongo phrase that Leah uses, Nelson warns that if they do not pay the gods, they will ultimately pay (the Price). Church for the Lost Cause When Nelson discovers that Leah and Adah are twins, he is horrified and tries to understand from Adah how it is possible that the girls were not killed at birth, as is the custom in Kilanga. Twins are considered bad luck and a danger to society. As Nelson questions Adah about her shocking revelation, we get more insight into how the village really views Jesus: “Tata Jesus, what does he say?” TOO MUCH, AS A RULE. “What does he say to do when a woman has…” he hesitated over even saying the word in English. I shrugged, but Nelson kept pushing me on this point. He would not believe the Jesus Bible with its absolutely prodigious abundance of words gave no specific instructions to mothers of newborn twins. Finally I wrote: JESUS SAYS TO KEEP THEM, I GUESS. (212) In addition to Adah’s ever-cynical view of Jesus, she understands Nelson’s need to see the Bible as an instruction book. Because twins are such a perceived evil in the village, Nelson believes that there must be something specific about what to do with them in the Bible, if this Bible is so important in Nathan’s religion. This dialogue between Nelson and Adah shows the great chasm between the two cultures’ belief systems, not only theologically regarding Jesus and the Western understanding of God, but in the more practical, day to day workings of village life. Nelson cannot believe that nothing bad happened in the Price “village” when Adah and Leah were 173 born, but the idea that twins could bring a curse upon a village is so foreign to us as readers that we have a hard time taking it seriously. Our Western acculturation inclines us to believe that such superstitious “nonsense” just goes along with Nelson’s other voodoo beliefs. Such beliefs are very real to the Kilangese, however, and we soon discover that many of the village women have a tendency toward twins. Nelson explains to Adah that because they take such evil omens seriously, the afflicted women have started looking to Jesus for a reprieve. Nelson became agitated again, “so you see both wives of Tata Boanda go to the Jesus Church! And the Mama Lakanga! All these women and their friends and husbands! They think they will have twins again, and Tata Jesus will not make them leave the babies in the forest. This was fascinating news, and I queried him on the particulars. According to Nelson's accounting, nearly half my father's congregation were relatives of dead twins. It is an interesting precept on which to found a ministry: The First Evangelical Baptist Church of the Twin-Prone. I also learned from Nelson that we are hosting seven lepers every Sunday, plus two men who have done the thing that is permanently unforgivable by local gods—that is to have accidentally killed a clansman or child. We seem to be The Church for the Lost of Cause, which is probably not so far afield from what Jesus himself was operating in his time. (211-212) Adah’s perception here that there is a relationship between church attendance and personal need is inspired. Through Adah, Kingsolver lets us see one very common way religion is used—she reminds us that people in all cultures go to church to find answers and to help improve their lives. If people are in need of healing, they go to church to pray. If they wish for a child, they go to church to pray. If the church they are attending does not hold the answers, or if their prayers are not 174 answered, then they will often seek out a new church. It is a basic human religious need to find answers and solace. Jesus understood that and, just as Adah suggests, his was a church for the downtrodden. One only need read the Beatitudes to understand Jesus’ congregation. 56 As always, it is Adah who speaks the unvarnished truth and has the insight to understand the purpose of her father’s church. She goes on to explain that Nathan is still clueless: Anatole had already tried to explain to us the societal function of our church during a peaceful dinner that ended in a shattered plate. 57 But the Reverend feels he is doing such a ripping job of clarifying all fine points of the Scripture to the heathen, he cannot imagine that he is still merely serving the purpose of cleaning up the streets, as it were. Removing troublesome elements from the main ceremonial life of Kilanga. (212-213) Orleanna and Adah knew exactly the meaning of Anatole’s words during that ill-fated Sunday dinner, but Nathan in his “sick-souled” delusion refused to accept, or was incapable of understanding, that his role in the Congo was not to clarify the fine points of Scripture. The Reverend failed to notice that every churchgoing family whose children were struck hard with the kakakaka quietly removed themselves back to ancestor 56 3: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 6: Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. 7: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.8: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. 9: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. 10: Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven ( Matthew 5:3-10). 57 After Orleanna comments to Nathan that Anatole’s visit puts a whole new outlook on things (See “Anatole Comes to Dinner,” above), Nathan gets so angry that he smashes Orleanna’s precious dinner plate with the blue flowers. 175 worship, while a few of the heathen families that were hard hit quietly came and tried out Christianity. While it makes perfect sense to me, this pragmatic view of religion escapes the Reverend utterly. Each time a new convert limps through the door on a Sunday morning, he will boast over dinner that he is “really calling them home now, buddy. Finally attracting the attention of some of the local big shots.” (213) Through Adah’s sarcasm, Kingsolver reiterates the differences in religious understanding between the villagers and Nathan. Until now, we have only been shown the villagers’ pragmatism through action and story, but in this passage, Adah both names it and acknowledges that while she understands it, it continues to escape Nathan entirely. God Does Not Suffer the Coward As life gets increasingly worse for whites in Stanleyville, Orleanna, still sick in bed, begs Nathan to take the family back to Georgia. Ruth May, who has been ill with malaria, narrates this part of the story: But Father says what the Bible says: The meek shall inherit.” He started to put his hand on Mama and she pushed him away. Hearken therefore unto the supplications of thy servant. That thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day. (238) 58 The verses that Orleanna quotes from 2 Chronicles 6 are part of a prayer of thanksgiving made by Solomon after he has built the Temple to hold the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon calls upon God to keep watch over the Temple and to continue 58 2 Chronicles 6:20-21 176 listening to the prayers of the Israelites and forgive them their iniquities. The verses go on to outline all the events that will appropriately occur in this newly built Temple of God. Orleanna, desperate, quotes to Nathan in a way that he might understand—to listen to his servant and to heed her prayers. Lacking that, she prays that God will keep watch over the household. Nathan will not be moved, however, and Ruth May continues her narrative, telling how Rachel, equally desperate, screams at her father: “Who cares who cares who cares! Who is even going to know the difference if we scoot out of here and go back home where it's safe?” Father yelled, “God will know the difference!” and Rachel fell down hard before I even heard the sound of the wall and his hand. “God despises a coward who runs while others stand and suffer!” (238) Here we finally hear from his own mouth Nathan’s motivation for staying in the Congo—he believes that God judged him for his actions during the war and he cannot bear the thought that he might again be perceived as a coward for running a second time. The survivor guilt is so pronounced that we almost feel sorry for Nathan, and could even forgive him if, as discussed above, he was not jeopardizing his family. Nathan is so completely consumed with doing penance for his presumed cowardice during the War that he allows his own family to stand and suffer so that he can ostensibly protect, through his sermons, the suffering, unsaved villagers. Ruth May continues her narrative: When Mama raises her eyes up to him, they are so cold there isn't even any Mama home inside there, and she says, “Nathan Price, the meek shall inherit. You wait and see.” (235) 177 Orleanna, now thoroughly disgusted with Nathan, flings the Beatitude back at him, almost as a curse. The women are the meek and Nathan the master, but Orleanna is determined that she and her daughters will survive this. Throughout The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver sets up Ruth May to be the daughter most susceptible to the Bantu beliefs and superstitions of young Nelson. Ruth May goes from describing the encounter between her parents to telling about the amulet Nelson gives her to protect her from death. He said now if anything happens to me, if I start fixing to die or something, hold on to this tight and bambula! Ruth May will disappear. . . . I don't want to disappear, I said. But he said, Only if you are going to die. He said this way I won't die, I will just disappear for a second and then I'll turn up someplace else, where it's safe. Instead of dead, I'll be safe. (239) Ruth May takes the amulet, and with Nelson’s instructions to think of a safe place every day, she puts it under her pillow. Ruth May accepts that wherever she thinks of, that is where she will disappear to instead of dying. Kingsolver has alluded to the death beliefs of the Kilangese before now, but through Nelson and Ruth May, she begins to incorporate them into the story in a way which will become more apparent, and more significant, through the rest of the novel. Awakenings Leah describes how, after her mother’s long illness, when Orleanna finally gets out of bed, she has found her voice: 178 [Mother had] gotten up changed from her month in bed. For one thing, she was now inclined to say whatever was on her mind right in front of God and everybody. Even Father. She didn't speak to him directly; it was more like she was talking straight to God, or the air, or the lizards who'd paused halfway up the walls, and if father should overhear her, that was his nickel. She declared she was taking us out of here as soon as she found the way to do it. (243) Orleanna finally finds it within herself to look for any way possible to take her daughters out of the Congo. She discovers her voice and her moral agency. Orleanna’s newfound strength and belief in herself rubs off on Leah: I was shocked and frightened to see her flaunt Father's authority, but truthfully, I could feel something similar moving around in my own heart. For the first time in my life, I doubted his judgment. He’d made us stay here, when everybody from Nelson to the King of Belgium 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. (243) Leah wants to believe in her father, but he is constantly letting them down. Nathan believes, or wants to believe, that the Lord’s work will be easier to do in the new atmosphere of Independence because now the Congolese are free to make their own choices. Leah comes to see that Nathan truly believes that the villagers will choose the Lord’s infinite love, and us of course, as we are God’s special delegation to Kilanga. He says we are being brave and righteous. Bravery and righteousness— those are two things that cannot go unrewarded in the sight of the Lord. Father never doubts it, and I can see that for him it’s true. . . . For Father, the Kingdom of the Lord is an uncomplicated place, where tall, handsome boys fight on the side that always wins. (243-244) 179 Kingsolver again spells out for us Nathan’s obsession with bravery (God hates a coward) and righteousness. His interpretation of that bravery and righteousness, however, leaves a bit to be desired. Leah understands Nathan’s motivation, but she also is learning that the world is not the cowboy and Indian, football star place that her father makes it out to be. The Kingdom of Heaven, as Leah has spent the past year discovering, is a very complicated place, and there aren’t any hard and fast rules for getting in, as much as her father might like to think so. She begins to question whether Nathan would not be equally brave, and perhaps more righteous, to take his family away from this place that is so dangerous for them and where they are so unwanted. Leah also sees, for perhaps the first time, what Adah has been trying to tell her all along: But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl’s bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? (244) Leah has been working toward this revelation a little at a time. She keeps hoping that Nathan will live up to her expectations, but he continually disappoints her. As she matures, she sees the religious conflict raging within her father; she wants so badly to be there for him, but she recognizes that he is not fighting the same war, nor even living in the same space, as she is. All my life I've tried to set my shoes squarely into his footprints, believing if only I stayed close enough to him those same clean, simple laws would rule my life as well. That the Lord would see my goodness and fill me with light. Yet with each passing day, I find myself farther 180 away. There's a great holy war going on in my father's mind, in which we’re meant to duck and run and obey orders and fight for all the right things, but I can't always make out the orders or even tell which side I'm on exactly. . . . If his decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn't right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. (244) Leah has always hoped that God would fill her with the righteous light that seemed to be illuminating Nathan. She understands, regretfully, that until this moment she had been blinded by his radiance but is now finally beginning to see the light. Brother Fowles Brother Fowles is introduced in name early on in The Poisonwood Bible. He provides the liberal Protestant counterpart for Reverend Price’s Baptist fundamentalism and is the vehicle through which Kingsolver provides most of her moral discourse on Christian love and tolerance. As has been alluded to several times previously, Brother Fowles is viewed in an entirely different way from Reverend Nathan Price. We have seen from Methuselah that Brother Fowles used profanity, from Rachel that he was “crazy” enough to stay in the village for 6 years, and from Leah that his greatest sin was to mingle with (and marry one of) the villagers. When Brother Fowles is finally introduced in person, we again get Rachel’s perspective on his arrival. As noted above, although she is self-centered and naïve, Rachel is also perceptive and opinionated, so she provides a good lens through which to view 181 Brother Fowles’ arrival: “He had a white beard and twinkling blue eyes, and all in all gave the impression of what Santa Claus would look like if he’d converted to Christian and gone without a good meal since last Christmas” (244). It is both humorous and telling that Rachel believes that Santa Claus is not Christian. This ignorance could be because 1) the Price family is more traditional when it comes to Christmas and does not associate Christmas with Santa Claus, which would not be surprising, 2) because she is unclear on the origins of Santa Claus, which would be even less surprising, or 3) because Rachel is unaware that only Christians include Santa Claus as part of their nativity holiday, which would be perhaps the least surprising of all. Upon his arrival, Brother Fowles asks the family how things were going at the church, and Rachel narrates the response: Father was out somewhere looking for trouble, as usual, and we hardly knew how to answer that question ourselves. Mother said, “Well, it’s difficult. Nathan’s very frustrated. It’s all so clear to him that the words of Jesus will bring grace to their lives. But people here have such different priorities from what we are used to.” (246) Rachel identifies Nathan as being out causing trouble—an indication of how he is perceived in the village and his lack of success. Orleanna, realistic about what is actually happening in the village, succinctly identifies the problem—grace does not seem to be a priority to the congregation. Grace is not a theological idea that has any pertinence to a people whose understanding of religion is completely integrated with their day to day lives; their concept of a soul and that it might be in peril is 182 nonexistent. Because Nathan cannot function except through the Southern Baptist theology he brings to the people of Kilanga, he is unable to adapt his mission to their needs. Upon hearing Nathan’s “dilemma,” Brother Fowles tries to explain to Orleanna and the girls about the villagers’ religion: “They are very religious people, you know,” the old man said. “For all that.” “How do you mean?” Mother asked. “Everything they do is with one eye to the spirit. When they plant their yams and manioc, they are praying. When they harvest, they are praying. Even when they conceive their children, I think they are praying.” Mother seemed very interested, but Leah crossed her arms and asked, “Do you mean praying to their own pagan gods?” Reverend Santa smiled at Leah. “What do you imagine our God thinks of this little corner of His creation: the flowering trees in the forest, the birds, the drenching downpours, the heat of the sun—do you know what I am talking about?” “Oh, yes,” Leah said, straight-A pupil as always. “And do you think God is pleased with these things?” “Oh, I think He glories in them!” She hastened to say. “I think he must be prouder of the Congo than just about any place he ever made. “I think so, too,” he said. “I think the Congolese have a world of God’s grace in their lives, along with a dose of hardship that can kill a person entirely. I happen to think they already knew how to make a joyful noise unto the Lord a long time ago.” (247) In Nathan’s theology, grace is a state to be earned, given by God solely through the rite of baptism, and Nathan makes it abundantly clear throughout the novel that without baptism, there is no grace. For Brother Fowles, however, grace is not dependent upon being baptized. God’s presence, and thus the grace of God, is evident everywhere, and in a culture where baptism is a ritual without meaning, 183 Brother Fowles feels that the villagers achieve grace in how they meet the challenges of their difficult lives. He observes that everything the Kilangese do is an homage to God—that their lives are infused with a spirituality that makes the act of baptism unnecessary. Through Brother Fowles’ theology and practice, Kingsolver introduces a dimension of religious interpretation that is lacking in the single-minded religious vision of Nathan Price. Brother Fowles uses the Bible as a tool for understanding and getting closer to God, for expressing the spirit of God, and to show how God’s goodness is manifest in the world. He comprehends the meaning of the Psalms and points out that these “pagans” already understand the spirit as well as the letter of that biblical shout of exultation to “make a joyful noise.” 59 Kingsolver makes Brother Fowles so rational, especially in contrast to Nathan, that we as readers pay attention to what he has to say. Kingsolver effectively uses Brother Fowles as her mouthpiece—her agent to definitively express where she stands on these religious themes. He becomes in many ways the primary vehicle for her religious discourse on Christianity. Kingsolver wants us to understand the villagers’ sense of spirituality yet also lets us know—as in the conversation with Anatole—that while the Kilangese are inherently spiritual, they are also deeply superstitious. Strict Christian theology holds no tolerance for superstition, although many traditions have woven it into their belief system. 60 Nathan cannot incorporate 59 Psalms 66, 81, 95, 98, and 100 all include “make a joyful noise.” 60 One of my favorite classes to teach is the pagan origins of Jewish and Christian traditions. Seemingly benign conventions such as wearing white at weddings began as superstitious practices. 184 the traditional village religion with his worldview and ultimately fails in trying to win the villagers to his way of thinking. The more unconventional Brother Fowles interprets everything as a path to God and is able to connect much more successfully with the people of Kilanga. “Have you heard the songs they sing here in Kilanga?” he asked. “They’re very worshipful. It’s a grand way to begin a church service, singing a Congolese hymn to the rainfall on the seed yams. It’s quite easy to move from there to the parable of the mustard seed. (247) Brother Fowles sees the aspect of God within the villagers in a way that is impossible for Nathan, and Fowles uses this understanding as a bridge between the cultures and the religions. He has found a way to relate in a meaningful, and tolerant, way to the villagers—another lesson Kingsolver would like to impart to her readers. For Brother Fowles (and for Leah as well), the Congo is already a Garden of Eden, and his personal work toward the villagers’ redemption is not in what they believe, but in how they behave. Brother Fowles sees the Bible from an entirely different— and patently non-Southern Baptist—perspective, and he finds a way to bring its meaning to the villagers: “Many parts of the Bible make good sense here, if only you change a few words.” He laughed. “And a lot of whole chapters, sure, you just have to throw away.” “Well, it's every bit God's word, isn’t it?” Leah said. “God's word, brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a chain of translators 2000 years long.” Leah stared at him. “Darling, did you think God wrote it all down into English of King James himself?” “No, I guess not.” 185 “Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?” Leah sat narrow-eyed in her chair, for once stumped for the correct answer. (247-248) This passage and the next provide what I believe to be the crux of Kingsolver’s argument within the entire novel. It is within this discussion that we gain the most insight into Brother Fowles’ theology and Kingsolver’s own theological and ethical discourse. Kingsolver wants us to be clear that there must be a complete understanding of the context of one’s faith before one can completely understand and accept the faith. Brother Fowles continues: “Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it is the camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it’s the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?” He leaned forward toward Leah with his hands on his knees. “Och, I shouldn’t be messing about with your thinking this way, with your father out in the garden. But I’ll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.” Leah did not commit herself one way or the other. “The flowers and birds and all, you mean to say that’s your Gospel.” “Ah, you’re thinking that I’m a crazy old Pagan for sure.” Old Tata Bird laughed heartily, fingering the cross around his neck (another warning sign of Catholic papism), and he didn’t sound repentant. “No, I understand,” Mother said thoughtfully. She appeared to understand him so well she’d like to adopt him and have his mixed-race family move right in. 186 “You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve been here so long. I’ve come to love the people here and their ways of thinking.” (248) Kingsolver has spent the first half of the book presenting a particular understanding of Christianity—a Christianity that is not working in the Congo—and now she demonstrates, through the character of Brother Fowles, her own theology. Brother Fowles jokingly names it Pagan, but Orleanna understands it for what it is, and identifies with it. There continues to be reader-author-character engagement throughout this section. At first, we immediately suspect Brother Fowles, as do the Price women—after all, Nathan has said nothing positive about the man since the Price family arrived in the Congo—but he is so congenial and talks with such sense that the girls, particularly Leah, are thrown. As a mode of biblical criticism and as a way of presenting food for thought, this dialogue is very successful. It is presented through a skeptical narrator, but the wisdom within the words is revealed through the dialogue. We as readers are forced to confront the truth of his words, or at least the implication of the truth. If it really is true that the Bible has been mistranslated, then what does that reveal about a belief in the infallibility of God’s word, particularly for 187 Nathan, a Southern Baptist whose creed demands that Scripture is the word of God and thus infallible. 61 Reverend Fowles’ speech regarding “throwing out” parts of the Bible also reveals an acceptance on Kingsolver’s part that the Bible was written for a specific purpose, and it is the purpose, not the details, that is important when trying to bring the Good News to a place where it is so entirely foreign. Reverend Fowles represents the Christianity of Jesus—the same Christianity that Adah spoke of earlier—a Christianity that aims to serve the downtrodden, and a Christianity about love, where love is patient and love is kind. 62 It is through Reverend Fowles that we see that Kingsolver is not anti-Christian. She is anti-dogmatism, she is in favor of reason, and she has a clear affinity for the Christian message of love and good works. When Nathan finally joins the group in the house, Brother Fowles jumps up to warmly greet him, extending his hand Congolese style. Nathan initially does not offer his hand in return. After coolly studying the “big Catholic-looking cross around the neck, and probably thinking over all we had heard about Brother Fowles going off the deep end, plus every curse word ever uttered by the parrot,” he finally does 61 “The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy. It reveals the principles by which God judges us, and therefore is, and will remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried. All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.” The Baptist Faith and Message, article I, “Scripture.” Taken from the Official Website of the Southern Baptist Convention., http://www.sbc.net/bfm/bfm2000.asp. 62 1 Corinthians 13:4. 188 shake hands and asks what brings Brother Fowles to Kilanga (250). Brother Fowles replies, “We do most of our work down near the river Kwa, but my wife’s parents are at Ganda. We thought we might look in on you and our other friends in Kilanga. Sure, we should pay our respects to Tata Ndu.” You could see our Father’s skin crawl when he heard the name of his archenemy, the chief. Spoken in a Yank accent to boot. But Father played the cool cat, not admitting what a miserable failure he had been so far at the Christianizing trade. (250) Here Kingsolver again establishes that Brother Fowles has been accepted by the village whereas Nathan has been a “miserable failure.” Brother Fowles has been able to befriend the chief and work with him within the village, whereas Nathan considers him an archenemy. Within this brief exchange we find both the American North/South dichotomy still prevalent as well as the Catholic overtones (from Nathan’s perspective) of Brother Fowles’ Christianity. 63 The following discussions between Brother Fowles and Nathan solidify the differences between the two religious perspectives: “I rejoice in the work of the Lord,” said Brother Fowles. “I was just telling your wife, I do a little ministering. I study and classify the fauna. I observe a great deal, and probably offer very little salvation in the long run.” “That is a pity,” Father declared. “Salvation is the way, the truth, and the light. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And how then shall they 63 This also shows Nathan’s ignorance, for it is more likely a Northern/Southern Baptist difference than a Catholic/Protestant one. Although officially a Southern Baptist missionary, Reverend Fowles theology more closely represents a liberal Protestant tradition. 189 believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? …As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the Gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!’” “‘Glad Tidings of good things,’ that is precious work indeed,” said Brother Fowles. “Romans, chapter ten, verse fifteen.” Wow. This Yank knew his Bible. Father took a little step backwards on that one. “Certainly I do my best,” Father said quickly to cover his shock. (250) In this passage, Nathan again, as above, combines biblical verses and does not get them exactly right. This will be lost on many readers, and it is not the central point that Kingsolver is trying to make, but when incorporated with the rest of the biblical hermeneutic, it adds an extra dimension to what Kingsolver tries to convey regarding the sanctity of the text. Nathan’s initial verse is taken from John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” Commonly misquoted, this verse does not discuss salvation or light, but refers to one’s relationship with God. The rest of the verses are correctly quoted from Romans 10:13-15. Brother Fowles’ response that to bring glad tidings is “precious work indeed” provides what I believe Kingsolver intended as an ironic context—Brother Fowles truly believes that bringing glad tidings is the work of the Lord, yet he sees glad tidings not merely as the word of the Gospel, but also as the meaning behind the Gospel. As readers bound into this story, we are able to add another ironic layer to this statement because we are aware that there is nothing glad about the Gospel that Nathan brings to the people of Kilanga. Brother Fowles is most likely aware of this as well. Brother Fowles dwells not on the 190 idea of salvation, at least spiritual salvation, but on the day to day salvation that glad tidings can bring to a person’s life. Nathan, recovering from his shock, then quotes another chapter of the Bible: “I take to heart the blessed words, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house.’” (251) Brother Fowles again correctly identifies this verse as Acts of the Apostles 16, Paul and Silas speaking to their jailer. Brother Fowles responds, clearly teasing Nathan, who is oblivious: “I’ve always been a little perplexed by the next verse, ‘And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes.’” “The American translation might clear that up for you. It says, ‘washed their wounds.’” Father sounded like the know-it-all kid in class you just want to strangulate. “It does, yes,” replied Brother Fowles, slowly. “And yet I wonder who translated this? During my years here in the Congo I’ve heard so many errors of translation, even quite comical ones. So you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical, Brother Price. Sometimes I ask myself: what if those stripes are not wounds at all, but something else? He was a prison guard; maybe he wore a striped shirt, like a referee. Did Paul and Silas do his laundry for him, as an act of humility? Or perhaps the meaning is more metaphorical: Did Paul and Silas reconcile the man’s doubts? Did they listen to his divided way of feeling about this new religion they were springing upon him all of a sudden?” (251) These exchanges between Nathan and Brother Fowles are crucial for Kingsolver’s theological goals: she presents for her reader a different way of thinking about the Bible. While this exegesis is common practice for most of us in 191 the field of religion, it is a fairly new—even shocking and, one can hope, revelatory—notion for most readers. By providing a new way of interpreting the Bible—and even permission to do so—Kingsolver brings into the mainstream culture issues which are morally relevant to our understanding of the Bible and its religious impact. This dialogue is invaluable and should be considered intrinsic to a discussion of ethics and literature. Whereas Nathan takes the meaning of the verse at its face value, and even more conclusively as it is translated, Brother Fowles offers a perspective that one should always question the meaning of the Bible—go back to the sources—try to discover within the context of the verse what is actually intended. This is the same lesson Brother Fowles tried to impress upon Leah above in his translation of the word “camel.” Later in the book, Kingsolver flat out states, through Adah, just how faulty translations can be and how ill-advised we are to rely upon translations for our understanding of the Bible and its meaning in our lives. The banter continues between the two men, and Nathan remains completely baffled by Brother Fowles’ unconventional biblical interpretations. Brother Fowles demonstrates for Nathan how he chose biblical passages that would be meaningful to the Congolese, concluding that he is “a plain fool for the nature images in the Bible.” He tells Nathan that he finds such imagery “so handy here, among these people who have such an intelligence and the great feeling for the living world around them. They’re very humble in their debts to nature” (252). Brother Fowles provides an entirely different perspective about these people by whom Nathan has come to be so 192 frustrated. Brother Fowles quotes Romans 12, alluding to his previous discussion of grace: “Having then gifts that differ according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, or ministry, or he that teacheth. He that giveth, let him do it with simplicity. He that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without dissimulation. Be kindly affectioned to one another with brotherly love.” “Chapter twelve. Verse ten. Thank you, sir.” Father was plainly ready to call a halt to this battle of the Bible verses. I’d bet he’d like to of given Brother Fowles The Verse to copy out for punishment. But then the old man would just stand there and rattle it off from memory with a few extra images of nature thrown in for free.” (253) Kingsolver shows, through the humor of Rachel’s narrative, the beauty and the usefulness Brother Fowles finds in the Bible and how he is able to use it with the people in Kilanga. Nathan has no such facility with his biblical understanding and can only take the Bible literally—making him constantly at odds with the Kilangese. Finally frustrated with the exchange with Brother Fowles, Nathan stomps out on him and his wife, and the Fowles spend the rest of the afternoon visiting with their friends in Kilanga. Rachel laments that it was all the girls could do to keep from following the family around: We were so curious about what they’d be saying to Tata Ndu and them. Jeepers! All this time we’ve been more or less thinking we were the one and only white people who ever set foot here. And all along, our neighbors had this whole friendship with Brother Fowles they’d just kept mum about. You always think you know more about their kind than they know about yours, which just goes to show you. (253) 193 Rachel’s revelation reflects the arrogance she and her family have had regarding Brother Fowles and the villagers. Brother Fowles lived there for six years before he was apparently asked to leave by the Baptist ministry, in Rachel’s interpretation, for consorting with the natives. It is more likely that the Fowles were advised to leave the Congo for their own safety, just as the Price family had been advised not to come. The Fowles chose to stay in the Congo and continue their ministry in other useful ways. They lived on a boat and traveled up and down the river administering aid. As they are leaving Kilanga, they give Orleanna many supplies: “canned goods, milk powder, coffee, sugar, quinine pills, fruit cocktail, and so many other things it seemed like they really were Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus, after all” (254). Orleanna just can’t believe it: Mother was taking stock of things. She asked, “How do you manage to stay so well supplied?” “We have so many friends, Celine said. “The Methodist Mission gets us milk powder and vitamins to distribute in the villages along the river. The tins of food and quinine pills come from the ABFMS.” “We’re terribly interdenominational,” said Brother Fowles, laughing. “I even get a little stipend from the National Geographic Society.” “The ABFMS?” Mother queried. “American Baptist Foreign Mission Service,” he said. “They have a hospital mission up the Wamba River, have you not heard of it? That little outfit has done a world of good in the ways of guinea-worm cure, literacy, and human kindness. . . . It’s run by the wisest minister you’ll ever meet, a man named Wesley Green, and his wife, Jane.” Brother Fowles added as an afterthought, “No offense to your husband, of course.” “But we’re Baptists, Mother said, sounding hurt. “ And the Mission League cut off our stipend right before Independence!” 194 Mr. Fowles thought this over before offering, tactfully, “For certain, Mrs. Price, there are Christians and then there are Christians.” (255) The implication here is that the ABFMA finds the work of Brother Fowles and Wesley Green far worthier, and more Christian, than that of Nathan Price. This is the primary religious message of the novel, and another emphasis on the good work that Christianity is meant to inspire. Brother Fowles considers himself to be “interdenominational,” and Kingsolver herself claims that, “the soul of the book is its portrayal of the divergent spiritual views of its characters.” 64 Kingsolver wants us to consider seriously, not only through Nathan’s negative example, but through the other positive examples as well, exactly what we think it means to be a Christian. 65 After discussing how to help Ruth May, who still has malaria, Brother Fowles recommends to Orleanna that she speak to Tata Ndu. Orleanna is taken aback: “Were you really on such good terms with Tata Ndu?” He looked up, a little surprised. “I respect him, if that’s what you mean.” “But as a Christian. Did you really get anywhere with him?” . . . “As a Christian, I respect his judgments. He guided his village fairly, all things considered. We never could see eye to eye on the business of having four wives…. But each of those wives has profited from the teachings of Jesus, I can tell you. Tata Ndu and I spent many afternoons with a calabash of palm wine between us, 64 http://www3.baylor.edu/Rel_Lit/archives/interviews/kingsolver_intv.html 65 Orleanna, Brother Fowles, Leah, and later the Catholic nuns all offer alternative perspectives to Nathan’s disturbed and dogmatic view of Christianity. 195 debating the merits of treating a wife kindly. In my six years here I saw the practice of wife beating fall into great disfavor. Secret little altars to Tata Jesus appeared in most every kitchen as a result.” (257-258) Brother Fowles lives the Gospel as opposed to merely preaching it. The Kilangese people respected Brother Fowles because he spoke to them as one of them. He understood the value of sitting with the villagers and debating the moral lessons that the Bible teaches, and as a result, Jesus is honored by the villagers. By significantly reducing wife-beating in the village, Jesus is imbued with a practical and tangible quality to which the villagers can relate. They must have been terribly confused when Nathan replaced Brother Fowles with a completely different presentation of this God they had come to worship for his tolerance and peaceful ways. Rachel’s sequence of events concludes with Orleanna asking Brother Fowles if he felt that what he did in Kilanga was enough. Picking up a biblical allegory he and Nathan had argued earlier, he replies, “We’re branches grafted on this good tree, Mrs. Price. The great root of Africa sustains us. I wish you wisdom and God’s mercy.” This answer again demonstrates his belief that everyone must work together in the Kingdom of God, and that they must be willing to work within the world the Africans inhabit without forcing them into positions which are foreign to them. Brother Fowles understands the importance of recognizing religion’s subjective nature. He witnesses how the Kilangese lean toward James’ institutional religion and he tries to bring a more personal aspect to that view of religion. As the Fowles family 196 floats away in their houseboat, Rachel describes the village’s reaction to their departure: They were yelling so happily it seemed like they loved Brother Fowles for more reasons than just powdered milk. Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa. (285) Rachel’s previous description of Brother Fowles as Santa Claus had to do with his appearance. Now that we know more about this benevolent man, she uses the same depiction to describe his good heart and generous nature. This chapter is pivotal in many ways. We see that Orleanna is more aware of religious diversity and she asks many of the same questions the reader might be asking; Brother Fowles has given her a lot to think about. We also see that Reverend Fowles is a good man, despite the legacy that has followed him, and he demonstrates in a clear fashion what is real about Christian charity and what is not. For Kingsolver and the Kilangese villagers, it is of little or no importance that Brother Fowles curses when he has virtually eliminated wife-beating. Brother Fowles represents a Jesus- like figure in our era of “What Would Jesus Do?”. Through Kingsolver’s representation of Brother Fowles, the reader is forced to consider the liberal and flexible theology he offers as it is juxtaposed with the more rigid theology represented by Nathan Price. Through Brother Fowles, Kingsolver best portrays her normative approach to ethical actions. She reveals her belief that the lessons of the Bible are valuable primarily insofar as they effect a change in moral behavior. It is not important to her 197 whether baptism will ensure spiritual salvation, if one’s soul is corrupted by his/her behavior. This is a very powerful message and one that is often discussed in philosophical treatises. But Kingsolver wants to do more than talk about it; she wants to demonstrate the efficacy of a theology applied to real life, not just a theoretical philosophy. To give Nathan credit, he does demonstrate some frustration with all talk and no action. When he complains to Leah above about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, we are meant to recognize that theology as a hypothetical discipline is relatively worthless in a practical way. Kingsolver emphasizes that how one applies ethics is profoundly more important than philosophical bantering, and she continually reveals her disinclination toward the value of spiritual salvation over the salvation of Good Works. The Christian teaching that Kingsolver wants to emphasize is that through one’s actions, one will achieve spiritual salvation. This is the lesson Jesus preached, and a lesson we find throughout the New Testament. One does not achieve spiritual salvation through baptism alone. 66 This is what we would expect from her as a normative ethicist, and it is what we get from her as a narrative ethicist. Through the character of Brother Fowles, Kingsolver is able to reveal her ethics in a prescriptive way which can then supply an entrée for the reader into both ethical discourse and social action. 66 In 2 Corinthians 9:7-9, for example, Paul writes: 7: Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. 8: And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. 9: As it is written: “He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever.” 198 Ruth May’s Premonitions As Ruth May remains ill with malaria, she explains that “this time I got sick because Baby Jesus can see ever what I do and I wasn’t good” (273). Ruth May sees a cause and effect for her actions against other people, but not for the fact that she did not eat her quinine pills. She has begun to accept Nelson’s belief about disappearing when she dies rather than her own earlier Christian belief about going to live with Jesus: “If I die I will disappear and I know where I’ll come back. I’ll be right up there in the tree, same color, same everything. I will look down on you. But you won’t see me” (274). Her personal understanding of religion is that what you believe is what will happen, and in this story, that is exactly what comes to pass. This statement is also the first where Ruth May gives herself a particular color and location. If the reader has been paying attention to Orleanna’s narrative, then we know that she has been talking to her child whose “bright eyes bear down” on her and who is a “little beast.” Ruth May’s own prophetic descriptions will soon catch up with Orleanna’s until we have a complete picture. The Gospel of The Poisonwood Bible Adah’s description of Nathan’s Poisonwood Church lies exactly halfway through the novel and reveals to us that while the past year has changed the rest of the Price family, Nathan has essentially remained the same: “Tata Jesus is Bängala!” declares the Reverend every Sunday at the end of his sermon. More and more, mistrusting his interpreters, he tries to speak in Kikongo. 199 He throws back his head and shouts these words to the sky, while his lambs sit scratching themselves in wonder. Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the Poisonwood Tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! For Jesus will make you itch like nobody’s business. (276) Adah’s sarcasm and cynicism are still present here, and we understand that Nathan still has not made any impact on the parishioners as far as teaching them the ways of Jesus; they are as confused as ever. This passage and the next help explain the novel’s title. The Poisonwood Bible accounts both for the sermon that Nathan preaches and the lessons that Kingsolver teaches. Both Bibles can be considered sacred or tainted depending upon one’s perspective. Kingsolver has been telling us about Nathan’s poisonous approach to religion, and in doing so, she reveals Nathan’s Bible as Poisonwood. Through her storytelling, she has also created her own Poisonwood Bible, the book we are actually reading. Certainly anyone who objects to the way she interprets the Bible and religion would consider this novel poisonous, but it is also a text of healing and hope, a Bible that is not poisonous but beloved. Kingsolver’s Bible is subtly layered with lessons from the Holy Bible that are presented in a way that can make them even more practical—or religious, or even sacred—than they seem in their own context. 67 67 Nathan’s use of the Apocrypha, for example. 200 The Ant Invasion The village of Kilanga is invaded by an army of ants which swarms over every living thing and devours everything in its path. All the daughters describe this event in their own way. Leah’s description is first, and she begins by bemoaning the fact that in her haste to run she has forgotten to look after Adah. Anatole offers to go back for Adah, and Leah laments: “How could I leave Adah behind again? Once in the womb, once to the lion, and now like Simon Peter I had denied her for the third time” (300). There is an assumption here by Kingsolver that the reader knows the biblical reference to Peter’s denial of Jesus in Luke 22, and she thereby successfully includes the reader in a more intimate understanding of Leah’s guilt. Leah prays that they will survive the ants, “Father forgive me according unto the multitude of thy mercies. I have done everything so wrong, and now there will be no escape for any of us,” and she reveals that her initial impressions of Africa have still not changed: “Though I didn’t deserve it, I wanted to rise to heaven remembering something of beauty from the Congo” (300). Rachel’s take on the ant invasion is, as would be expected, very self-serving, but also revealing: I only had time to save one precious thing. Something from home. Not my clothes, there wasn’t time, and not the Bible—it didn’t seem worth saving at that moment, so help me God. It had to be my mirror. (301) Like so many others in this book, when forced to choose between the tangible and the spiritual, Rachel decides the most important item is not the Bible, but 201 something far more practical. It is a perfectly constructed symbol for Rachel as her mirror is a reflection not only of her vanity, but of the difference to her between the United States and the Congo. As she runs out the door, she knows her father is “somewhere nearby, because [she] heard him yelling about Moses and the Egyptians and the river running with blood and what not” (301). Nathan, rather than saving his family, which one would naturally expect a father to do, is standing on his soapbox preaching a sermon that no one understands because his translator, Anatole, is busy saving Adah and Ruth May. Rachel explains that when she was younger she had read How to Survive 101 Calamities: “And thank goodness I’d read it because now I was in a jam and knew just what to do!” (302). She learned from the book how to wedge herself among the stampede of escaping villagers and get carried to the safety of the riverbank. While an amusing anecdote, Rachel’s narrative also draws attention to the fact that the most useful book in her life has, again, not been the Bible, but a practical “how to” book. Ruth May assumes the ants are invading in retribution for “that time Leah fed [an ant] to the ant lion. Jesus saw that. Now his friends are all coming back to eat us up.” This remains consistent with the theology Kingsolver has ascribed to Ruth May up until now. The important part of Ruth May’s account, however, is when she reveals her decision regarding where she will “disappear to” when it comes time to die: [W]hen Mama ran down the road with me I saw everybody was going to die. The whole world a-crying and yelling 202 bad. So much noise. I put my fingers in my ears and tried to think of the safest place. I know what it is: it's a green mamba snake away up in the tree. You don't have to be afraid of them anymore because you are one. They lie so still on the tree branch; they are the same everything as the tree. You could be right next to one and not even know. It's so quiet there. That's just exactly what I want to go and be, when I have to disappear. Your eyes will be little and round but you are so far up there you can look down and see the whole world, Mama and everybody. The tribes of Ham, Shem, and Japheth altogether. Finally you are the highest one of all.” (304) With Ruth May’s revelation that she has decided to become a green mamba snake, Kingsolver weaves the pagan Congolese traditions with the Christian stories. Ruth May’s imagining of herself as a snake looking down on all the generations of Noah is an effective synthesis of the two traditions while still maintaining her childlike outlook. We do not know if Ruth May ever speaks about this safe place to Mama, but Orleanna definitely knows that Ruth May is the snake in the tree at the conclusion of the novel. As we will see in chapter six below, Ruth May becomes both the snake and Jesus; she watches everything and determines whether to forgive. What We Learned In the final chapter of “The Judges,” Anatole returns to the riverbank with Ruth May, and Leah asks about her family. Anatole sums up the entire situation with characteristic insight: “Adah is safe. Rachel is a demon. And your father is giving a sermon about Pharaoh's army and the plagues. Everyone is all right.” Leah is greatly troubled by the meaning of the ant plague and turns to Anatole for religious answers. 203 I asked Anatole, quietly, “do you think this is the hand of God?” . . . I waited so long for his answer I finally decided he hadn’t heard me. And then he simply said, “No.” “Then why?” “The world can always give you reasons. No rain, not enough for the ants to eat. Something like that. [The ants] are always moving anyway, it is their nature. Whether God cares or not.” . . . “God hates us,” I said. “Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants. . . . When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.” (308) As we have seen above, Kingsolver has given Anatole (whose name means “sunrise”) a wisdom role. He is very thoughtful in his answer to Leah and, reflecting what we understand to be Kingsolver’s perspective, very philosophical. He separates the actions of God from what is inherent in nature. Unlike Nathan, Anatole is willing to admit that there are no real answers for why the world exists the way it does, but that God is not to blame. This and the following passages are fine examples of Kingsolver’s intentionalist hermeneutics. We can take the conversation at face value—the discussion between Anatole and Leah, a discussion which leads Leah to finally break completely with her father—and we can accept that Kingsolver’s underlying intention is to have us, the readers, see the relationship between God and the world from her (guised as Anatole’s) perspective. If we as reader and participant in the story accept that the conversation is also meant to be a dialogue, Socratic style, between author and reader, we gain far more meaning from it. 204 “I want to be righteous, Anatole. To know right from wrong, that’s all. I want to live the right way and be redeemed.” . . . I shouted to make him hear. “Don’t you believe me? When I walk through the valley of the shadow the Lord is supposed to be with me, and he’s not! Do you see him here in this boat?” . . . But Anatole said suddenly, “Don’t expect God’s protection in places beyond God’s dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I’m warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself. . . . “Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.” (309) Unlike Leah, whose protected Georgia upbringing has given her a naïve view of Right and Wrong (her father’s extremism aside), Anatole comes from a background where men get their hands cut off for not working fast enough in the diamond mines, and where the men doing the cutting get off unpunished. He has seen that there is no cause and effect relationship between one’s moral or religious principles and what happens to them. The world, especially his world, does not work that way. Like an unexpected infestation of ants, there is sometimes no sense to what happens to us. Leah ponders Anatole’s perspective: I could see what he thought: that my faith in justice was childish, no more useful here than tires on a horse. I felt the breath of God grow cold on my skin. “We never should have come here,” I said. . . . “You shouldn’t have come here, Béene, but you are here and nobody in Kilanga wants you to starve. They understand that white people make very troublesome ghosts.” (310) 205 Leah begins to appreciate what Anatole is telling her, and she puts all she has learned in the past year together to form a new understanding of herself and her relationship to God. When she first arrived in the Congo, she was indignant that God was not “balancing the scales of justice” by sending Kentucky Wonder beans to their poor, barren garden. Now she has gained more insight into the realities of life in the Congo. More important, for her and for Kingsolver’s message, Leah understands that what may have been true back in Georgia is not necessarily true here. She sees that truth is subjective and completely situational. She also realizes in a much more tangible way her father’s folly for bringing them to the Congo. Anatole tells her that they should not have come, but because they are here, no one wants to see them starve. He attributes the charitable behavior to their fear of white ghosts, but the reality is, as Kingsolver would have us agree, the Kilangese have a highly developed sense of communal good. 68 Leah has spent the past year watching the difference between the villagers’ treatment of others and her father’s supposed Christian behavior. She comes to a realization about her father, his Bible, and her innocent faith in the God he represents: My father was not a ghost; he was God with his back turned, hands clasped behind him and fierce eyes on the clouds. God had turned his back and was walking away. 68 In a dialogue I did not include, there is a long discussion between Anatole and Leah about “sharing the wealth” and how when one person in the village has good fortune—a promising hunt, for example, the entire village shares in the bounty. This is juxtaposed with the American tendency to hoard wealth. 206 . . . Quietly I began to cry, and everything inside me came out through my eyes. “Anatole, Anatole,” I whispered. . . . I repeated his name because it took the place of prayer. (310) Leah has learned about God in both Christianity and Bantu, and she no longer knows what to think. She has seen the actions of a man who considers himself a Christian, and the far more “Christian” behavior of a man who does not. Leah has been rejected by God and by her father, and she has now transferred the love she once held for both onto Anatole. As they arrive safely on the opposite shore, Leah remembers the poor chickens shut up in their coops, unable to escape the ants: I pictured their bones laid white and clean in a pile on top of the eggs. Two days later, when the rebel army of tiny soldiers had passed through Kilanga and we could go home again, that is exactly how we found our hens. . . . This is what I must have learned, the night God turned his back on me: how to foretell the future in chicken bones. (311) After this event, Leah turns from the Christianity of her father. Through Ruth May, Kingsolver incorporates both the Christian and Bantu beliefs into a religious experience possibly only available to a child, but through Leah, Kingsolver expresses the abandonment of faith in favor of fate. 207 CHAPTER FIVE BOOK FOUR: BEL AND THE SERPENT Orleanna Price: Sanderling Island “Bel and the Serpent” begins with Orleanna’s interpretation of the political situation in the Congo during the transition to independence. Kingsolver’s polemic becomes more outspoken as Orleanna describes how the Americans and Belgians have used the Congo in their own chess game: “the kind of game that allows civilized men to play at make-believe murder.” Given time, legions of men are drawn into the game, both ebony and ivory: the Congo's CIA station chief, the National Security Council, even the President of the United States. (318) Kingsolver goes on to outline the assassination of new Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and how the puppet Joseph Mobutu is left in power by the United States. 69 She is also very specific about the United States’ involvement in this historic event, and how a Senate committee in 1975 uncovered the United States’ culpability in bringing Lumumba down because he was “a danger to the safety of the world” (319). Kingsolver wants to be very clear to the reader from here throughout the rest of the 69 When Kingsolver published this novel in 1998, it seemed that the United States had a very prominent role in both these events. In 2002, Belgium released formal statements admitting their culpability in Lumumba’s death, along with a formal apology to the people of Congo (formally Zaire). The United States continues to claim that, while the CIA (and Eisenhower) was aware of the Belgian plans, they had no direct role in the assassination. None of the governments involved with putting Mobutu in power had any idea that he would go on to be a despot, ruling for three decades and leaving the country in ruins. 208 novel exactly what was going on in Africa during this time of political upheaval, and there is no ambivalence whatsoever in her political leanings concerning the guilt of the United States. Most of the information that comes from Kingsolver regarding Africa is not well-known to most Americans. Although the United States’ culpability in Lumumba’s death was headline news for a brief moment in 1975, this information is now something about which few of us learn. In this regard, Kingsolver’s use of the novel as an educational tool, in addition to its role as moral compass, is very effective. As Orleanna reflects back on January, 1961, all of her regrets surface, and she reveals that both personal and national disaster is imminent: If only I hadn’t let the children out of my sight that morning. If I hadn’t let Nathan take us to Kilanga in the first place. If the Baptists hadn’t taken upon themselves the religious conversion of the Congolese. What if the Americans, and the Belgians before them, hadn’t tasted blood and money in Africa? If the world of white men had never touched the Congo at all? (323-324) As she has in previous chapters, Orleanna ponders the way history might have gone, but she comes to terms with the fact that trying to fix destiny is “a fine and useless enterprise.” Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose. You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don’t expect them to do a thing for you. They’re far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven’s name we will do next. (323-324) 209 Orleanna’s language here alludes to both a Christian and pagan worldview. She both “walks through the valley” of her fate, an interesting twist on what we would expect her to say (and perhaps Kingsolver intends for Psalm 23 to be in the back of our minds) and has a non-Christian acceptance that the dead are watching everything we do, yet are not willing to intervene on our behalf. 70 Orleanna’s narrative is both fatalistic and resigned, and with these prescient words, Kingsolver readies the reader for the inevitable result of the Price family’s misguided mission to the Congo.  WHAT WE LOST: KILANGA, JANUARY 17, 1961  The Vote “What We Lost” is the first chapter to give the reader a specific date, and January 17, 1961 is historically both the day of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and President Eisenhower’s farewell speech to the nation. Leah begins the chapter by prefacing the impending tragedy foreshadowed for so long: You can’t just point to the one most terrible thing and wonder why it happened. This has been a whole terrible time, from the beginning of the drought that left so many without food, and then the night of the ants, to now, the worst tragedy of all. Each bad thing causes something worse. As Anatole says, if you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you’ll go crazy if you think it’s all 70 Although the concept of angels is very much a part of the Christian tradition, Orleanna’s description here does not sound as though she is referring to angels but to the same spirits of the dead that are more common in non-Western cultures and are very much a part of the Bantu culture. 210 punishment for your sins. I see that when I look at my parents. God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves. (327) “Bel and the Serpent” begins the new Leah—the Leah who begins to see things more clearly, and the Leah who embraces the wisdom in Anatole’s non- Christian philosophy. We have been led gradually through Leah’s transformation and are ready to accept her new perspective. More important, Kingsolver has laid enough groundwork, between Nathan’s Southern Baptist dogmatism and Brother Fowles’ pagan-Christian liberalism to accept the calm and rational theology of Anatole. While Brother Fowles provided a vehicle for alternate ways to approach biblical and religious interpretation, Anatole offers alternate ways to accept God in the world. His lessons to Leah, both in the previous chapter and in this, primarily have to do with coming to terms with the way God works in the world. That can be a Christian way or a pagan way, but the emphasis is on not feeling that God is punishing us personally. Through Anatole, Kingsolver’s voice as theologian comes out the loudest. In many ways, the dialogues between Leah and Anatole are no different from any other philosophical or theological question-and-answer session. Kingsolver provides a forum from which Leah asks some very difficult, and very common, questions about God, and Anatole answers them. Kingsolver gives a huge audience access to questions they either may never have thought about or which answer questions they have thought a lot about. By providing theology through her literature, she encourages hermeneutic engagement with the reader, and, as stated 211 earlier, this theological reflection is no less valid because it is contained within fiction. The novel’s very accessibility makes it an important contribution to moral discourse. Leah continues by describing the events that occurred during one of Nathan’s Sunday sermons. The village has been set upon by a drought, and the people have turned to whatever means available to bring rain: Tata Kuvudundu cast his bone predictions, and nearly every girl in the village had danced with a chicken held to her head, to bring down rain. People did what they could. Church attendance rose and fell; Jesus may have sounded like a helpful sort of God in the beginning, but He was not bearing out. (328) Again the emphasis here is on Jesus as a practical god. Pray as they might, Jesus was not ending the drought. The village beliefs are not solely responsible for expecting this cause and effect relationship, however, for Nathan has been doing his part to encourage the connection: [Tata Ndu] didn't appear to be paying much heed to the sermon. Nobody was, since it didn't have to do with the rain. A month earlier when thunderstorms seemed imminent, Father had counseled his congregation to repent their sins and the Lord would reward them with rain. But in spite of all this repentance, the rain hadn't come, and now he told us he refused to be party to the superstitions. (328) Nathan’s own utilitarianism comes to the forefront here in his attempt to connect rainfall with repentance. This small bit of hypocrisy again emphasizes the “less than pious” nature of Nathan Price, but it also shows a bit more awareness on his part of what would influence the Kilangese. It is an interesting insight because 212 whereas here he is willing to acknowledge that should it happen to have rained the villagers would have come swarming to Tata Jesus, he is still unwilling to make other adjustments in his preaching that might actually affect their belief. After explaining how the villagers have come to be in church this Sunday morning, Leah continues by describing Nathan’s chosen sermon: This morning [Father] was preaching on Bel in the temple, from the Apocrypha. Father has always stood firm on the Apocrypha, though most other preachers look down on him for it. They claim those books to be the work of fear- mongers who tagged them on to the Old Testament just to scare people. Yet Father always says, if the Lord can't inspire you to leave off sinning any other way, why then, it's His business to scare the dickens out of you. (328) Leah feels it necessary to explain Nathan’s use of the Apocrypha, and her take on it is different from Adah’s above because it reflects her new-found understanding of Nathan’s motives. 71 For Nathan, Christianity is a religion of fear. That is what drives him, and it is what constitutes his own personal relationship with God. Therefore, Nathan thinks it best to convert the masses through fear—fear of drought, fear of burning, fear of an angry God. As noted above, Nathan is Old Testament-driven, and the wrathful God of many of those books speaks to him. Bel and the Serpent wasn’t so frightening, as it mainly featured the quick wits of Daniel. This time Daniel was out to prove to the Babylonians that they were worshiping false idols, but even I was having trouble paying attention. Lately I’d rarely felt touched by Father's enthusiasm, and never by God. 71 Adah’s explanation is that Nathan is particularly drawn to Daniel as detective. 213 “Now the Babylonians had an idol they called Bel,” he declared. . . . “Every day they bestowed upon the statue of Bel twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep, and fifty gallons of wine. . . . The people revered the statue of Bel and went every day to worship it, but Daniel worshiped the Lord our Saviour.” (329) Nathan has so completely appropriated the Old Testament to be applicable to Jesus in every way that he has lost sight of what is real and what is not. Nathan’s claim that Daniel worshiped “the Lord our Saviour” is absurd both because Daniel was a Jew and because the book was written before Jesus was born. This is also a fact likely lost on most readers, but for those aware, it adds to Nathan’s unreliability as an exegete. Leah tells us that she, personally, likes the story of Bel and the temple: It’s a private-eye story, really. . . . Daniel knew very well that the King’s high priests were sneaking in at night and taking all that food. So Daniel set up a trick. After everyone left their offerings in the temple, he went in and spread fireplace ashes all over the floor. That night the priests snuck in as usual through a secret stairway under the altar. But they didn’t notice the ashes, so they left their footprints all over the floor of the temple. They were having a big old party every night, compliments of their pal Bel. But with the ashes on the floor, Daniel caught them red-handed. (329) Nathan is in the middle of the story of Bel and the Serpent when suddenly, “Tata Ndu [holds] up his hand and declare[s] in his deep, big-man’s voice: . . . ‘Now is the time for the people to have an election.’” (329). Leah is astonished, as is the rest of the family: 214 “With all due respect, my father said, “this is not the time or place for that kind of business. . . . Church is not the place to vote anyone in or out of public office.” “Church is the place for it,” said Tata Ndu. “Ici maintenant, we are making a vote for Jesus Christ in the office of personal God, Kilanga village.” Father did not move for several seconds. Tata Ndu looked at him quizzically. “Forgive me, I wonder if I have paralyzed you?” Father found his voice at last. “You have not.” “Á bu, we will begin.” . . . I felt a chill run down my spine. This had been planned in advance. . . . Tata Mwanza’s father came forward to set up the clay voting bowls in front of the altar. One of the voting bowls was for Jesus, the other was against. . . . Father tried to interrupt the proceedings by loudly explaining that Jesus is exempt from popular elections. But people were excited, having just recently gotten the hang of the democratic process. . . . They shuffled up to the altar in single file. Just exactly as if they were finally coming forward to be saved. And Father stepped up to meet them as if he also believed this was the heavenly roll call. . . . My father’s face was red. “This is blasphemy! He spread his hands wide as if casting out demons only he could see, and shouted, “there is nothing fair here!” Tata Ndu turned directly to Father and spoke to him in surprisingly careful English, . . . “Tata Price, white men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” he said. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot now say they are not good.” (331) Kingsolver brings up many questions here, including, what constitutes the role of the church? For Tata Ndu, the church is exactly the right place to hold an election, just as it is the right place to hold village meetings, feasts, and funerals. The idea of Jesus as personal or individual Savior is foreign to them, and like everything else in this village, belief in Jesus is something to be determined by consensus. This 215 is an unusual concept for most readers, and it would never occur to us, just as it does not occur to Nathan, that there would be any connection between democracy and religious belief (aside from the general mistaken belief that democracies are Christian). Yet when confronted by the apparent logic of the village chief, this connection seems to make sense, for we have come to understand that what is really important to the villagers, again, is how the gods can help them in their day-to-day lives. Father spoke slowly, as if to a half-wit, “Elections are good and Christianity is good. Both are good.” We in his family recognized the danger in his extremely calm speech, and the rising color creeping toward his hairline. “You are right. In America, we honor both these traditions. But we make our decisions about them in different houses.” “Then you may do so in America,” said Tata Ndu. “I will not say you are unwise. But in Kilanga we can use the same house for many things.” Father blew up. “Man, you understand nothing! You are applying the logic of children in a display of childish ignorance.” . . . Father pointed his finger like a gun at Tata Ndu, then swung it around to accuse the whole congregation. “You haven't even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases! You don't have a pot to piss in! And you're presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus Christ!” (332) Nathan is under the mistaken impression that the benevolence of Jesus and the poor living conditions in the Congo are somehow connected and that they can be alleviated by accepting Jesus. Whether or not the Kilangese accept Jesus as their Savior has nothing to do with the dreadful state that Africa is in, for surely if it did, 216 all the “believing” Christians who governed the country under Belgian rule would have done something about the tragedy long ago. That Nathan would even bring up the dreadful state of the villagers lives is significant given how he has done absolutely nothing to help alleviate these conditions. This reflects back on Brother Fowles’ comment that “there are Christians and there are Christians.” Nathan, for all his sermonizing, does not preach, or live, as what Kingsolver wants us to expect of a true Christian, or even a true missionary, which would be to behave more like Brother Fowles and work toward the improvement of this community. The role of missionaries is not merely to bring the word of the Gospel, but also to model through example the teachings of Jesus. 72 In the above passage, Tata Ndu cleverly backs Nathan into a corner regarding the supposed wisdom of American innovations, whether they be religious or political. In Kilanga, politics and religion are all woven together. Nathan is resistant to understanding the beliefs of the village, and in imposing his own (ineffective) religious beliefs on the people of Kilanga, he will have to accept the consequences if those beliefs are likewise rejected. The political and religious reality that Kingsolver highlights here is dramatically different from how we generally view democracy, and she emphasizes ideas here to which we may not have been exposed. Which, she 72 In the wake of the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, more and more evangelical Christians and Catholics are turning to issues of poverty and war as their most pressing concerns. Evangelical preacher Jim Wallis, for example, says, “I can’t ignore thousands of verses in the Bible on . . . poverty. . . . Fighting poverty’s a moral value, too. . . . And, for a growing number of Christians, the ethics of war—how and when we go to war, whether we tell the truth about going to war—is a religious and moral issue as well.” (http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/03/gods_politics_jim_wallis.html). 217 seems to ask, is more truly democratic, majority or consensus, and which is better for the Kilangese community? If Jesus brings the rain, it is good for all the villagers. If Jesus relieves the bad luck of twins or allows a full term pregnancy, it is good for the entire village. If Jesus is not fulfilling these needs of the village, it is therefore incumbent upon the entire village to agree to whether they accept “the program of Jesus.” This differentiation between the villagers’ understanding regarding the place of religion and Nathan’s understanding underscores William James’ differentiations between institutional and personal religion. Recall that James has defined institutional religion as “an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods” while personal religion focuses on “the inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness” (James, 41). These differentiations are at the center of the differences between Nathan and the villagers, yet Nathan’s inability or refusal to see these differences creates an un-traversable chasm between him and his congregation. Tata Ndu seemed calm and unsurprised by anything that had happened. “Á, Tata Price,” he said, in his deep, sighing voice. “You believe we are mwana, your children, who knew nothing until you came here. Tata Price, I am an old man who learned from other old men. I could tell you the name of the great chief who instructed my father, and all the ones before him, but you would have to know how to sit down and listen. There are one hundred twenty-two. Since the time of our mankulu we have made our laws without help from white men.” . . . Tata Ndu turned to Father and spoke almost kindly. “Jesus is a white man, so he will understand the law of la majorité, Tata Price. Wenda mbote.” Jesus Christ lost, eleven to fifty-six. (333-334) 218 The Hunt The first terrible thing that happened was Jesus losing the election; the second was the aftermath of a village-wide hunt to find food, which then leads to the “worst tragedy of all.” Anatole gives Leah a bow and arrow as a gift, and despite being a girl, she wants to hunt along with the men. The village is divided over whether or not they will allow Leah to go with them. The younger men are in favor of Leah hunting: “if we’re dying of hunger, why should we care who shoots the antelope, as long as it gets killed?” (336). Tata Ndu and the older men were all against it, particularly Tata Kuvudundu. Tata Kuvudundu, certain he would win, called for a vote. The events leading up to the vote, and ultimately the hunt itself, provide another method for Kingsolver to express her feminism and views on women’s equality. It is a given that Leah shoots quite competently, and this is never the issue. The problem becomes whether she should be allowed to alter the “natural order” of the way things have always been in the village. Kingsolver clearly wants us to recognize that this is a metaphor for the role of women in our own society, and she encourages us to think about our own prejudices in that regard. Whether we believe that Leah should join in the hunt, and whether we feel that her participation will be beneficial or not, depends on the hermeneutic we bring to the novel, but I believe it is Kingsolver’s hope that we at least consider all the arguments before automatically deciding what we think Leah should do. Because the story is primarily told by Rachel, who believes that Leah is chiefly out for her own aggrandizement, the perspective offered helps us be more objective about the entire situation. 219 Most of the villagers vote for Leah, not because they want her to hunt, but because they are put out with Tata Ndu and Nathan, who were both against Leah hunting. When the voting backfires on Kuvudundu and Leah wins the right to hunt, Kuvudundu threatens that they will all be very sorry for overturning the natural way of things: “The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own. Bwe? You did this. You decided the old ways are no good. Don't blame the animals, it was your decision. You want to change everything, and now, kuleka? Do you expect to sleep?” (339) The villagers are generally terrified by Kuvudundu’s warning, and leave the meeting wary and nervous. They strongly believe in the power of the animals to become like humans and in the cause and effect relationship that Kuvudundu predicts. The day before the hunt, Anatole finds a green mamba snake on the floor “curled up by his cot, and it was just by the grace of God he didn’t get bit on the leg and die on the spot” (342). Rachel describes the effect of the snake on the villagers: I don’t care if they were followers of God Almighty or the things that bump you in the night, they were praying to it now, believe you me. Thanking their lucky stars that what happened to Anatole hadn't happened to them. (342) While Rachel describes the events leading up to the hunt, Kingsolver uses Adah to elaborate upon the Bantu understanding of spirit and self: People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through all those conditions 220 unchanged. . . . The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. (344) The muntu, Adah tells us, do not care what happens to our bodies. They just watch and wait. The muntu “dead and unborn …watch from above,” while the muntu within the living “peer out through the eyeholes, watching closely to see what will happen next” (344). This description fits with what we already know from Nelson— that the muntu is a separate entity. This description also echoes Orleanna’s comments above regarding the dead who are “interested in watching us, to see what in heaven’s name we will do next” (323-324). When Nelson teaches Ruth May what to do if she is going to die, it is her muntu that he wants her to protect; he wants her to ensure that her muntu will have a place to go if she needs it. This is a foreign concept for most people from monotheistic traditions; we do not tend to think that we can manipulate our soul’s journey into another creature, or that our soul is somehow separate from who we are as entities. Muntu as a concept becomes a critical part of the rest of the novel, and Kingsolver uses Adah to make sure we understand it. The hunt proceeds and what “should have been the most glorious day in [the] village . . . all came crashing down” (353). Leah kills an impala, but another man in the village claims it as his. Despite the fact that Leah has been allowed to hunt, no one really expected her to do anything other than shoot herself in the foot, so when it turns out that she really is quite a good hunter, many of the men become upset. After the hunt there was supposed to be a celebration, but before the old men could drag their drums out under the tree and get the dancing started, it had already turned into a melee of screaming and fighting. Men we had known as 221 kindly, generous fathers suddenly became strangers with clenched fists and wide eyes, shouting into each other’s faces. (352) The shouting turned into fighting over the “ownership” of the killed meat and the before unheard of claiming of another hunter’s kill as one’s own. And so it came to pass that the normal, happy event of dividing food after a hunt became a war of insults and rage and starving bellies. There should have been more than enough for every family. . . . Abundance disappeared before our eyes. Where there was plenty, we suddenly saw not enough. . . . Sons shouted at their fathers. Women declared elections and voted against their husbands. The elderly men whose voices hardly rose above a whisper because they were so used to being listened to, were silenced completely in the ruckus. Tata Kuvudundu . . . raised his hands and once again swore his prophecy that the animals and all of nature were rising up against us. We tried to ignore his strange remarks, but we did all hear him. In some corner of our hearts we all drew back, knowing he was right. . . . What was surely the oldest celebration of all, the sharing of plenty, had fallen to ruin in our hands. (354) Kingsolver uses the hunt as another metaphor for the situation in the Congo. Whereas the Africans had once lived peacefully amongst themselves, with the introduction of the “white” ways, chaos now prevails. Kingsolver wants to show what happens when “white-man’s greed” pervades a once harmonious community. This is a situation with which we as Americans are already far too familiar given America’s history with colonization, and Kingsolver uses this knowledge to her advantage. She wants to emphasize her own ethic regarding profiteering through globalization and uses the hunt as a metaphor for Western greed; the village, in 222 becoming “civilized,” actually loses its civility. Kuvudundu’s warnings are not only of nature against man on a local level, but on a global level. The guilt that Leah feels is an overwhelming certainty that by bringing their foreign ways, they have indeed created all the problems. Kingsolver paints Kuvudundu as the classic religious icon who is strange and otherworldly, while at the same time being tremendously human. We are never quite certain of him. His actions are ritualistic, yet he is motivated by jealousy and fear. He is tremendously pleased that the hunt has turned out so badly, just as Tata Ndu was pleased when he thought Adah had been killed by the lion. The apocryphal book Bel and the Serpent is a lesson against both the evils of gluttony and the worshiping of false idols, and Tata Kuvudundu, like the priests in Bel and the Serpent, sets up a deception so that the villagers will believe in his power. Bel and the Serpent The evening after the hunt, Nelson comes running into the house, “afraid for his life. It was something about a snake. He’d seen the evil sign outside [the Price’s] chicken house” (356). The sign terrifies Nelson because he sleeps in the chicken house, and the past few days in the village, people had been finding snakes everywhere. Father announced this was the unfortunate effect of believing in false idols and he washed his hands of the affair. He was washing his hands left and right that evening. Mother didn’t necessarily agree with him, but I could see she didn’t want us going anywhere near that 223 chicken house to investigate. Father quoted a Bible verse about the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. He told Mother if she let Nelson sleep in our house that night she’d be playing directly into the hands of the idol worshipers, and if she wanted to count herself as one of them she could take her children and go seek shelter among them. (357) Nathan’s arrogance again comes into play here. Rather than warning the girls to be careful and stay away from the chicken house, he quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural address as if it is from the Bible. Nathan does not take into consideration that there might actually be a snake, and he uses this crisis as one more opportunity to show the superiority of his faith over the “laughable Congolese superstitions” (357). Nelson is forced to sleep outside, and his whimpering has all the girls awake and miserable for him: “‘This is wrong,’ Leah said finally. ‘I’m going to help him. Who has the guts to come with me?’” (358). Rachel, who narrates this part of the story, explains her reason in joining Leah, although the thought of going outside gives her the “willies:” I was long past the point of feeling safe huddling under my parents’ wings. Maybe when we first came to the Congo I did, because we were all just hardly more than children then. But now everything has changed; being American doesn't matter, and nobody gives us any special credit. Now we’re all in this stew pot together, black or white regardless. And certainly we're not children. Leah says in Congo there's only two ages of people: babies that have to be carried, and people that stand up and fend for themselves. No in-between phase. No such thing as childhood. Sometimes I think she’s right. After a while, she said again, “I'm going out there to help Nelson, and father can go straight to hell.” Whether we said so or not, the rest of us certainly agreed upon where Father could go straight to. (358) 224 Rachel’s rationale for joining Leah and her sisters is, for once, not selfishly motivated. We see here a Rachel who not only puts her experience into context, but who recognizes that being American gives her no special privilege. She has gained a newfound sense of unity and sees that they all need to stick together. Kingsolver uses this as another opportunity to express her personal views on how privileged we are as Americans; we are fortunate to be blessed with childhoods. The girls join Nelson outside and, using the apocryphal Bel and the Serpent as their model, the group decides to find out whether the animals really are angry and rising against the village, as Tata Kuvudundu maintains. What we decided to do was to set a trap. Like Daniel in the temple. This was Leah's inspiration. Nelson raked a pan of cold ashes out of the stove, and together we strewed them all around the hard-pan-dirt yard outside the chicken house. (359) They tell Nelson to sleep at Anatole’s house and to return in the morning. The following dawn, Adah relates, “in the company of nothing but our fear itself, we went to the chicken house” (361). Adah, Leah, and Nelson find a green mamba snake, just “as Nelson knew it would be . . . curled tightly around our two precious hens and all their eggs” (361). The snake suddenly shoots past them, and when they realize that this “gift meant for Nelson” has left the coop, they breathe a sigh of relief and drop their eyes to “the white-ash floor:” A foot had marked that floor in all the seven ways of the dance. Footprints fanned out in tight circles. Evil deed live. Not the paws of a leopard walking upright, turned against men by irreverence. Not the belly slither of angry snakes coming up from the sheltered ground of their own accord to 225 punish us. Only a man, one man and no other, who brought the snake in a basket or carried it stunned or charmed like a gift in his own two hands. Only one single dancer with six toes on his left foot. (362) In Bel and the Serpent, Daniel succeeds in disclosing the priests’ deception, and here the girls are successful in determining who planted the snake. This is the most useful lesson anyone has gained from modeling a Bible story, and it is not a lesson of piety or monotheism, but a lesson in being able to outsmart your enemy—a practical lesson. The obvious parallels here to the biblical story—Kuvudundu to the priests and Daniel to the girls—are secondary to the overall morality both stories teach: the evils of gluttony, greed, and deception. 73 This time, it is not the greed of the villagers we are warned about, but the evil in deceiving one’s congregation. Just as the Babylonian King put his faith in the priests of Bel, so do the people of Kilanga trust Kuvudundu, both to great detriment. The Muntu of Ruth May From the chicken house, Leah hears “a gulp and a sob and a scream all at once,” and runs outside to find “the voiceless, empty skin of [her] baby sister sitting quietly on the ground, hugging herself” (362). At first the children don’t realize that Ruth May has been bitten by the green mamba, but then, in horror, they 73 Most Bibles that include the Apocrypha call this book Bel and the Dragon, with Bel and the Serpent being a parenthetical addition. Kingsolver specifically uses the more obscure name to emphasize the metaphor between the biblical story and her own. 226 watched her face change to a pale blue mask pulled down from her hairline to her swollen lips. No eyes. What I mean is that no one we recognized was looking out through her eyes. (362) Ruth May’s eyes become a very important part of the description of her death. Above, Adah tells us that the muntu of the living peer out the eyeholes. Now Leah explains that no one they recognize looks out through Ruth May’s eyes. Adah takes over the narration and, characteristically, quotes Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me” (365). Adah describes Ruth May’s transition from life to death: While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born. (365) This is a very poetic description of Ruth May’s journey into night, and we see an unusual use for the metaphor of light. Kingsolver uses light not to define what Ruth May discovered in death, as is the more traditional Christian view, but that which she had while living on this plane of existence. We are accustomed to light representing salvation and the afterlife, but here it reflects Adah’s non-religious beliefs about death. When Rachel continues the story, her focus is not on Ruth May, but on the effect her death is going to have on the family. The girls stand frozen, and Rachel dreads telling their Mother the terrible news: 227 The whole world would change then, and nothing would ever be all right again. Not for our family. All the other people in the whole wide world might go on about their business, but for us it would never be normal again. . . . We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have. The only Ruth May. Until that moment I'd always believed I could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened. (366-367) Rachel has finally matured enough to understand that life’s harsh realities affect everyone. Kingsolver uses Rachel in this context to emphasize again the universality of experience—and the incredible good fortune that we as Americans tend to take for granted. Until this moment, Rachel believed that because she was a white American, she was somehow immune to the pain and suffering of others, that her existence was separate from that of the people around her. The tragedies that happened to Africans were not mine. We were different, not just because we were white and had our vaccinations, but because we were simply a much, much luckier kind of person. . . . This is what I believed. (367) Kingsolver warns us against believing that we are also immune to the tragedies that happen to the rest of the world. This is a lesson that hit home during two events that occurred after The Poisonwood Bible was published: The destruction of the World Trade Centers and Hurricane Katrina. 74 The message is the same—it can happen here and it can happen to us. We as Americans are no more special than anyone else, and 74 The tsunami in South Asia also helped provide a sense of global unity, but this was not a specifically American tragedy. 228 we need to understand this along with the need for global unity if we ever want to improve conditions in the world. As readers we do not witness the girls breaking the terrible news to their parents, but Leah tells us that after learning of Ruth May’s death, Orleanna calmly and quietly begins to tear down the mosquito netting from all the beds. No one is quite sure what she was doing, and the girls are afraid she has “simply lost her mind” (368). With Nathan’s reaction Kingsolver provides another opportunity for the reader to judge Nathan’s particular religious fervor and increasing insanity. [W]e stood out of her way and watched. All of us, even Father. For once he had no words to instruct our minds and improve our souls, no parable that would turn Ruth May's death by snakebite into a lesson on the Glory of God. My Father whose strong hands always seized whatever came along and molded it to his will, seemed unable to grasp what had happened. “She wasn't baptized yet,” he said. I looked up when he said this, startled by such a pathetically inadequate observation. Was that what really mattered to him right now—the condition of Ruth May’s soul? (368) As Kingsolver concludes her own “Bel and the Serpent,” a number of startling revelations occur. First, as Leah narrates the events that follow Ruth May’s death—the same Leah who once felt her father could do no wrong— she now presents to the reader her father’s misguided actions. Although we have watched Leah grow away from her father as she matures, her awareness of his motives is almost startling in its cynicism. It’s true [Ruth May] wasn’t baptized. If any one of us had cared about that, we could lay the blame on Father. He’d 229 maintained that Ruth May was still too young to take the responsibility of accepting Christ, but in truth, I think he was holding her back for the sake of pageantry. He was going to baptize his own child along with all of Kilanga’s, on that great day down at the river when his dream finally came true. It would lend an appearance of sincerity to the occasion. (368-369) Leah now understands, as Adah has all along, the way her father uses anything at his disposal to accomplish his goals, a fact which will be highlighted even more profoundly below. Second, Kingsolver again brings into discussion the purpose of baptism, both to Southern Baptists and to Nathan Price. As Leah observes, Nathan claims that Ruth May was too young to accept Christ, yet that has not stopped Nathan in his attempts to baptize the rest of the congregation—a group of people who similarly do not understand the responsibility of accepting Christ. Nathan clearly did not know his youngest daughter or her connection with and belief in Jesus, a connection the reader is aware of from Ruth May’s narratives. Nathan’s goal in baptizing the people of Kilanga is to assuage his personal guilt surrounding his issues of survivor guilt; he needs to show God that he can live up to his responsibilities. His goal in baptizing Ruth May is to hold her up as an example. In both cases, the sanctified purpose of baptism is completely lost. While Nathan remains stupefied, Orleanna lovingly prepares Ruth May for burial, washing and shrouding her, and then laying her upon a table in the yard. As the villagers learn of Ruth May’s death, they begin to pay their condolences. 230 Several women from the village had already come. Mama Mwanza arrived first, with her daughters. A few at a time, the others followed. They fell down at the edge of our yard when they came, and walked on their knees to the table. All of them had lost children before, it dawned on me through my shock. Our suffering now was no greater than theirs had been, no more real or tragic. No different. (370) As Rachel stated previously, they are all the same now. Death is the great equalizer and the experience of loss is universal. Although Nathan refused to let his family be a part of the mourning when a village child died, here the village women join in grieving with the Price family. This adds another facet to Kingsolver’s ongoing question of who behaves in the more Christian-like manner. No matter how badly the Price family, particularly Nathan, treats the people of the village, the villagers continue to include them as a part of the larger extended village family. The women begin to ululate in a chilling manner now quite familiar to Leah, for they had heard this strange mourning song many times before, back during the heavy rains when so many children got sick. . . . The trilling of our neighbors tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger. We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest. In our family, the last was first. I would like to believe she got what she wanted. (371) In this previously mentioned reference to Matthew, 75 Leah reminds us that Ruth May was always the one to run to the front of the line when the girls walked 75 20:16; 19:30. 231 anywhere, and now she will be the first to find her place in heaven, even without the benefit of baptism. When the women’s wailing finally stops, Orleanna begins moving all the furniture and household items from her house into the yard. She stacks the books, clothes, and cooking items onto the chairs and desk and, when no one moves, she finally starts to hand the items to the women. As the women realize that Orleanna means to give everything away, they excitedly start to go through all the items and take what they want. The children form a circle around the periphery of the yard, just watching and waiting, and staring at Ruth May lying on the table. Leah observes that they were as astonished as we were that a member of our family was capable of death. . . . My sisters and I stayed outside with the children because they seemed to embrace our presence. Out of habit, we knelt on the ground and prayed the dumb prayers of our childhood: “Our Father which art in heaven,” and “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” I could not remotely believe any Shepherd was leading me through this dreadful valley, but the familiar words stuffed my mouth like cotton, and it was some relief to know, at least, that one sentence would follow upon another. It was my only way of knowing what to do. (372) Prayer provides solace for Leah not in its words, but in its familiarity and repetition. Nathan does not come outside to join his daughters in prayer, and Leah notes that she has no idea where he is. Suddenly, as the girls are kneeling on the ground, a thunderstorm comes, answering “months of prayers.” Nathan now comes out of the house, stares up into the sky, and begins quoting John 13-14: 232 “The Lord spoke to the common people gathered at the well,” [Father] said at last, in his old booming voice that allowed no corner for doubt. He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the downpour. “And the Lord told them, Whosoever drinks of this ordinary water will be thirsty again, but the water I will give unto him will quench his thirst forever. It will become the spring within him, bubbling up for eternal life.” (374) As he continues reciting, Nathan combines John 1:23-29 and John 7:38 to create his own unique mishmash of biblical verses: “If anyone is thirsty,” my father shouted, “let him come to me and drink! If anyone believes in me, streams of living water shall flow forth from his heart!” . . . “I am a voice of one shouting in the desert, Straighten the Lord’s way!” My father cried. “I am only baptizing in water, but someone is standing among you of whom you do not know. He is God’s lamb, who is to remove the world’s sin.” 76 (374) Taking the rain as an extraordinary opportunity, Nathan begins to baptize the children, who gape wordlessly at him and have no idea what he is doing. His final injunction is taken from 1 John 1:7: 77 “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize you, my son. Walk forward into the light.” . . . Father took his hand away and waited, I suppose, for the miracle of baptism to take hold. 76 John 1:23: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord;” 26: John answered them, saying, “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not;” 29: The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” John 7:38: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” 77 1 John 1:7: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.” 233 . . . The dust on our feet turned blood–colored and the sky grew very dark, while Father moved around the circle baptizing each child in turn, imploring the living progeny of Kilanga to walk forward into the light. (375) Nathan’s inability to understand the sheer brazenness—and meaninglessness—of his opportunistic actions are astounding to Leah. He hadn’t baptized Ruth May because she supposedly was not yet old enough to take Christ into her heart, yet he is baptizing these children—with rain, no less—heedless of the fact that they have no idea what he is doing; the baptism’s intent, and therefore result, become completely irrelevant. Although Nathan implores the children to walk toward the light of salvation, we cannot help but think of Ruth May’s own journey into that light—again, an expression we associate with death—and Nathan’s belief that Ruth May has been denied this salvation. The vision Kingsolver leaves us with, as she concludes “Bel and the Serpent,” is intended to emphasize Nathan’s insanity and his distorted ideas of baptism and salvation. 234 CHAPTER SIX THE FINAL BOOKS Many Bible stories culminate in a sacrificial death, and The Poisonwood Bible is no exception. Although not truly the end of the story (the denouement is three chapters long), with the death of Ruth May, The Poisonwood Bible makes a dramatic shift in its polemical style. Creating a form of moral discourse, Kingsolver has woven her lessons throughout the book, gradually intermingling issues of religious subjectivity, common morality, feminism, and tolerance within the story. In the final three books, “Exodus,” “The Song of the Three Children,” and “The Eyes in the Trees,” the reciprocal relationship among reader, author, and novel remains firmly in place, but Kingsolver’s political and theological goals are much more manifest. As readers, we have taken this journey with the Price family and have participated in their tragedy; we have been allowed an insider’s view into another culture and its religious beliefs; we have been placed in the role of jury, given all the facts, and are now in the privileged position of seeing how judgment will be rendered, even as we make our own judgments. The dialogue in the final books is much sparser and each daughter’s exposition much denser than in the previous books. The Bible remains a part of the narrative, but its role moves from main player to background character. It has done its job to set up the tension and now, while the Scriptures remain a reference point, it is Kingsolver’s Bible which takes center stage. 235 “Exodus” follows the aftermath of Ruth May’s death and continues in the same format of Orleanna’s flashback followed by the accounts of the three surviving daughters as they describe their exodus from Kilanga, the subsequent 25 years, and a reunion in which we learn of Nathan’s fate. In “The Song of the Three Children,” each of the women expounds on her philosophy of life and religion—all aspects of Kingsolver’s own world view—and how each daughter believes she arrived at her conclusions. The final chapter, “The Eyes in the Trees,” is an epilogue of sorts. It is told by judge and redeemer, Ruth May, the eyes in the trees whose muntu now eternally exists and who ends the novel as Orleanna began it, speaking both to her mother and to the reader, using the Bible as her ultimate reference.  BOOK FIVE: EXODUS  Orleanna Price: Sanderling Island, Georgia “Exodus” begins with Orleanna’s final narrative, and although the reader still feels included in her explanations, we are now keenly aware that she is directing her monologue and entreaties to her lost child, Ruth May. Citing the biblical Ruth, Orleanna implores, My baby, my blood, my honest truth: entreat me not to leave thee, for whither thou goest I will go. Where I lodge, we lodge together. Where I die, you'll be buried at last. 78 (382) 78 Ruth 1:16-17 236 In the Bible, Ruth begs her mother-in-law, Naomi, to allow her to stay with her until the end of her days. Naomi accepts Ruth’s plea, and Ruth lives with her until Ruth eventually marries Boaz and becomes a great matriarch. 79 In Kingsolver’s Bible, it is the mother who begs the daughter, and Ruth May who will live within her mother until Orleanna is buried. In her last appeal to Ruth May, Orleanna again exposes her need for forgiveness and redemption: Maybe you still can't understand why I stayed so long. I've nearly finished with my side of the story, and still I feel your small round eyes looking down on me. I wonder what you will name my sin: Complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? How can you tell the difference? Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence? . . . Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still. But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it’s wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still. And their stake moves underneath them. The Pharaoh died, says Exodus, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of their bondage. 80 (384) Orleanna recognizes that there has been some sin on her part in the outcome of this terrible tale, yet she still struggles to name exactly what that sin might be. She feels she is guilty of many sins, yet she also knows that there was little she could do under 79 Ruth bears Obed, father of Jesse, father of David. 80 Exodus 2:23 237 the circumstances, and perhaps that in itself is her sin. Ultimately she is both damned and saved by hell and brimstone, for the horrific events of that last day gave her the impetus to break from her bondage. Orleanna equates Nathan with the biblical Pharaoh, evoking the obvious image of Nathan as tyrant, but other imagery occurs as well. The family has endured plagues of famine, flood, beasts, and death, due to the intractability of this Pharaoh within their own household; because his heart was so hardened, the women ultimately had no choice but to create an exodus of their own. Orleanna concludes her reminiscence here as she began it in “Genesis,” asking what would have been different, and reminding the reader that it is not only men who are conquerors and oppressors, but all who share in their history are guilty as well. Whether it is complicity, loyalty, or stupefaction, Orleanna believes she is an accessory to the crime. Only by recognizing our own complicity can we make amends and avoid making the same mistakes. Kingsolver maintains this theme as a constant undercurrent in the novel, impressing upon the reader that we must learn about history so that, in the words of George Santayana, we are not doomed to repeat history. Kingsolver’s political leanings are clear by now, and she wants the reader to be aware that the United States consistently acts as conqueror over a country that she believes should govern itself without interference. Kingsolver’s hope is that we will see a pattern and realize that the presence of the United States in other countries, even when acting in the name of democracy and/or Christianity, can be devastating. 238 Although Orleanna speaks to Ruth May in a way that reveals a pagan influence, she simultaneously draws from her Christian background and asks, Who is she to cast the first stone? 81 Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conquerors’ music and sang a new song of her own. If you are the eyes in the trees, watching us as we walk away from Kilanga, how will you make your judgment? Lord knows after 30 years I still crave your forgiveness, but who are you? . . . Try to imagine what never happened: our family without Africa, or the Africa that would have been without us. Look at your sisters now. . . . They’ve got their own three ways to live with our history. . . . But which one among us is without sin? I can hardly think where to cast my stones, so I just go on keening for my own losses, trying to wear the marks of the boot on my back as gracefully as the Congo wears hers. (385) Orleanna finally seems to have come to terms with her fate. She acknowledges that no one is without sin, and that she must cope as best she can. She hopes that Ruth May, her little beast, will understand the conclusions she has come to and will recognize, as she has, that change is an inevitable part of life. My little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg. Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of the story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. (385) Kingsolver makes her own appeal to the reader here, emphasizing not only the value and inevitability of change, but also the value of the story marking that 81 John 8:7: “So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ ” 239 change. As moral discourse, the story we hear becomes the story we live. As Adam Newton writes, there is “a common, though sometimes overlooked, fact about narrative: that the story it frequently tells is a story of storytelling.” The story is the celebration, and the ability to learn from the story—to change from it—is a celebration for which we humans can all hope.  WHAT WE CARRIED OUT  Leah Price: Bulunga, Late Rainy Season 1961 With Ruth May’s death, Kingsolver’s narrative moves from the individual situation of the Price family in Kilanga to the global situation of the Price women in three very different environments. In describing the exodus from Kilanga, Leah conjures images of Lot’s wife: “we only took what we could carry on our backs. Mother never once turned around to look over her shoulder” (389). Although their exodus is from their oppressive father, there is also a sense of sadness that they will be leaving behind the good people of Kilanga, not merely the sinners. As the women leave Nathan baptizing the children of Kilanga, Leah speculates about Nathan’s motives: Father wouldn't leave his post to come after us, that much was certain. He wasn't capable of any action that might be seen as cowardice by his God. And no God, in any heart on this earth, was ever more on the lookout for human failing. (393) Nathan’s view of God and Christianity is summed up in this observation. Kingsolver’s moral code follows the biblical teaching that God wants people to treat 240 each other well. 82 Jesus’ second commandment is that we must love each other, yet Nathan sees Christianity as nothing other than blame-laying and human failing. Redemption is almost impossible in Nathan's world because no matter how hard one tries she is doomed to fail. By the time Orleanna, Adah, Leah and Rachel make their way to Bulungu, the nearest village, Leah is delirious with malaria and stays behind with Anatole. Orleanna flees with Adah to the United States, and Rachel goes with Eeben Axelroot, the unscrupulous bush pilot, to Johannesburg. As Anatole nurses her back to health, Leah has a revelation about the true meaning of forgiveness: For my whole 16 years I've rarely thought I was worth much more than a distracted grumble from God. But now in my shelter of all things impossible, I drift in a warm bath of forgiveness, and it seems pointless to resist. I have no energy for improving myself. If Anatole can wrap all my rattlebone sins in a blanket and call me goodness itself, why then I'll just believe him. (396) By Anatole, Leah tells us, she is “delivered not out of [her] life but through it” (399). Anatole becomes her redeemer and love incarnate: “Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love I should say, for I’ve loved my father fiercely my whole life. And it changed nothing” (399). Leah was unsuccessful finding acceptance, forgiveness, or love from either Nathan or his God, but Leah finds these in Anatole, the man who embodies a large part of Kingsolver’s theology and basic morality, and they become engaged to marry. 82 Mark 12:31, “And the second is likewise, namely this, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.’” 241 Rachel Price Axelroot: Johannesburg, South Africa, 1962 A year has passed, and Rachel begins this chapter by quoting John 3:16 in Afrikaans. Rachel now lives as the common-law wife of Eeben Axelroot, the corrupt man who flew her out of the Congo, and she has become an active member of upper- class Johannesburg society. Kingsolver has fun here with Rachel and her relationship with religion. Rachel attends the First Episcopal Church in Johannesburg because that is where the elite attend. She is very proud of her ability to quote John 3:16 in Afrikaans and French: I am fluent in three languages. I have not remained especially close with my sisters, but I dare say that for all their being gifted and what not, they can’t do a whole lot better than John 3:16 in three entire languages. Maybe that won’t necessarily guarantee me a front-row seat in heaven, but considering what all I have had to put up with from Eeben Axelroot for the last year, just for starters, that ought to at least get me in the door. (402) After a year back in “civilization,” Rachel reverts to her self-centered ideas of religion and how to get into heaven. Kingsolver continues to use Rachel as a gauge of what is morally facile and shallow. The reader now has enough background information on all the girls to assess their values, and Kingsolver intends some self- comparison. Rachel’s sole purpose for attending church, for example, is to be with the beautiful people there: I've always made sure I go to church with the very best people, and we get invited to their parties. I insist on that. I have even learned to play bridge! It is my girlfriends here in Joburg that have taught me how to give parties, keep a 242 close eye on the help, and just overall make the graceful transition to wifehood and adulteration. (405) This description is intended to be instantly recognizable to almost anyone who attends church or temple, and it highlights the hypocritical underpinnings of why so many people do attend services. If Adah were describing this about her sister, the cynicism would be apparent. Because Rachel is proudly telling us something about herself, we as readers are meant to understand the dig on our own and reflect on whether we are guilty of this same sin of vanity. Adah Price: Emory University, Atlanta 1962 When Adah and Orleanna return from the Congo, they find themselves homeless “(for we could no longer live in a parsonage without a parson)” and presumed insane (408). Adah is eventually accepted into college and finds a religion that suits her: In organic chemistry, invertebrate zoology, and the inspired symmetry of Mendelian genetics, I have found a religion that serves. I recite the Periodic Table of Elements like a prayer; I take my examinations as Holy Communion, and the pass of the first semester was a sacrament. My mind is crowded with a forest of facts. Between the trees lie wide-open plains of despair. I skirt around them. I stick to the woods. (409) In her weekends away from the University, Adah visits Orleanna, who lives on a plot of land left her by her grandfather: “It turns out Mother has an extraordinary talent for flowers. She was an entire botanical garden waiting to happen” (410). The metaphor here is implicit: Orleanna is finally able to bloom now 243 that she has left Nathan. Adah also describes the incredible excess of American society, plainly voicing Kingsolver’s own feelings: It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. . . . I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that have gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence? Kingsolver is not subtle about her thoughts on American abundance. There have been several previous allusions to how much Americans have, especially in relation to the rest of the world, and she is creative in her ways of illustrating such abundance without hitting her reader too hard over the head. We see this in more detail below when Leah and her family come to the United States for a visit. Adah has a difficult time recovering from the shock of being back in the United States, and she also carries her own brand of survivor guilt. Finding her father’s discharge papers, she comes to realize that he was not the war hero the girls had always thought him to be; he was just a man who had survived when the rest of his battalion did not. Fate sentenced Our Father to pay for those lives with the remainder of his, and he has spent it in posturing desperately beneath the eyes of a God who will not forgive a debt. This God worries me. Lately He has been looking in on me. . . . This is what I carried out of the Congo on my crooked little back. In our seventeen months in Kilanga, 244 thirty-one children died, including Ruth May. Why not Adah? I can think of no answer that exonerates me. (413) Adah comes to realize that each member of her family must come to terms with her own brand of sin, her own means to exoneration: “Carry us, marry us, ferry us, bury us: those are our four ways to exodus, for now. Though, to tell the truth, none of us has yet safely made the crossing. Except for Ruth May, of course” (414). Leah is carried, Rachel married, Adah ferried, and Ruth May buried. All four achieved their own rite of passage, their own trial by fire. Only Ruth May has come to the end of her journey; the rest of them must wait to see what else life will bring, to learn what other ways their lives have yet to be affected by their experiences in Africa. Leah Price: Mission Notre Dame de Douleur, 1964 Once Leah has mostly recovered from malaria, she realizes that her whiteness is a danger to the village of Bulungu, and with the kindness of people like Tata Boanda, she and Anatole prepare to go to Stanleyville. Tata Boanda has brought them money for their journey and news from Kilanga: The news of Father wasn’t good. . . . Father ran off to a hut in the woods he was calling the New Church of Eternal Life, Jesus is Bängala. As promising as that sounds, he wasn’t getting a lot of takers. People were waiting to see how well Jesus protected Tata Price, now that he had to get by the same as everyone without outside help from the airplane or even women. So far, Father seemed to be reaping no special advantages. Additionally, his church was too close to the cemetery. 245 Tata Boanda told me with sincere kindness that Ruth May was mourned in Kilanga. Tata Ndu threatened to exile Tata Kuvudundu for planting the snake in our chicken house, which he was known to have done, since Nelson pointed out the footprints to many witnesses. Kilanga had fallen on trouble of every kind. (417) Nathan still refuses to accept or understand the needs of the people in the village, and we learn that he has probably gone completely mad. Although Tata Kuvudundu was not exiled outright, his clout as “minister” was seriously compromised, and the village perceives that the hard time they now endure is punishment for Ruth May’s death. Tata Kuvudundu’s magic was malicious, and the village believes they suffer for his actions. Leah marries Anatole, and when he is arrested and imprisoned under Mobutu’s new regime, she goes to live with the nuns of Mission Notre Dame de Douleur, Our Lady of Sorrow. As a white woman, Leah is not safe anywhere else, and the nuns have generously taken her in. The women of this mission have devoted their lives to helping the people of the Congo who suffered first under Belgian rule and now are dying from Mobutu’s army. Because Leah is staying among Catholic nuns, she experiences first hand yet another religious perspective and approach to understanding the will of God. The nuns are so patient. They’ve spent decades here prolonging the brief lives of the undernourished, accustomed completely to the tragedy playing out around us. But their unblinking eyes framed by their white starched wimples make me want to scream, “This is not God’s will be done!” How could anyone, even a God distracted by many other concerns, allow this to happen? 246 “Ce n’est pas à nous,” says Thérèse, not ours to question. As convincing as Methuselah shouting, Sister God is great! Shut the door! “I’ve heard that before,” I tell her. “I’m sure the Congolese heard it every day for a hundred years while they had to forbear the Belgians.” . . . She sighs and repeats what she’s told me already. The sisters take no position in war, but must try to hold charity in their hearts even for the enemy. . . . “I damn them for throwing me into a war in which white skin comes down on the wrong side, pure and simple. “If God is really taking a hand in things,” I informed Thérèse, “he is bitterly mocking the hope of brotherly love. He is making sure that color will matter forever.” (420-421) This exchange highlights several of the issues that Kingsolver emphasizes throughout The Poisonwood Bible. The first is Leah’s relationship to God and her unfaltering belief that God should be just. This is the one area of her faith that has not changed since she was a child, but now she has a completely different understanding and expectation of what justice requires. Jesus’ mandate that we should love our neighbor becomes a mockery in the face of the savagery and hatred that she sees around her. What she experiences is, of course, no different than in any other place or time of war. In many ways, Leah represents the liberation theologian in Kingsolver’s theology. Kingsolver, like Sharon Welch, questions what it means “to believe in a God of Justice in the face of unthinkable justice,” and like Welch, she has concluded that “the truth of God-language and all theological claims is measured not by their correspondence to something eternal, but by the fulfillment of its claims in history, by the actual creation of communities of peace, justice, and equality” (Welch, 1985, 6-7). Kingsolver’s message comes through strongly 247 throughout the novel, but especially so in Leah’s narratives, for Leah is the one who remains in Africa suffering along with the rest of the people. Leah finds that when she does think about God, she cannot picture God at all. He just ended up looking like my father. I tried to imagine Jesus, then, in the body of Brother Fowles. Tata Bidibidi, with his kind, pretty wife and their precarious boat dispensing milk powder and quinine and love to children along the river. Attend to Creation, was his advice. (422-423) This revelation shows a more complete conversion on Leah’s part to Brother Fowles way of viewing Christianity. Although probably unnecessary, Kingsolver clearly delineates the differences between Nathan and Brother Fowles in a dichotomy that emphasizes the God of Justice/God of Love split between God and Jesus. What Leah remembers most from Brother Fowles’ visit is his Jesus-like advice to treat God’s creation with reverence. Leah has increasing difficulty picturing God because God no longer represents for her the justice of which she was so certain when she was younger. Justice is its own entity, but as much as she may wish it to be so, God seems to have little to do with it. Leah has learned that it is only through God’s children and their ability to attend to creation that justice can be served. Leah Price Ngemba: Bikoki Station, January 17, 1965 After three years of imprisonment, Anatole is finally released, and he and Leah return to Bikoki, the village where Anatole grew up. At Leah’s request, they 248 “were married . . . by the village chief, in a ceremony that was neither quite Christian nor Bantu” (432). Through Leah, Kingsolver continues to educate the reader about the history of the Congo, cynically explaining what has happened up until now: “foreign hands moved behind the curtain and one white King was replaced by another. Only the face that shows is black.” After Mobutu fixes an election in his favor, Anatole comments, “If the Americans mean to teach us about democracy, the lesson is quite remarkable” (433). On Christmas day, 1965, Leah and Anatole are visited by Fyntan and Celine Fowles. [The Fowles] are now staying at Kikongo, the hospital mission on the Wamba they told us about. I rejoiced to see them, but any reunion brings awful news. . . . Father is still carrying on with his tormented Jesus Is Bangäla church. . . . Poor Father. Now he’s left Kilanga altogether, vanished into the forest, it seems, or melted under the rain. . . . I understand he’s dangerous to me now. Dangerous to many people, and always was, I guess. Fyntan and Celine must have been alarmed by our misguided outpost in Kilanga, where we slept in their same house, antagonized their former friends, even turned their parrot out to nature’s maw. (435) In looking back on the damage her father did while in Kilanga, and the harm he most likely continues to cause, Leah again echoes Kingsolver’s point that missionaries can do good works if their motivations are altruistic. There are others who didn’t go back, like me. But they seem so sure of being right here where they are, so rooted by faith—Fyntan Fowles for one, and the strangers who turn up every so often to ask if I can help get a message through or keep a box of medicines safe till a boat is found to take it upriver. I’ll happily invent a meal and make up a 249 bed on the floor, just to hear the kindness in their stories. They’re so unlike Father. As I bear the emptiness of a life without his God, it’s a comfort to know these soft-spoken men who organize hospitals under thatched roofs, or stoop alongside village mamas to plant soybeans, or rig up electrical generators for a school. They’ve risked Mobutu and every imaginable parasite in the backwater places where children were left to die or endure when the Underdowns and their ilk fled the country. As Brother Fowles told us a long time ago: there are Christians, and there are Christians. (435) True faith requires a certainty that Leah does not believe she has. While thankful for the work these missionaries and others accomplish, she still struggles to reconcile the God of Love she sees in these selfless people with Nathan’s demanding God from her childhood. Kingsolver’s theology that Christian Love can create Justice slowly settles into Leah as she admires the Good Works of the Christians around her. Adah Price, Emory Hospital, Atlanta, Christmas 1968 In 1968, Leah, Anatole, and their son Pascal come to live in Atlanta while Leah studies Agronomics. After the harsh realities of the Congo, the United States is a wonderland, and Kingsolver uses this chapter to again comment on the excess and materialism of Americans: When I go with them to the grocery, they are boggled and frightened and secretly scornful, I think. Of course they are. I remember how it was at first: dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our Rachel had been left suddenly in charge of everything. 250 “What is that, Aunt Adah? And that?” their Pascal asks in his wide-eyed way. . . . They’re things a person doesn’t really need.” “But Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn’t really need?” I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world. (441) As a voice for social justice, Kingsolver has temporarily moved her characters out of the Congo and into the United States to emphasize an issue about which she is very passionate. It was apparent in the early chapters that Kingsolver has a certain disdain for American frivolity, particularly with the way she characterized Rachel, and here, as in Adah’s chapter above, Kingsolver uses Leah’s experiences in the United States to capitalize on an opportunity to speak out against the injustice that consumerism promotes, both here and abroad. By situating Leah and her family back in the United States, Kingsolver includes the reader in a way that is much more present than has been possible previously because we live in these Western countries that she speaks out against. When Kingsolver writes that Anatole is able to “read things backward. What the billboards are really selling, for example,” she wants the reader to be aware of just how taken in we are by the abundance around us and to be alert to our gullibility. How can we truly need a choice between toothpastes when people are starving on our own streets? Kingsolver has written extensively on this subject and has several books of essays which feature stories or commentary on social justice issues. Including this within The Poisonwood Bible 251 adds another effective way to get her message across to an audience which, having come this far, is going to stick with the rest of the story and hear what else Kingsolver has to say. Rachel Price, The Equatorial, 1984 Kingsolver spends the next few chapters working her way from 1968 to 1984. During that time, Leah and Anatole move back to Kinshasa, Zaire, once known as Leopoldville. They have two more children, and Anatole is arrested in 1981. Meanwhile, through neurological retraining while in medical school, Adah has gained the ability to speak as well as walk evenly with both legs. She has also become a researcher at the Center for Disease control in Atlanta, specializing in African viruses. Rachel has gone through four husbands and now owns the Equatorial Hotel in Johannesburg, running it for upper-class white guests. Orleanna spends her days fighting for civil rights in the United States and raising money for food and bribes so Leah can keep Anatole alive in jail. In 1984, Leah masterminds a reunion of the sisters because “the last month of waiting for her husband to get out of prison was going to kill her if she didn’t get out of there and do something” (475). The sisters meet in Angola and Rachel informs the reader that they are all still very different: [N]o matter how much [Leah and Adah] get to looking and sounding alike, as grown-ups, I could see they were still as different on the inside as night and day. And I am different too, not night or day either one but something else altogether, like the Fourth of July. So there we were: night 252 and day and the Fourth of July, and just for a moment there was a peace treaty. (483) The discussion among the sisters initially turns to politics because Rachel, even as an adult, is still completely oblivious to the politics of Africa or the world. Leah takes the time to explain democracies, dictatorships, socialism and capitalism to her clueless sister. This serves Kingsolver by providing another conversation through which to educate the reader about the hardships Africa has endured in the past 20 years. She also gives her perspective on the relationship between Africa, the Soviet Union, and the United States, particularly regarding the perceived threat of communism. When discussing the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, for example, Rachel says, “For your information, Leah, . . . your precious Lumumba would have taken over and been just as bad a dictator as any of them. If the CIA and them got rid of him, they did it for democracy. Everybody alive says that.” “Everybody alive,” said Adah. “What did the dead ones say?” “Now look, Rachel,” Leah said. “You can get this. In a democracy, Lumumba should have been allowed to live longer than two months as head of state. The Congolese people would have gotten to see how they liked him, and if not, replaced him.” (479) This point about democracy and how a true democracy should behave serves as Kingsolver’s lesson not only to Rachel, but to anyone reading the story, and 253 although the events they are discussing take place in 1961, 20 (or even 45) years later they are still relevant. 83 After the lesson in politics, Leah gives her sisters an update on Nathan, information she knows because she keeps in touch with Brother Fowles. Rachel narrates: “So, . . . Dear old Dad, what’s the scoop?” . . . “He’d gotten a widespread reputation for turning himself into a crocodile and attacking children. . . . So there was a really horrible incident on the river. A boat full of kids turned over by a croc, and all of them drowned or eaten or maimed. Father got the blame for it. Pretty much hung without a trial.” “Oh, Jesus. . . Actually hung?” “No, not hung. Burned.” I could see this was hard for Leah. I reached out and took hold of her hand. “Honey, I know,” I told her. “He was our daddy. I think you always put up with him better than any of us. But he was mean as a snake. There’s nothing he got that he didn’t deserve.” . . . “The people in the village had asked him to leave a hundred times, go someplace else, but he always sneaked back. He said he wasn’t going to go away until he’d taken every child in the village down to the river and dunked them under. Which just scared everybody to death. So after the drowning incident they’d had enough, and everybody grabbed sticks and took out after him.” (485-486) Leah explains how the villagers chased Nathan to the top of an old wooden tower in a nearby coffee field and set the tower on fire: “They said he waited till he was on fire before he jumped off. Nobody wanted to touch him, so they just left him 83 Questions of what makes a democracy and whether we as the United States have the right to create or enforce a democratic society overseas are obviously still valid. The current war in Iraq centers around the exact same questions. 254 there for the animals to drag off.” The women sit in silence for a few moments, contemplating their father’s fate. Then Adah got a very strange look and said, “He got The Verse.” “Which one?” Leah asked. “The last one. Old Testament, Second Maccabees 13:4: ‘But the King of Kings aroused the anger of Antiochus against the rascal.’” “I don’t know it,” Leah said. Adah closed her eyes and thought for a second and then quoted the whole thing out: “The King of Kings aroused the anger of Antiochus against the rascal. And when Lysias informed him this man was to blame for all the trouble, he ordered them to put him to death in the way that is customary there. For there is a tower there seventy- five feet high, filled with ashes, and there they push a man guilty of sacrilege or notorious for other crimes to destruction. By such a fate it came to pass that the transgressor died, not even getting burial in the ground.” “Holy shit!” I declared. . . . “How come you know that verse?” Leah asked. “I must have gotten that one fifty times. It’s the final ‘The Verse’ in the Old Testament, I’m trying to tell you. One-hundred-count from the end. If you include the Apocrypha, which of course he always did.” “And what’s at the finish of it? . . . The take-home lesson?” “The closing statement of the Old Testament: ‘So this will be the end.’” “So this will be the end,” Leah and I both repeated. In complete amazement. (487) 255 Nathan’s perverted way of punishing the girls by writing out Bible verses comes back to him in a form of karmic retribution. 84 Just as he always meted out The Verse which he felt appropriately suited the offense, Nathan is certainly guilty of sacrilege and “other crimes.” Kingsolver beautifully brings The Verse full circle, again reminding the reader of Nathan’s eccentric religious practices. By the time the reader gets to this point in the story, The Verse has been all but forgotten, but now it has been effectively revived. We do not feel sorry for Nathan when we hear of his doom because we believe he received the just end he deserved, whether by God or by man. Nathan was unwilling to accept the wishes and beliefs of the people he had come to serve, and Kingsolver reminds her readers that we must not impose our will on others, for it will eventually come back to bite us. Leah continues the story of Nathan’s demise: “The tales got wilder and wilder as the years went by. That he’d had five wives, who all left him, for example. . . . It was really the best way for him to go. In a blaze of glory,” Leah said. “I’m sure he believed right up to the end that he was doing the right thing.” (488) Nathan did believe that what he was doing was the right thing. Although we know that Nathan was a bit crazy, especially at the end, the fact that his faith was so 84 The way Kingsolver works this verse into her story is quite interesting. Depending upon how the Apocrypha are placed in the Bible, this is indeed the final verse. In The Complete Bible: An American Translation, the Bible that Kingsolver uses for all her apocryphal quotes, the Apocrypha are grouped together after the traditional Protestant Old Testament to form their own section. 2 Maccabees is the final book in this grouping, coming immediately before the New Testament. In a Catholic Bible, such as The Jerusalem Bible, the Apocrypha are interwoven chronologically with the traditional books. In a standard King James Bible without Apocrypha and traditional Protestant Bibles, Malachi is the final book of the Old Testament. [The Jewish Scriptures put the Prophets in their own section altogether and 2 Chronicles is the final book.] 256 fervently unwavering could make him into a martyr figure for those who believe as he does. I find Nathan, aside from his repugnance as a human being, to be a fascinating character ethically. Nathan felt it was his religious duty to baptize the Kilangese children; he was, in a deontological way, unconcerned with whether the result of his actions were good or bad, only that they were the right thing to do. His motivation, however, lands him in an ethical no-man’s land: he felt it was his duty because of his faithfulness to the command of God, yet he is also motivated by his need to “replace” the un-baptized souls of the men lost in the jungle. In doing so, it is not the souls of the baptized, but his own soul which he believed shall be redeemed. This becomes a twisted form of ethical egoism, and is another reason why Nathan becomes both unsympathetic and morally suspect. Nathan is absolute in his duty to baptize, yet his is not a morality which anyone, even he, can apply universally. Nathan believes that he is able to wash away his own sins through the baptism of others; there is no true moral right in his actions because no one can act in his stead. Nathan’s unwavering faith in a retributive God who has obligated him to baptize come hell or high water (literally) causes him to behave in ways that Kingsolver would say were anything but moral. Whether or not Nathan got what he deserved, his religious fervor does not represent the values that Kingsolver finds important. As is clear throughout the novel, particularly with the introduction of Brother Fowles and his manifestation of Christian obligation, Kingsolver does not intend for Nathan to represent missionaries or Christianity; he represents unchecked religious fervor of the “sick-minded” type that James describes. 257 The three women move from talk of Nathan to their present lives. They had just come from seeing the ancient palace of Abomey where they “killed people right and left” and then worked the skulls into the household décor. Rachel describes the palace, saying, This was no fairy-tale kingdom, let me tell you. They forced women into slave marriage with the King for the purpose of reproducing their babies at a high rate. . . . To celebrate their occasions . . . they’d just haul off and kill a bunch of their slaves, grind up all the blood and bones, and mix it up with mud for making more walls for their temples! And what’s worse, whenever a King died, forty of his wives would have to be killed and buried with him! (480) Rachel describes how Leah “moved on [from poor old Dad] to how the Portuguese and Belgians and Americans have wrecked poor Africa from top to bottom” (489). Rachel, having had enough of Leah’s complaining about Africa in general and Mobutu in particular, screams at her: “Leah, I am sick and tired of your sob story!” . . . Really. After what we had just seen in that palace: wife murdering and slave bones in the walls! These horrible things had nothing to do with us; it was absolutely hundreds of years ago. The natives were ready and waiting when the Portuguese showed up wanting to buy slaves, I pointed out. The King of Abomey was just delighted to find out he could trade fifteen of his former neighbors for one good Portuguese cannon. (489) Leah, who “has an answer for everything” replies, “This is sparse country. . . . It never could have supported a large population.” “So?” I examined my nails, which were frankly in bad shape. 258 “So what looks like mass murder to us is probably misinterpreted ritual. They probably always had ways of keeping their numbers in balance in times of famine. Maybe they thought the slaves were going to a better place.” Adah chimed in: “A little ritual killing, a little infant mortality, just a few of the many healthy natural processes we don’t care to think about.” Her voice was surprisingly like Leah’s, although I presume Adah was joking, whereas Leah never jokes. Leah frowned at Adah, then at me, trying to decide which one of us was the true enemy. She decided on me. “You just can’t assume that what’s right or wrong for us is the same as what was right or wrong for them,” she said. Kingsolver uses this exchange between the women as one more opportunity to make her views known on being tolerant of other cultures and reserving judgment about things we may not understand. It also solidifies, had we any doubt, how far she lies outside of deontological ethical philosophy. This becomes a very interesting discussion, particularly when thinking in terms of universal morality and the common good, because while Leah defends the Abomey culture, explaining that there may have been a rational reason for their behavior, the reader shares a culture- wide intolerance for such reprehensible brutality. The tolerance that Kingsolver asks from the reader is strained as most readers will want to answer as Rachel does: “Thou shalt not kill,” I replied. “that’s not just our way of thinking. It happens to be in the Bible.” Leah and Adah smiled at each other. “Right. Here’s to the Bible,” Leah said, clinking her bottle against mine. “Tata Jesus is bängala!” Adah said, raising her bottle too. She and Leah looked at each other for a second, then both started laughing liked hyenas. “Jesus is poisonwood!” Leah said. “Here’s to the Minister of Poisonwood. And here’s to his five wives!” 259 Adah stopped laughing. “That was us.” “Who?” I said. “What?” “Nathan’s five legendary wives. They must have meant us.” Leah stared at her. “You’re right.” Like I said: night, day, and the Fourth of July. I don’t even try to understand. (490) As Nathan’s story is concluded, Adah and Leah seem to have made peace with some of the terrible events of their mission to Kilanga. Kingsolver’s seamless transition from Rachel’s uncharacteristic quoting of the Bible to her sisters belittling of it represents so much of what Kingsolver has aimed to accomplish. Rachel claims a biblical authority for her belief that the ritual killing in Abomey culture is wrong, yet she is completely a-religious, selfish, and bigoted—all the characteristics that Kingsolver has spent the past 500 pages trying to separate from true Christian faith and action. Adah and Leah both show their cynicism toward the Bible, yet both live lives of Good Works, whether inspired by Jesus or not. By connecting the Bible to Nathan and his misguided Poisonwood church, Kingsolver again reinforces all the connections she has encouraged the reader to make throughout her Bible—her “Jesus is beloved” Poisonwood Bible. When Adah realizes the facts which spawned the myth of Nathan’s wives, Kingsolver encourages the reader to make the leap from her Bible and the myths that it has created to the Holy Bible and the idea that there could be myths there, myths inspired by truth. We do not know what is real and what is fiction. We only have faith that the fictions we choose to believe have an element of truth. 260  BOOK SIX: SONG OF THE THREE CHILDREN  “Song of the Three Children” is the third apocryphal book that Kingsolver utilizes and contains the final narratives of Orleanna’s three surviving children. 85 Kingsolver opens this chapter with an apocryphal quote which adds an additional ironic meaning to the story of the Price women: “All that you have brought upon us and all that you have done to us, You have done in justice . . . Deliver us in your wonderful way” (507). 86 The time is 1994, Orleanna has long since moved to Sanderling Island in Georgia, and each of the three daughters reflects back on her life in Africa and how its lessons have led her to what she believes today. Rachel Price: The Equatorial Rachel is now 50 and still running the Equatorial. She was never able to have children due to an infection from Eeben Axelroot (“I paid my price with him”), and she is still quite vain about never having “let herself go”: I guess I should be flattered if some fellow peeks around the garden wall and thinks he spies Jezebel. Oh, if Father could see me now, wouldn’t he give me The Verse! I’m afraid all those childhood lessons in holiness slid off me like hot butter off the griddle. … But sometimes life doesn’t give you all that many chances at being good. Not here, anyway. Even Father learned that one the hard way. 85 The Song of the Three Holy Children is a passage in Daniel 3 that would come between verses 23 and 24 in Protestant Bibles. In Bibles which separate the Apocrypha, it is considered an addition to Daniel. Catholic Bibles integrate it into Daniel. 86 “You have executed proper judgments in all that you have brought upon us and upon Jerusalem, the holy city of our fathers. By a proper judgment you have done all this because of our sins.” From Daniel, Chapter 3:28. The New American Bible translation. 261 He came on strong, thinking he’d save the children, and what does he do but lose his own? That’s the lesson, right there. If you take a bunch of practically grown, red-blooded daughters to Africa, don’t you think at least some of them are going to marry or what have you and end up staying? You can’t just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back. (515) Rachel sums up in her unerring fashion one of the primary lessons Kingsolver aims to leave us with: not only does the river of life constantly move forward, but its currents are far reaching. Rachel first contemplates this above after Ruth May’s death when she talks about how she always thought they would return to the United States and it would be as if they never left. Rachel also admits that these were the thoughts of a child. As an adult, Nathan should not have expected to waltz his family into Africa and change the lives of the people there without somehow being changed in return. With maturity comes an understanding that there are consequences for our actions and we must take those into consideration when we make our choices. This is the lesson of every Bible story, beginning with Adam and Eve, and The Poisonwood Bible stories are no exception. For the benefit of anyone who might not have gotten the moral by now, Rachel states it quite succinctly: “Father’s mistake, see, was to try to convert the whole entire shebang over into just his exact way of thinking. He always said, “Girls, you choose your path and stick to it and suffer your consequences!” (516). Nathan lived by his faith and died by his faith, and, as Rachel puts it, “that is about as consequential as it gets” (516). 262 Rachel is a difficult character to pinpoint morally. On the one hand, she is astute enough to make judgments about her father’s moral lack, but she herself remains morally vacant throughout the novel, both religiously and politically. In her closing statement, she refers back to the book that saved her life the dreadful night of the ants, and we get final confirmation that Rachel represents the self- absorbed child who from beginning to end puts egoism and her own survival before all else: Sometimes I really do think I owe the secret of my success to that little book I read long ago called How to Survive 101 Calamities. Simple remedies for dire situations, that’s the lesson. In a falling elevator, try to climb up on the person nearby so their body will cushion your landing. Or in a crowded theater when everybody’s hightailing it for the fire exit, stick your elbows hard into the ribs of your neighbors to wedge yourself in. (516) Although these bits of advice have formed Rachel’s personal philosophy, at the end of the day she is still able to look outside herself and put it in the context of her Christian upbringing and the reality of her life in Africa. So that’s my advice. Let others do the pushing and shoving, and you just ride along. In the end, the neck you save will be your own. Perhaps I sound un-Christian, but let’s face it, when I step outside my own little world at night and listen to the sounds out there in the dark, what I feel down in my bones is that this is not a Christian kind of place. This is darkest Africa, where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up. If you ask me, that’s how it is and ever shall be. You stick out your elbows, and hold yourself up. (516) 263 Rachel’s pragmatism reflects not only her selfishness, but what she sees is necessary for her own survival. All three daughters (and Orleanna as well) come to represent different parts of ourselves that we recognize, whether or not we wish to accept them. Although Kingsolver invented How to Survive 101 Calamities to emphasize Rachel’s worldview, Kingsolver depends upon the reader’s survival instinct to be intrigued by the book while simultaneously rejecting the callousness it promotes. We are meant to reflect upon how our own survival instinct influences the choices that we make and whether we make, or would make, choices that are similar to or different from Rachel’s. If we do see some of ourselves in Rachel, or some of Rachel’s attitudes within us, what changes can we make in our own lives to diminish such behavior? Rachel’s allusion to the Gloria Patri provides Kingsolver one last bit of irony before we leave this daughter. It is not the “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” that guides Rachel’s life, but the need to preserve oneself at all cost: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without end.” Leah Price, Angola Leah’s closing narrative returns to the history of the Congo and its “civilization” by the Portuguese. She tells of how the Portuguese marveled at the efficiency of the Kingdom of the Kongo and how the Catholic “priests were dismayed to learn the Kongo already had their own Bible. They’d known it by heart for hundreds of years” (520). The Portuguese determined that, despite the well- 264 dressed and articulate population they found, “such people were surely not fully human—were primitive” (522). This determination, Leah explains, was a way for them to salve their consciences about what was to come: “Soon the priests were holding mass baptisms on shore and marching their converts onto ships bound for sugar plantations in Brazil, slaves to the higher god of commodity agriculture” (522). Leah reflects that nothing has changed, and after 30 years watching the horrors of life in the Congo, she has developed her own acceptance of the way things are: There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the meek inherit anything. What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That’s pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There’s the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with grace. (522) Leah has spent the past ten years in Angola, on an agricultural station, where she and Anatole help the collective make palm oil. She teaches classes in nutrition, sanitation, and soybeans. The hardest task, she says, is “teaching people to count on a future” because for those “who’ve lived as refugees longer than memory, learning to believe in the nutrient cycle requires something close to a religious conversion” (524). They have had to learn that very little will grow on this land, and it is “famine or flood.” Such a climate is a “great shock to souls gently reared in places of moderate clime, hope, and dread” (524). Kingsolver introduces the topic of the land 265 at this juncture so that she can go on to make her next point—the difficulty of bringing a religious tradition to a place that has no context in which to understand the biblical parables: In a temperate zone it’s the most natural thing in the world, right as rain, to grow fields of waving grain. To grow them year after year without dread of flood or plague, in soil that offers up green stems that bend to the scythe again and again, bread from a bottomless basket. Christians could invent and believe in the parable of the loaves and fishes, for their farmers can trust in abundance, and ship it to burgeoning cities, where people can afford to spend their lives hardly noticing, or caring, that his seed produces a plant. Here you know what a seed is or you starve. (524) If there is no perspective in which to understand a biblical story, is it reasonable to expect that a culture will embrace it? Brother Fowles understood the need to put the Bible into an embraceable context when he spoke to Nathan about the parable of the mustard seed. Such considerations regarding the accessibility of the Bible concern Kingsolver, but she seems even more interested in Christians’ ability to understand why the Bible might have limited appeal to people for whom there are greater concerns. 87 Kingsolver’s moral discourse involving poverty and justice is again apparent through Leah’s narration, as is Kingsolver’s consistent empathy throughout the novel with those who have nothing. Belief in a better “world to come” has sustained many people in trying times, but generally there is already an 87 And here, I acknowledge, that for many people (far saner than Nathan) there is no greater concern than the mortal state of one’s soul, but I am going to make the sweeping assumption that those with such a concern are not also starving to death. 266 established belief system within these faith communities. Trying to introduce a new theology when people are far more interested in survival becomes a very difficult, if not futile task. Leah concludes with her final thoughts about the God she has come to believe in: Poor Father, who was just one of a million men who never did catch on. He stamped me with a belief in justice, then drenched me in culpability, and I wouldn't wish such torment even on a mosquito. But that exacting, tyrannical God of his has left me for good. I don't quite know how to name what crept in to take his place. Some kin to the passion of Brother Fowles, I guess, who advised me to trust in Creation, which is made fresh daily and doesn't suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a bird raises its brood in the forest, and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes, followed by torrential rains, and if these things aren't always what I had in mind, they aren't my punishment either. They’re rewards, let's say, for the patience of the seed. The sins of my fathers are not insignificant. But we keep moving on. As Mother used to say, not a thing stands still but sticks in the mud. . . . I stretch out . . . reaching for balance . . . and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether. (525-526) Leah is the child who constantly struggles to create balance. She reaches for the balance between Nathan’s God and her own, between what she knows to be right and the behavior she sees around her, between the whiteness of her background and the blackness of her present life. Leah’s God wants justice but is not personally punishing, creates and destroys equally and without vengeance, hopes that we will choose, as did Jesus, to help those who are worse off than we, but will create the 267 world anew every day despite our actions. Leah’s God does not send tsunamis and hurricanes to punish the wicked, but does provide motivation to assist the survivors. There is hope in Leah’s God, and this God comprises an aspect of divinity that we can choose to embrace or abandon as irreligious. Kingsolver presents this God as a viable option for Christian belief, and more important, as a model for Christian behavior. Adah Price, Atlanta Adah is entrusted with Kingsolver’s final theological and ethical pronouncements. Leah and Adah are different yet complementary aspects of the same theological and moral discussions. While Leah has always been concerned about a God of Justice who sets things right in the normative scales of balance between what should occur and what does occur, Adah is the child who views everything with an eye to a more universal Right. Christianity is too small a perspective in her wider view of God’s handiwork. Adah is the mouthpiece for global ethics, common morality, and Kingsolver’s last attempt to express to the reader the almost unimaginable differences between the culture of Africa and that of the West. “For every life saved by vaccination or food relief,” Adah informs the reader, “one is lost to starvation or war. Poor Africa. No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill” (528). Kingsolver impresses upon the reader again and again the vast chasm that separates the life of privileged Westerners from that of most Africans. Out of 268 “sympathy for Africa and the Devil,” Adah leaves medicine and becomes a self-proclaimed witch doctor in “the great Rift Valley that lies along the eastern boundary of Congo” (528). She tells us the creation story that she believes in, and we know we are hearing Kingsolver’s own creation story in Adah’s words: When God was a child, the Rift Valley cradled a cauldron of bare necessities, and out of it walked the first humans upright on two legs. With their hands free, they took up tools and beat from the bush their own food and shelter and their own fine business of right and wrong. They made voodoo, the earth's oldest religion. They engaged a powerful affinity with their habitats and their food chain. They worshiped everything living and everything dead, for voodoo embraces death as its company, not its enemy. It honors the balance between loss and salvation. (528) Leah’s balance is between immorality and justice; Adah’s is between loss and salvation. One is not possible without the other, and within that balance lies a kind of universal justice we rarely consider. In Adah’s justice, and most likely Kingsolver’s as well, God does not take sides, for God has created everything: God is everything, then. God is a virus. Believe that, when you get a cold. God is an ant. Believe that, too, for driver ants are possessed, collectively, of the size and influence of a Biblical plague. . . . This is what we learned in Kilanga: move out of the way and praise God for the housecleaning. In a few days the dark brigade will have passed on through—those ants can't stop moving. You return to find your houses combed spotless of spoiled crumbs, you're bedding free of lice, your woodlots cleansed of night soil, your hen coops rid of chicken mites.. . . loss and salvation. . . . As a teenager . . . I was still a bit appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now 269 I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same human soil in the Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning. Five million years is a long partnership. If you could for a moment rise up out of your own beloved skin and appraise ant, human, and virus as equally resourceful beings, you might admire the accord they have all struck in Africa. (530) In her role as philosopher and educator, Kingsolver reminds us that Africa has always had a very effective system of cleaning itself. Whether through the brooms of driver ants, the Ebola virus, or AIDS, nature has devised a method “to sweep a small clearing very well. Not one of them can cross a river by itself. And none can survive the death of its host” (520). Our efficient global commerce, however, is the gift of godspeed to the virus. Gifts of foreign magi, brought from afar. In the service of saving Africa’s babies and extracting its mineral soul, the West has built a path to its own door and thrown it wide for the plague. (530) What Kingsolver implies here, is that Western conquerors have brought woe not only to Africa, but to ourselves as well. Had we, as Orleanna speculates in the opening of the book, left well enough alone, then the self-cleaning African system of ants and Ebola would have stayed in Africa where it would efficiently keep its (not starving or slave-burdened) population under control. As Americans, we live in a glorious world of “what if,” and just as Orleanna accepts her own complicity in the oppression of Africa, Kingsolver reminds us that none of us is without sin, particularly if we choose to remain either ignorant or duplicitous in perpetuating our roles as conquerors. 270 Adah is the word master, the child who plays with language and understands that there are meanings and implications beneath all text. Hermeneutics is an inherent accompaniment to all literature, and Adah has been responsible for demonstrating this throughout the novel. Not only is author intent a valid way of understanding this novel, but the understanding that is brought to it by the reader herself plays an integral part in the success of Kingsolver’s narrative theology. The final paragraphs of Adah’s narrative are, appropriately, about Bibles and the hermeneutic necessary to appreciate them fully. Kingsolver has been relatively deliberate throughout the novel about indicating how the Bible should be interpreted, and here, at last, she explains how her Bible has earned its title. Lately I've started collecting old books that are famous for their misprints. There is a world of irony in it. Bibles in particular. I've never actually seen any of these in original editions, but back in the days when print was scarce, only one printing of the Bible was widespread at any given time, and people knew it by heart. Its mistakes became celebrated. In 1823 when the Old Testament appeared with the verse “And Rebekah arose with her camels”—instead of damsels—it was known as the Camel’s Bible. In 1804 the Lions Bible had sons coming forth from lions instead of loins, and in the Murderers’ Bible of 1801, the complainers in Jude 16 did not murmur, they murdered. . . . In the Sin- On Bible, John 5:14 exhorted the believers not to “sin no more” but to “sin on more!” . . . I can't resist these precious Gospels. They lead me to wonder what Bible my father wrote in Africa. We came in stamped with such errors we can never know which ones made a lasting impression. I wonder if they still think of him standing tall before his congregation shouting, “Tata Jesus is bängala!” I do. I think of him exactly that way. We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions. He was my father. I own half of his genes, and all of his history. 271 Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible. (533) 88 As we saw in Chapter Two, when Adah trips up Leah by quoting The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as if it were from the Bible, there is an underlying commentary here on the absolute nature of biblical authority, especially when basing one’s theology on a translation. Brother Fowles talks about it when debating whether it is harder to thread a needle with a camel or a course piece of yarn. Words are important, yet they are just words. The lasting and more meaningful impression comes with the intent behind the words—with our actions. Adah recognizes that the Bible Nathan “wrote” in Africa has many truths in it, as it is a story told about the characters, yet it is also a story told by the characters. The Hebrew Scriptures, should we accept the theory that they are written by several authors, are structured in a similar way. 89 Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, paralleling the four daughters, also tell the same story in different ways. Just as in the Holy Bible, Kingsolver’s stories are meant to be parables, to teach a moral lesson about how we should behave in the world: to instruct us how to love our neighbor as ourselves. Nathan’s rock-solid belief that he was right about everything created a Bible that burned all who came in contact with it. Kingsolver’s Bible, in its mosaic of theology and social justice, 88 For an interesting article on Bible misprints, see Ray Russell’s “The Wicked Bible,” reprinted at <http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1980/v37-3-criticscorner2.htm.> 89 Following the JEPD hypothesis, for example. 272 creates a Bible which can redeem Nathan’s and call itself Beloved. How we view the Bible—Nathan’s, Kingsolver’s, or that of our own religious tradition— depends upon what we find in it when we read it and what we take from it when we are through.  BOOK 7: THE EYES IN THE TREES  As discussed above in Chapter Two, in the opening pages of “Genesis,” Orleanna tells the reader “First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees” (5). She goes on to describe the jungle from this aerial view and then issues her initial warning to the reader/judge who in the course of this novel will come to learn the dark truth about what happened in Africa. During her opening narrative, Orleanna also describes a memory: Away down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls all in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dress. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they deserve. The mother especially. . . . The daughters march behind her, four girls compressed in bodies as tight as bowstrings, each one tense to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation. . . . At the stream bank she sets out their drear picnic. . . . After months of modest hunger the children now forget to complain about food. Silently they swallow, shake off the crumbs, and drift downstream for a swim. . . . A beautiful animal stands on the other side of the water. They look up from their lives, woman and animal, amazed to find themselves in the same place. . . . That one time and no other the okapi came to the stream, and I was the only one to see it. (5-6) 273 By the end of the novel, the reader is well-acquainted with Orleanna’s “eyes in the trees,” the “little beast” to whom she tells her tale of woe, and with her overwhelming need to be absolved of her transgressions. This final chapter, “The Eyes in the Trees,” is a stream-of-consciousness answer to Orleanna by “muntu Africa, muntu one child and a million all lost on the same day,” whom we quickly recognize as muntu green mamba snake, Ruth May (537). This muntu speaks to her mother, declaring that although she hears Orleanna’s pleas, she is “no little beast and [has] no reason to judge” (537). Ruth May describes from her omniscient viewpoint the same scene that Orleanna first describes in “Genesis”: Mother, be still, listen. I can see you leading your children to the water, and you call it a story of ruin. Here is what I see: . . . Away down below single file on the path comes a woman with four girls, the pale doomed blossoms. . . . The [smallest child] delicately reaches out her toe and squashes [a] spider. . . . At the river they eat their picnic lunch. . . . The noise they make frightens away a young okapi. He had just lately begun to inhabit this territory on the edge of the village. If the children had not come today, the okapi would have chosen this as his place. He would have remained until the second month of the dry season, and then a hunter would have killed him. But instead he is startled today by the picnic, and his cautious instincts drive him deeper into the jungle, where he finds a mate and lives through the year. All because. . . . Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger. (538) 274 This alternate version of the okapi story reinforces Kingsolver’s modus operandi throughout The Poisonwood Bible—truth is subjective, just as experience is subjective, and since we cannot see all sides of a situation, we should not be hasty in making our judgments. It also reinforces her conviction that the web of life is interconnected in ways we cannot ever imagine. Our lives intertwine, our stories intertwine, and the reality of what happens to us and those we touch is fluid. The choice we make about something as seemingly simple as having a picnic by a river has much further-reaching implications. It is again Kingsolver’s conviction that the river moves forward and its ripples affect everything. Ruth May continues her narrative: On another day the same woman leads her children through a market. Now she has white hair and only three daughters. . . . These four have not been together in one place since the death of the other. They have come to say good-bye to Ruth May or so they claim. . . . But in truth they are saying goodbye to their mother. They love her inordinately. (538) Orleanna and her daughters have come back to the Congo because it is Orleanna’s special wish to put a marker on Ruth May’s grave. She will be unable to place the marker, however, because the Congo has been swept by “a terrible war that everyone believes will soon have been worth the price” (540). Ruth May describes the result of Mobutu’s overthrow with her muntu visionary clarity: After thirty-five years the man Mobutu has run away in the night. Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath, moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests. The eyes in the trees are watching. The animals open their mouths and utter joyful, 275 astonishing words. The enslaved parrot Methuselah, whose flesh has been devoured now by many generations of predators, is forcing his declaration of independence through the mouths of leopards and civet cats. (540) The people, the land, and even Methuselah are all interconnected and breathing a sigh of relief that the stranglehold of this one fiendish man has finally been released. Kingsolver’s extraordinary language melds together the time and reality of the situation in a visual, almost tangible, way that is as philosophical in its intent as any treatise on Same/Other. She explores the possibility that there is no differentiation—all is the same; all is muntu. Methuselah exists again and again, his flesh devoured, reborn, and devoured again, yet the essence of independence that he represents remains present throughout all time. Just as time erases “whiteness altogether,” so it erases most things, and Kilanga is one of the casualties of Mobutu’s regime. The mother and daughters ask a merchant if she has heard any news from Kilanga. The woman replies, “there is no such village. . . . She is very sure. There has never been any village on the road past Bulungu” (542). The women are confused but realize that this piece of history is their own to work out, to live with, and finally, to let go. The disappearance of Kilanga also serves to reinforce the mythos of the story. There is no evidence that it happened; we have to take it on faith, just as in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The Poisonwood Bible is meant to teach, to guide and instruct—it is not whether the stories actually happened that is relevant, but what the stories teach us about ourselves and how to live with others in the world. 276 Ruth May watches as her mother tries to calculate how old she would be had she lived, and she bestows upon Orleanna her final judgment: Mother, you can still hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as we both shall live I forgive you, Mother. I shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. The teeth at your bones are your own, the hunger is yours, forgiveness is yours. The sins of the fathers belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in iron bracelets, and here you stand, remembering their songs. . . . You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light. Just as she began with Genesis and the Garden of Eden, Kingsolver neatly bookends her story by concluding with the last verse from Malachi, the final book of the Old Testament (without Apocrypha). Ruth May forgives her mother with words from the prophet Malachi who foretells the coming of the Messiah: 4:5 “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes.” 4:6 “He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.” (Malachi 4:5-6) Elijah is the prophet who will herald the redemption, turning “the hearts of fathers to their children” (a gift of which Nathan Price was sorely in need). Ruth May also acts as a kind of Elijah—she heralds, should the reader choose to heed the message in this book, the possibility of a Messianic age. When we are ready to turn our hearts toward each other, when we are ready for redemption, this promise of redemption shall be fulfilled because through our own actions we can achieve salvation. 277 The sins of the father Ruth May speaks of are not only the sins of Nathan upon his family, but the sins of the colonialists upon the Africans and the sins of America upon Africa. Kingsolver entreats us to forgive ourselves for these past sins, but more important, to learn from our mistakes. Kingsolver gives one final twist to the verse from Malachi, for her parting message is not one of warning, “lest I strike the earth with a curse,” but of hope: “Forgiveness is yours . . . Move on. Walk forward into the light” (543). The Poisonwood Bible’s final sentence mirrors 1 John 1:7: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.” In giving Ruth May this final behest, Kingsolver reinforces Ruth May in the role of Jesus as judge and redeemer. If muntu interconnects everything, then Ruth May is in a position both to forgive and to welcome Orleanna into the light of salvation. More important, Orleanna believes that Ruth May has the power to forgive her. Unlike Nathan’s above injunction to the children he attempts to baptize in the rain, Ruth May’s bid to “walk forward into the light” is one that offers true redemption. This is an uplifting, hopeful ending to the book; the light represents both visual light and a lightness of being that will come about if Orleanna can truly forgive herself, and it is that forgiveness, not baptism, which will allow her to walk into the light. 278 CONCLUSION Social ethics reaches beyond social science by including explicit and sustained attention to formulating social ethical and public policy prescriptions. Social ethical prescriptions concern what should be done to make favorable differences to the probable future. Social ethical prescriptions are often guided by heavily value-laden visions of an alternative and more righteous future. These visions of an alternative more righteous future are partly visions of the differences being and doing as prescribed will make, and partly visions of differences to be made by other favorable influences. And of course all social ethical reflection is founded upon the metaphysical presupposition that being-becoming- doing differently makes at least some difference, and upon the metaethical presupposition that we ought to prefer some differences over others, namely, we ought to prefer making righteous differences—differences contributing to the good, to shared well-being. (Walker) This quote from Theodore Walker succinctly describes my own views on social ethics and its importance as both a field of study and a pragmatic endeavor. Making the leap between social ethical reflection and social ethical prescription is a primary challenge for those who desire social justice awareness and transformation. Through The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver has integrated her moral, political and theological views and presented a guideline for how she feels we should approach that transformation. Within the reciprocal relationship among author, novel, and reader, her novel as narrative theological ethics reflects not only her judgment of what is, but what ought to be. As explicated above, Kingsolver’s philosophy is chiefly pragmatic, and she uses her novel to illustrate that literature can reflect theory and reality, as Rorty 279 recommends, without choosing one over the other. Her primary goal as a moral theorist is to demonstrate through narrative her normative theory of moral obligation. Kingsolver has adopted a theory of obligation which, using William Frankena’s words, could be defined as follows: There are two basic principles of prima facie obligation: that of benevolence and that of justice or equality. From the former follow various less basic principles of prima facie obligation: the principle of utility, the principle of not injuring anyone, the principle of not interfering with another’s liberty, and so on. From the latter follow others, for instance, equality of consideration and equality before the law. Possibly some others, like keeping promises follow from both. . . . [O]ne must make a decision as best one can in the light of the facts and the principles of benevolence and justice. (Frankena, 42) It is clear throughout The Poisonwood Bible that she subscribes to these principles of benevolence and justice and that she holds high the nonmoral values of justice, freedom, beneficence, and tolerance. For Kingsolver, an act is “right if and only if it . . . produces, will probably produce, or is intended to produce at least as great a balance of good over evil as any available alternative” (Frankena, 13). The moral value of an action, for Kingsolver, is the nonmoral value which it promotes. This is not to say that Kingsolver belittles right action which is based on moral values; she clearly favors the virtues of Brother Fowles, a man who is compassionate, selfless, and doing what he believes to be God’s work. For Kingsolver, though, the difference between Brother Fowles’ and Nathan’s understandings of what it means to obey God’s commands is the difference between acting on the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Kingsolver, through her characters, promotes her belief that acting 280 in any way which does not take the ultimate result into consideration cannot be considered an ethically right decision. What she also adds to the mix, making the novel both more interesting and far more complex, is the way she incorporates the Bible and its often conflicting lessons of agapism and absolutism. As moral discourse, this melding of theological and philosophical principles demonstrates that because of the complexities of religion, place, and social understanding, for her, unified theories of morality do not work. Even the reprehensible behavior of Tata Kuvudundu in his unintentional murder of Ruth May, while socially condemned, is not considered absolutely morally corrupt by the villagers. It was wrong for him to put the snake into the chicken house, but he did what he felt was necessary to scare the villagers into going back to the old ways. His actions are both selfish and altruistic, just as Tata Ndu’s are in voting out Jesus, and it was understood that he thought he was looking out for the welfare of the village. In Adah’s observations about Kuvudundu that she “saw a kindness there, and believe[s] he means to protect us,” 90 we are meant to see that Kuvudundu’s motives are not inherently evil (174). The ends certainly don’t justify the means, but if we assume that his intent was to scare, and not to kill, does that change our perception of his actions? If we see Tata Kuvudundu’s actions as morally unjustifiable, then he falls into the same category as Nathan, whose motives were similar and, by keeping his family in the Congo, the result was exactly the same. The complexities of place and 90 See Chapter Three above: “Waiting For a Child to Die.” 281 situation sometimes make an action or decision difficult to judge morally, from either side of the event, and categorical certainty, Kingsolver would argue, is out of the question. In a recent Gallup poll conducted by Baylor University, some interesting statistics emerged regarding people’s attitudes toward God, attitudes which are reflected within The Poisonwood Bible’s various characters: One area that emerged from the survey that has excited the researchers is what they call the “Four Gods.” Depending on how engaged people think God is in the world and how angry God is with the world. […] What researchers found was that the type of god people believe in can predict their political and moral attitudes more so than just looking at their religious tradition. Researchers found that none of the “four gods” dominated among believers. The data showed: • 31.4 percent believe in an Authoritarian God, who is very judgmental and engaged. • 25 percent believe in a Benevolent God, who is not judgmental but engaged. • 23 percent believe in a Distant God, who is completely removed. • 16 percent believe in a Critical God, who is judgmental but not engaged. 91 Nathan’s faith clearly falls into the “authoritarian God” description, and his understanding of God is harsh because of the way he views God’s judgment. His perspective is so myopic that he cannot see beyond the immediate use that God has for him. There are definitely attributes to be admired in Nathan, but like the mighty oak, he falls when the wind of adversity hits him. The United States, with its 91 “Losing My Religion? No, Says Baylor Religion Survey.” Sept. 11, 2006. http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=41678 282 democratic and diverse structure, can support many differing religious views without calling upon them to be flexible; 92 Nathan, however, finds himself in a culture where, because he is unable to adapt to differing beliefs, he is ultimately doomed to failure and destruction. Kingsolver seems to be asking whether there is a value in such a theological adaptation, and she challenges the reader to determine whether one should compromise religious belief if a greater beneficence and/or justice is served. On a certain level, this can be seen as a dichotomy between religion as belief and religion as praxis. Nathan truly believes that without baptism, not only has he failed as a preacher, but the villagers are doomed to eternal damnation. He prays upon first arriving, “Lord make me a powerful instrument of thy perfect will,” and perhaps that indeed is what ultimately develops; but the question begged here is what precisely is God’s will (18)? Is it God’s will that we only believe with perfect faith, or God’s will that we go out and do good works in God’s name? Kingsolver would have us believe the latter, but the value of this novel is that it offers different perspectives and ideas for us to consider. From a solely deontological faith perspective, if Nathan is being absolutely true to his beliefs, then whatever the consequences, we cannot cast aspersions on the result. The true good works in the book, however, come not from Nathan or his belief, but from Brother Fowles and the Catholic nuns, both of whom have a far more beneficent, teleological application of their religious beliefs. 92 As much as we may wish otherwise. 283 Does Nathan flout God’s will by keeping his family in jeopardy, by having a cursing parrot, by failing to baptize even his own daughter, and thus does he lose the Kingdom of Heaven? Do we believe that Nathan would be more deserving of that place in heaven had he taken his family out of the Congo and saved the life of his daughter? Would our judgment of Nathan change had he baptized Ruth May? Do we judge Nathan by his Christian desire to save others or by his lack of Christian charity? Ostensibly it should not matter what we believe—only God makes such determinations—except that Kingsolver has constructed this relationship between reader and text and asked us specifically to serve as judge. On the surface, many of our judgments seem predetermined by Kingsolver, but the beauty of this novel is that the characters and their moral foundations are not black and white. Brother Fowles loves God and treats his neighbor as himself, yet he challenges our perception of him as a Pastor because he interprets the Bible as it is useful to him; Nathan fears God and teaches that same fear to others, yet his religion drives him in a way that, his ultimate insanity aside, could at least initially be respected. Orleanna and her daughters each have their virtues and their vices. We can take one character at a time and render a moral judgment, but there are too many intervening factors to maintain within ourselves the honest integrity that it would require to make absolute pronouncements in the face of all they have experienced. We can try to determine how we would behave in their place, how they should have behaved, but in truth there is just no way to know. Kingsolver makes it clear that some truths are dependent upon personal experience, and while we can be sympathetic, the subjective nature of such 284 experience, whether religious epiphany or acute hunger, makes moral absolutes impossible to assert. In the end, we must make our judgments based as best we can on the principles by which we live our lives, principles which she feels should be guided by ideals such as benevolence, justice, and freedom. Although written in 1998, The Poisonwood Bible is even more relevant today. While I would not claim that this novel has been instrumental in making the American public more aware of the atrocities taking place in Africa, the current awareness of poverty, hunger, AIDS, and the genocide in Darfur is greater in the United States than it was, and I firmly believe that novels such as this have increased this awareness. The Gap’s “Red” Campaign, HBO’s The Girl in the Café, and the One Campaign, 93 all contribute to raising the consciousness of Americans to the poverty and despair in Africa, and there will be many readers who see the film Blood Diamond and recall that they first learned about the horrors of the diamond industry in The Poisonwood Bible. Kingsolver’s interweaving of ethics, religion, and Scripture in The Poisonwood Bible creates a possibility for moral discourse which is not similarly available in religious texts or philosophy classes. She has created a text which, as Nussbaum suggests, makes the confrontation of difficult topics far more palatable. 94 Through the novel, Kingsolver challenges the reader to come to confront many 93 http://www.one.org/ 94 Nussbaum, page 3 above. 285 uncomfortable issues which encourage moral inquiry—from the more global questions of how we treat other countries to the more personal questions of how we treat each other, recognizing that they are actually one and the same. In using the Bible as her focal point, she broadens the possibilities for the moral implications of her text, and for our understanding of its place as narrative theological ethics. The Poisonwood Bible is imbued with Kingsolver’s teleology, and successfully presents itself, in Newton’s words, to be “literature as ethics” (Newton, 11). Kingsolver’s goal from the outset, in addition to weaving an entertaining story, is to write a social ethical prescription that encourages us to act in a way that promotes what she considers to be the common good. At its core, The Poisonwood Bible is a political allegory, and in creating a tale of biblical proportions—in every sense of the word—she uses the Bible to reinforce her conviction that justice, benevolence, and religious tolerance should be the principles by which we all lead our lives. There are many novels which can be argued to be narrative theological ethics. I chose to use The Poisonwood Bible because the intentionalist hermeneutic of the work reflects Kingsolver as a self-consciously morally involved writer whose characters and situations not only reflect Kingsolver’s moral discourse, but are fully developed in their own right, allowing the reader to come to her own conclusions regarding the moral stance of the characters and their situations. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Hillinger, Erika Silver (author)

Core Title Literature as narrative ethics: ethics, religion, and scripture in Barbara Kingsolver's The poisonwood bible

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Religion

Publication Date 02/21/2007

Defense Date 02/21/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Barbara Kingsolver,ethics,Literature,narrative theology,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor Crossley, John P. (committee chair), May, William (committee member), Orenstein, Gloria (committee member)

Creator Email erika@hillinger.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c127-317948

Unique identifier UC1421734

Identifier etd-Hillinger-20070228 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-317948 (legacy record id),usctheses-m302 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hillinger-20070228.pdf

Dmrecord 317948

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hillinger, Erika Silver

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu