The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver does an excellent job in The Poisonwood Bible mixing fiction with both history and personal experience in the Belgian Congo. Nathan Price, a Baptist minister from Georgia, takes his wife and four daughters to a remote village deep in the Congo on a twelve-month mission. But his inability to persuade the Congolese of the existence of God and Jesus, plus the growing power struggles in the government of the Congo during the 1950s and 60s finally break-up the family and later lead to his death.
Once settled in the Congo, Orleanna Price and her daughters begin to adjust to an uncultured lifestyle. But the people there resist the fierce religious demands of Reverend Price. Orleanna herself questioned, "...whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence." And as her husband's gospel teachings becomes less productive, she admits that, "The hardest work of every day was deciding...to stay with my family."
But her husband rationalizes that "God was testing him like Job." And his treatment of his daughters, forcing them to write and rewrite verses from the Bible to perceive their shortcomings, slowly turns them against him. Then when the youngest child is bitten by a snake and dies, the other daughters follow Orleanna as she walks through rain and mud away from their Congo home and her husband, who from the beginning had been advised not to come to the mission.
In each chapter of the novel, the narrator is changed, which gives all members of the family except the father an opportunity to tell her story. These personal accounts from mother and daughters reveal their differences in character, and in the end, after they leave the mission, they go separate ways. Orleanna and Adah, the crippled daughter, return to Georgia. But Rachel, the oldest, marries three times and becomes a part of the upper class whites in Africa. Leah marries an African school teacher, who during Mobutu's reign in Zaire (Congo) is imprisoned three times. The contrast between Rachel and Leah' attitudes is a microcosm of the rich whites and oppressed blacks of Africa at that time.
So the struggle for independence in the Congo becomes the backdrop for The Poisonwood Bible. Nathan Price notices it when the village leader interrupts his sermon to take a vote for or against Jesus. The illiterate villagers in the church vote by putting a stone in one of two bowls. But Jesus loses, 11 to 56.
Actually during the 1960s, the Congolese voted for their first president, using stones as ballots. But he was soon murdered, and the CIA proceeded to install Mobutu in that position, because he would accept bribes from civilized countries which had big investments in the Congo. Kingsolver portrays Leah and her husband spending many years of their married life struggling along beside the poor Congolese people, while Mobutu builds his rich castles.
Leah at one point expresses what well may be the general theme the novel: "Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in a different place." Barbara Kingsolver's previous books include Pigs In Heaven, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees.