A Long Overdue Reread

My return to the Belgian Congo in "The Poisonwood Bible."

In September of 2019, the beginning of my senior year of high school, my AP English class was assigned our first full novel of the year. We’d read, over the summer break, How to Read Literature Like a Professor and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a change from the hefty Moby Dick of prior years. I was fully ready for another classic of some sort, in the vein of Frankenstein and Jane Eyre, but we instead began with Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible.

I didn’t know what to expect going in. My then-uber-pretentious choice in literature revolted at something published post-1970; on the other hand, I trusted my English teacher’s taste well enough to give it a good college try. What followed was the emotional rollercoaster of a lifetime. I fell in love with the women in the Price family, my heart breaking when theirs did, my anger rising at their patriarch with his every breath, my feelings aligning with theirs completely. I was so devastated by its story that, at one point, I hit it with a Louisville Slugger for dramatic effect. My copy still has a faint wood smell, or so I tell myself. It became, quite quickly, my favorite book of all time.

I readily answered with Poisonwood whenever people asked, and it remained fast and true for some five years. Towards the end of 2024, a year in which I read 65 titles and my now-second favorite book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, I began to debate whether or not Kingsolver’s book would hold its place. I decided to put it to the test. In January, I reread Poisonwood, my favorite book, and The Scarlet Letter, my least favorite. I’ve already written about the latter in a hit-piece on Nathaniel Hawthorne. Suffice to say, my opinion was reaffirmed. How did my favorite fare?

Long story short: Yes, it held up. But not for the reason I thought it would.

Poisonwood, as I briefly alluded to, is the story of the Price family. Its narration centers on the four children: Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. Their mother, Orleanna, also enters the fold at times. Its plot is driven largely by their father, Nathan, as he attempts to spread evangelical Christianity to the Belgian Congo shortly before its independence. What follows is the breakdown of this family, the already strained bonds reaching a point of no return by the novel’s climax.

Kingsolver wears her themes on her sleeve. That’s something I’ve come to appreciate about her novels: how upfront they are. Done poorly, it can feel very “in your face,” or almost forced. There’s a passion that she writes with, though, whether it be here, or Demon Copperhead, or even her debut, The Bean Trees, that is wholly palpable. It translates to her characters as well. They are wholly emotional beings across her works, Poisonwood being no exception to that. Emotion is what gravitated me to this book the first time around. Never before had I read something that felt so impactful on my psyche. As I’ve gotten older, and more experienced as a writer, I’ve seen how that emotion is communicated to the page. Take this example, from Adah’s final chapter of narration before the novel’s conclusion:

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. 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.

At this point, Adah is reflecting some 30 years after her time in the Congo. The bitterness she feels towards her father is there, as it has been for the entirety of her journey. Here, though, there’s a sense of ownership, or at least recognition, in the fact that he was her father nonetheless. Sure, the blame is there, as it rightfully deserves to be, but the acknowledgement of her own damage in this is subtle. It’s a roll-credits moment, title drop and all, but the recognition is what stands out, even if it’s bitter.

There’s this one as well, and when coupled with the concluding chapter, it makes the novel’s conclusion all the more heart wrenching:

But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after—oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.

This is Orleanna. Without spoiling too much, she has endured one of the most unbearable tragedies of her life. It will follow her forever, no matter how much time and distance she puts between herself and the moment, how much retribution she tries to enact. This is her lamentation, and her retrospective, on motherhood. She loves her children, all of them, but there’s something about the last one. I can understand it, without having to have had children of my own. It’s horrifyingly beautiful, given the context, and the last scene made me keep this quote in mind.

I knew what was going to happen, and I still cried.

And the writing, outside of these emotional moments, is engaging throughout. There is a lull in action towards the beginning—I use “action” loosely. Don’t expect fisticuffs, people, as much as I wanted it at times—but I still found myself wanting to continue, even this second go around, because of how well-written this story and its characters are. They are people, flawed and complicated, and as Adah said, the mistakes are part of the story.

That was the consistency between readings. What was new this second time around were the larger geopolitical discussions being had. I don’t reread books often, so to actually have the “something new the second time around” concept was wonderful, especially compared to the disaster that was The Scarlet Letter. Unfortunately, the something new was the horrors of U.S. interventionism, and its effects on the countries it invades and the world at large.

Post-independence, the Congo democratically elected Patrice Lumumba, a socialist, to lead their country. Within two months, he would be chased from the capital under a military coup and assassinated. He lasted from the tail-end of June to the beginning of September. He didn’t witness a new season. It’s a large point surrounding the novel’s plot, whether this intervention, compared with Nathan’s evangelical mission, actually help people. The answer, plainly, is not really. It helps few, but most struggle. A lot die. And that’s the brutality of the power of the U.S.

In case you haven’t noticed, the section I write my essays under labels myself as a cynic. While I don’t know that socialism is a perfect answer, given the incredible fallibility of humanity, I do also know that capitalism has caused billions of people to suffer, and innumerable deaths to boot. This has been much of my course of study recently, both academically and personally. My religious diatribes are well known, and at this point, my anti-capitalist sentiments are running parallel. The novel doesn’t confirm these feelings of mine outright; if your own are not as staunch as mine, it might not ring as firmly. For myself, though, it hit home. I appreciated that greatly.

I don’t know that it’s a perfect book, but I don’t know that such a book exists. To me, my own biases blind me enough that I would be able to label it as such. I encourage you wholeheartedly to challenge me on that perception. Read it, and let it consume. If you don’t agree, that’s okay too. What good would the diversity of literature be if everyone agreed all the time? We’d be stuck reading the same story. Let this novel’s uniqueness shine through.