The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

In this massive, hugely successful novel set in 1959, zealous Baptist minister Nathan Price leads his wife and four daughters to the Congo village of Kilanga. Blindly self-righteous, he's obsessed only with proving himself and baptizing unwilling villagers. Meanwhile his wife, Orleanna, struggles to keep the family alive, fed, and safe from animal and human predators. "I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband's confidence and the undertow of my children's needs," she says. Their marriage, as much as the place, becomes a "heart of darkness" as the story uncoils through the eyes of their daughters. This book was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998.

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Readers Guide by Elenor Denker

Overview

The struggles within the family provide a window into the development of the four young women who are experiencing the normal difficulties of finding themselves. Each has a very distinctive voice and even without reading the chapter titles (which indicate who the narrator is for that chapter) it is easy to recognize which woman is speaking.

All is heightened by the environment which is wholly unfamiliar. Every single belief they arrive with is challenged by the Congolese who have an entirely different set of beliefs and explanations for the way the world behaves and should behave. The question of what religion is and what it should be underlies much of the story. Kingsolver brings a biologist’s eye to the fascinating environment and the jungle becomes an additional character in the novel.

The politics of what happened in the Congo during this period affect the Price family in small ways and large ways, and raise provocative questions about the role of the United States in the countries of Africa and the rest of the world.

Discussion Questions

1. Each chapter is in the voice of Orleanna or one of her daughters. How does that literary technique strengthen or weaken the story? How do the different voices reflect the sisters’ characters? Why doesn’t Nathan speak, or any of the other men?

2. What part of life in the Congo would you find the most difficult to adjust to? Which beliefs of the Congolese are the least similar to yours?

3. What did each of the Prices learn in Kilanga? Did they learn any of the same things?

4. Leah says “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.” (p. 505, paperback edition) Have you experienced a situation where nothing was predictable? Where anything you believed may not have been true? How can we get along in a world with many people who have differing backgrounds, where everyone’s beliefs are different and what is important to one person may not be important to another?

5. In the first chapter, Orleanna tells us that she is a mother of children living and dead. How does knowing that a child is going to die change the reader’s experience? Why did Kingsolver choose to tell us that right at the outset of the novel?

6. What did the Price family bring to Kilanga? How did these belongings affect their stay? What would you bring?

7. What did each of the members of the Price family bring out of the Congo?

8. Why does Adah in some ways prefer her damaged body to her healthy body? What did she lose when she gained her balance?

9. What is the meaning of the title "Poisonwood Bible"?

10. Leah concludes that the “whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed” (p.114-paperback edition). What does she mean? Do you agree with her?

11. Would you consider Nathan Price abusive to Orleanna? How does she respond to him? Why did she stay with him for so long?

12. Orleanna blames herself for Ruth May’s death. She asks (p 383-paperback edition) “I wonder what you’ll name my sin: Complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? … Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence?” How much blame does she deserve? What made her act the way she did? What would you have done differently?

13. How did the political events in the Congo affect the experience that the Price family had?

14. How do Baptist beliefs differ from the beliefs of the Congolese? Are the Congolese “very religious people” as Brother Fowles believes?

15. Orleanna’s Aunt Tess told her ”Sugar – it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.” Each of the women selected a different parade, a different road. Did any of them throw their shoulders back and pick up their pace?

16. Why was Leah conflicted about raising her children in Africa or in the USA? What would you do?

17. What was the role of the USA in the history of the Congo? Did the USA help or hinder the Congolese people? Where has the US played a destructive role in the world? Where has the USA played a beneficial role in the world? How can US citizens influence the role the US plays in the world?

18. “If the mother and her children had not come down the path on this day, the pinched tree branches would have grown larger and the fat-bodied spider would have lived. Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. ” How did you alter someone’s life today?

About the Author

Barbara Kingsolver's web site gives a brief biography of this multi-award-winning author. To write this novel of post-colonial Africa, Kingsolver drew on her own experiences when, at seven, she and her family left Kentucky and lived for two years in the Congo.

In an interview with Bookpage magazine, Kingsolver said that living in the Congo left her changed: " "I came home with an acutely heightened sense of race, of ethnicity. I got to live in a place where people thought I was noticeable and probably hideous because of the color of my skin." She adds, " I'm extremely interested in cultural difference, in social and political history, and the sparks that fly when people with different ways of looking at the world come together and need to reconcile or move through or celebrate those differences."

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Other novels by Barbara Kingsolver that, likewise, explore cultural differences through the lives of vivid characters--

Animal Dreams
The Bean Trees
Pigs in Heaven

Novels with similar themes or contexts--

Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux
Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggar
Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone by Martin Dugard
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Elenor Denker

Elenor Denker, PhD., Denker has travelled extensively and lived for a year in Naples, Italy
and for two years in Cucuta, Colombia. She is fervent in her belief that one cannot understand one's own culture (and thereby oneself) until it is contrasted to another society. Like Ms. Kingsolver, Ms. Denker has had a varied career - as a bilingual guidance counselor in the NYC Public Schools, as Executive Director of a community-based economic organization, as a Regional Director in the NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal and as Vice-President of Human Resources and Customer Service at the Harman Consumer Group. Her book, Returning Women Students in Higher Education: Defining Policy Issues, co-authored with Carol Kehr Tittle, has not won any prizes.