Kingsolver's sweet poison

Summer reading carries with it a strange sort of mental relief; for three blessed months, we have absolute power over what to read, how far to read and where to stop. When we carelessly graze through half a novel and toss it aside with a yawn, we are implicitly defying the textbooks, the endless reading packets that our minds are forced to plow through during semester. When we introduce ourselves to a book and then pointedly ignore it for the rest of the summer, we are essentially snubbing the writer's - any writer's - efforts to draw us into the net of his or her words.

But sometimes we come across a book that engages our minds with an authority entirely its own, forcing us to pay it the tribute of our undivided attention. In such cases, the yoke slips on our necks willingly enough, and we trek through the narrative not with a sense of necessity, but with all the eagerness of desire. One such book I read was Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible; I couldn't put the book down until I had tasted the weight of the very last word against my tongue.

"A fierce, evangelical Baptist takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.they carry with them everything they believe they will need from home but find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in post-colonial Africa." So reads the cogent summarization offered by the back cover.

Part of the things the family carries into the Congo is, of course, the cultural and ideological baggage that has historically prevented the whites from connecting with other civilizations. The falseness of their lens distorts their perception of this new world - a small African village - allowing them to both place labels on the unfettered life around them and to maintain the fiction that they are the ones with something valuable to give. Among the things the characters leave behind are such self deceptions; we see them through a series of bittersweet interactions that forge for them new ways of thinking and seeing. We learn, through them, that other ways of living, other social configurations, are as authentic - if sometimes not more so - than the European ways. Calling something modern or primitive is an artificial judgment that has no bearing on human societies; and there is no right or wrong knowledge, but merely appropriate knowledge and self-knowledge. Kingsolver's intense, compassionate voice speaks through the voices of all the women who tell the story, educating us in the incredible complexity of African life and human nature.

The Poisonwood Bible also celebrates consciousness - specifically women's consciousness. The differences in the way the four women - the mother and three surviving daughters - experience Africa and tell their stories adds to the superb richness of the book. Through Orleanna, Rachel, Leah and Adah Price, Kingsolver shows us how the things which apparently link us together, like gender, can themselves become a force contributing to the diversity of our experience. For instance, Adah Price's handicap contributes to the emotional complexity, the angst, the skepticism of her voice; the voice of her whole-bodied twin Leah, on the other hand, is passionate, strong and straightforward.

Each woman's voice (or, in the daughters' cases, the process each voice goes through in becoming a woman) is a source of incredible wealth for the reader. In every sense of the phrase, The Poisonwood Bible is a banquet for the mind.