The Poisonwood Bible-Causes Soul Examination

I just finished Barbara Kingsolver's recent novel. It called forth in me a soul examination of our civilization. Her story took place in Equatorial Africa, the Congo, in the 1950's. A Southern Baptist preacher, a redhead from Georgia, took his wife and four daughters to a village up the Congo River so he could be a missionary. They had no idea where they were going except as a point on a map with a name. They didn't know what to take with them and as it turned out, very little they took had any use where they ended up. They didn't know the language there either.

The preacher wanted to baptize all the village children in the river. However, when the customs of one society meet the customs of another with no common language to bridge the gap, the mix-ups that occur make life-altering experiences for all concerned. The people of the village thought he wanted to feed their children to the crocodiles. One thing all the people knew in common was to stay out of the river. Word went out that the god of the crocodiles sent him.

The story is told by the four girls taking turns writing the chapters. Occasionally the mother writes one. Each girl has her own personality, beliefs, and motivations and ways of seeing things. These five different points of view tell the story, the title of each chapter being the name of the one who wrote it. The changes they all went through in their new, unpredictable circumstances become the story itself. It follows them through their individual lives over the twenty or so years since their year at the village by the river. Kingsolver's writing style flowed and I found myself immersed in the characters and believing that the chapters were individually written by them.

The story also looks at the relationship between the Europeans and the Africans over the last 500 years. It caused me to review in my mind issues regarding how peoples of different cultures treat each other and the sad results of when one cultural group views themselves as superior to others. As well as the role religion has played in the spreading of colonialism.

In fact, the story and its characters have such a broad scope that different people who read it may find their own individual truths in it. This is the most enjoyable reading that I've done lately.