Rereading The Poisonwood Bible

Back where it all began

When people hear about my book, or even just my upbringing, they invariably ask, “Have you read The Poisonwood Bible?”

When I was looking for an agent with my original memoir, I even pitched it as “the real Poisonwood Bible.” For many if not most people, Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 novel is their only reference point for American evangelical missionaries or even Africa itself.

I can’t remember when exactly I read it, but it wasn’t long after it came out, I would guess around 1999 or 2000. I was in the midst of massive personal upheaval/unraveling/awakening. I was in grad school, for the first time in a non-evangelical environment and confronted with truths about American history I had previously received in incomplete or sanded-down form. My life was also falling apart. The grief out of which I had subconsciously operated started to recede, and I was confronted with the wreckage of the choices it made for me. I inhabited a life that I did not recognize, and I was finally becoming strong enough to leave it behind.

But that required escaping from the straight jacket of fundamentalist religion. One of the readers here sent me an email recently asking me how I did that exactly. I think she was hoping I could identify a kind of 12-step plan that could be passed on or applied to others. But how we grow and change, and why some of us do and some of us don’t, is rather mysterious. I’m convinced there are certain people who aren’t capable of it; there’s a missing or damaged component of their construction that keeps them stunted. The relationship such people have with rigid faith is a tragic, endlessly reinforcing loop. Whether they arrived stunted—attracted to the certain answers, easy fixes, and distracting “missions” that those religious cultures offer—or became so once steeped in its waters, bad religion mires them ever deeper in their underdeveloped selves, like tires spinning in mud. And all the while, it reassures them they are floating on the breeze with angels.

The trajectory of my life forced me out in many ways, but it’s doubtful I would have made it out without the lifelines of relationship and influence. On the latter front, I’ve previously talked about the many books I read that gave me the language to articulate my hopes and fears and the permission and courage to speak them out loud.

And The Poisonwood Bible was one of the earliest ones of those. It was my bizarre, hyper-religious upbringing brought to life in vivid, cartoonish form. Its exaggerated characters and plot (as compared to my experience; it more closely matched some of the MKs I have encountered) might have been alienating at an earlier time, but at that time, it dramatized and magnified the more quiet tendencies and messages that ungirded my much less dangerous and uncomfortable life, and in white evangelicalism writ large.

In Nathan Price’s single-minded, ultimately deadly pursuit of his “godly” mission, I could see the ways my religious culture served as a dictator, ruthlessly funneling all experience, relationship, thought, and emotion through its tiny opening. In his grandiose sense of self, I saw mirrored evangelicals’ spiritual narcissism, their insistence that they are the chosen, righteous people of God, they have the correct answers and the upright path, despite ample evidence of their catastrophic wrongness. And, yes, in his inability to consider the needs of his family, and his own need of authentic relationship, I could see the family dynamics all around me as a child, growing up in a boarding school with children whose parents weren’t that interested in them outside their conformity to the faith.

As a twenty-something, my big takeaway from The Poisonwood Bible was the danger and destruction of arrogant, self-assured faith. The same bad religion that propelled the Price family into the jungles of the Congo was the same one that supported slavery and segregation and the same one that subjugated women (although back then I didn’t know the half of it) and the same one that barred doors and kept gates and used an inclusive gospel to exclude and judge. It was the same one that built emotional walls within my own family and the same one that kept me from naming my pain and the same one that compelled me to to enter an unhappy marriage and the same one that kept me from leaving it and the same one that authored the hurtful sermonettes preached at me when I did.

And, many years later, it’s the same one that has led scores of its followers into the arms of a bonafide authoritarian who threatens to set fire to all the democracy we’ve cobbled together over 250 years.

As a fifty-something, I read it again, as part of Benjamin Wittes’s book club, which pairs non-fiction with a thematically-linked work of fiction of the non-fiction author’s choosing. This month, it was my book and The Poisonwood Bible, a pretty obvious, unoriginal choice on my part. I briefly considered saving the time and not rereading the novel, but my memory of the plot details was sketchy, so I decided I would revisit this old friend. Reading it while I made my way around the country promoting a book that in no small measure ends the story The Poisonwood Bible began in my life was a redemption I can’t put into words.

This time, I picked up the more nuanced pieces of the plot and characters and themes that stretch beyond religion. I noticed Nathan’s backstory as a veteran of war plagued by PTSD and survivor’s guilted shame. I could find some compassion and even empathy for his frantic self-medication with a pious abuse that is outwardly unassailable. I could palpably feel the distress of Orleanna as a mother responsible for keeping her children alive in such difficult circumstances. I could understand better, with many more years experience, the tragic gift of not belonging, of being robbed of that early on and the wounded and wondrous paths that unfold. How the voids can fill with both empty and precious things.

I also have a better understanding of the history presented and the meaning of complicity, as a former CIA officer who acknowledges my agency’s terrible history in Africa and as one who has also seen Africans make their own terrible history without any American help at all.

And mostly, I more deeply know, as Adah says in the end, that “the mistakes are part of the story,” we are all complicit in humanity’s crooked path. Adah mourns the cure of her disability because she can see how it was her super power, how scars make artful patterns. She only hated her imperfection because she believed it made her unlovable, but once she grasps her misunderstanding, she comes to a place of self-acceptance.

In the three surviving daughters, we see the faith and the sins of the father play out in different ways. Rachel never grows, she never can incorporate new information, she never can read a story bigger than the one with which she started, with herself as its protagonist. She is stuck, forever in her own reality, ironically in the Africa she despises. Like her father, she becomes the self-satisfied monarch of a small, lonely kingdom, believing she has found her redemption. Leah subsumes herself in Africa, completely remaking herself into something else entirely, and, like her father, works to remake the world, too, tirelessly pounding square pegs into round holes, begging for redemption and belonging with every strike. Adah is something in between self and cause, taking it all in, studying it like a scientist even before she was one, constantly adjusting her frame, but remaining somewhat detached, even coldly cynical. Adah accepts the world as it is, her complicity as inevitable, her ability to bring change as limited.

And Ruth May, the ultimate victim, becomes the guiding light and the quick sand, leading them out and trapping them in.

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One of the most ferocious arguments I ever had with my mother was over The Poisonwood Bible. It was just after my marriage to Kevin, and I was visiting my parents in their home at the time in Zimbabwe. My mother had broken her foot shortly before my arrival, and I found myself somewhat trapped with her in her frustrated convalescence.

“Have you heard of this Poisonwood Bible book?” she queried.

I gulped, pausing to consider, as I had so many times in my life, whether I wanted to tell the truth or not. Whether I wanted to bear its consequences.

“Yes, I read it. I loved it,” I said.

Her reaction was viscerally defensive. She all but screamed at me, in hindsight I believe in pain, at how the book “bashed missionaries” who had sacrificed so much. To me, Nathan Price was an unalloyed villain, but to her, he was her, a misunderstood, unfairly maligned, badly caricatured hero. I tried to respond, but it wasn’t any use. Eventually, my dad came in to break up the fight, and I left the room to collect myself.

A few years later, I was talking to my mother on the phone, and she brought up the book again, with no apparent memory of our earlier confrontation, one that left me deeply shaken. I bluntly told her we had already discussed it and I didn’t care to do it again. I quickly got off the phone.

My parents have been imperfect. They have inherited their parents’ imperfections. They have drunk deeply of an imperfect faith. They have engaged in an imperfect enterprise. They have acted out all these imperfections without much evident awareness or examination. They have done good things and bad things. They have apologized for some of the bad, but they can’t quite get their arms around its girth or clearly make out its amorphous shape for the blinding gleam of the good.

I could blame them for that, I could lament the ways that affected me, I could be angry and bitter. I could do what so many MKs I’ve encountered have done and have nothing to do with them. I could scrutinize the bruises left by the blows their imperfections have landed on me. And I have done all those things, at various times and to various extents.

Or I can take in the gifts their imperfections have brought me. I can soak in all the varied sources of love I’ve found over the years to fill in their gaps. I can grieve the shaky foundations of my identity while marveling at the miraculously strong and spacious home that stands firm on top. I can trade in my upbringing’s narrow aperture of religion for its wider one of multiculturalism. I can love Africa without needing to possess it. I can love America without becoming it. I can speak Swahili with an accent and still hear a reply. I can marshal the pugnaciousness inherited from my parents to fight on their opposite side. I am free to do and be whatever I want with all they have given me, and I can feel comfortable in my father’s pale British skin and smile my mother’s wide, welcoming grin.

I can see them in myself. And I can have the grace and humility to see myself in them. We all inherit a fallen world, we are all misguided in our ways, and we are all both complicit and powerless in the perpetuation of its evils. Redemption is found through an unflinching yet forgiving gaze, in speaking the truth, even when there’s nothing to do but sit with it, and in applying a salve to the scrapes we both acquire and inflict.

We can’t fix this whole broken world, but we can take its pieces and make something else. We will make different mistakes, but perhaps the damage will be more contained. We will write new fables, but maybe they will be slightly closer to the truth.

Move on, walk forward into the light.