Barbara Kingsolver turns to her past to understand the present

INTERVIEW BY ELLEN KANNER

Barbara Kingsolver was a little girl of seven when she and her family left their Kentucky home to spend two years in the Congo. When she returned, the world looked totally different to her. "I understood the way we lived in my little corner of Kentucky was just that," says the author. "One little corner where we had certain things we did, possessed, believed in, but there was a great big world out there where people had no use for many of the things my community held dear.

"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."

These weren't easy lessons, says Kingsolver, but they were priceless. She has not forgotten what the Congo taught her. It made her the person, the writer, she is.

"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. All that precisely describes everything I've ever written, Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven, all of it." It also describes Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, a novel of post-colonial Africa which brings to bear all she observed as a child in the Congo and all she came to understand of it as an adult.

"Given that this is what we did as a nation in Africa, how are we to feel about it now?" asks the author. "How do we live with it and how do we move on? Given that this is our history, what do we do with it? One thing is very clear, there isn't a single answer -- there's a spectrum of answers."

 

...The Price girls and their mother narrate The Poisonwood Bible in alternating chapters. Kingsolver chose multiple voices to portray the enormity, the complexity, of her subject. That choice, however, created complexities of its own.

"I wasn't very far into this book when I realized what I set out to do was impossible." The author laughs. "Or at least extremely difficult, much harder than anything I ever did before. The most difficult thing was to fine tune the voices -- five narrators, all in the same family, most of them about the same age. How do you make each voice distinct enough that the reader could open to any page and know who's speaking?

"It led to many quiet little fits of flying paper in my office. But it was also great fun. What I love best about being a novelist is I get to do something different every time. When you're flying by the seat of your pants, you're never bored."

Writing is Kingsolver's passion, but she's no artiste. "I consider myself a writer of the working class. I'm a little bit smug about it. I have so little tolerance for writers who have elaborate three-hour rituals before they even get down to work. I think, oh, please. My idea of a pre-writing ritual is getting the kids on the bus and sitting down." The years she worked as a technical writer taught her "to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

 

"I love revision. Revision is where the art really happens, when you begin to manipulate, shift things around so your theme begins to shine through."

While Kingsolver was revising her novel, the Congo itself began its own revision. Mobutu, the Congolese dictator in power for over 30 years, died and his regime fell. The new president, Laurent Kabila, has clashed with Tutsi rebels, and the Congo is once again in the throes of bloody strife.

"It's very odd," says Kingsolver. "This book is in some way timely, and nothing could surprise me more. When I began writing, I thought my primary task would be to get my readers to believe there was a dictator called Mobutu, that all these things really happened somewhere far away and they should care."

 

As America and the United Nations study the Congo and analyze strategies for intervention, Kingsolver hopes governing bodies will heed some of the lessons she learned as a child, the lessons of The Poisonwood Bible.  "We can never know, never look at history with anything but a narrow and distorted window," says the author. "We can never know the whole truth, only what's been recorded for us and what our cultural and political predisposition understands. Leah says history is never much more than a mirror we can tilt to look at ourselves."

 

Kingsolver's other works include:

Animal Dreams (HarperPerennial, $13)

The Bean Trees (HarperPaperbacks, $6.99)

High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (HarperPerennial, $13)

Homeland and Other Stories (HarperPerennial, $13)

Pigs in Heaven (HarperPerennial, $14)

 

http://www.bookpage.com/9811bp/barbara_kingsolver.html

 

 

 

 

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1. What are the implications of the novel's title phrase, the poisonwood bible, particularly in connection with the main characters' lives and the novel's main themes? How important are the circumstances in which the phrase comes into being?

 

2. How does Kingsolver differentiate among the Price sisters, particularly in terms of their voices? What does each sister reveal about herself and the other three, their relationships, their mother and father, and their lives in Africa? What is the effect of our learning about events and people through the sisters' eyes?

 

3. What is the significance of the Kikongo word nommo and its attendant concepts of being and naming? Are there Christian parallels to the constellation of meanings and beliefs attached to nommo? How do the Price daughters' Christian names and their acquired Kikongo names reflect their personalities and behavior?

 

4. The sisters refer repeatedly to balance (and, by implication, imbalance). What kinds of balance--including historical, political, and social--emerge as important? Are individual characters associated with specific kinds of balance or imbalance? Do any of the sisters have a final say on the importance of balance?

 

5. What do we learn about cultural, social, religious, and other differences between Africa and America? To what degree do Orleanna and her daughters come to an understanding of those differences? Do you agree with what you take to be Kingsolver's message concerning such differences?

 

6. Why do you suppose that Reverend Nathan Price is not given a voice of his own? Do we learn from his wife and daughters enough information to formulate an adequate explanation for his beliefs and behavior? Does such an explanation matter?

 

7. What differences and similarities are there among Nathan Price's relationship with his family, Tata Ndu's relationship with his people, and the relationship of the Belgian and American authorities with the Congo? Are the novel's political details--both imagined and historical--appropriate?

 

8. How does Kingsolver present the double themes of captivity and freedom and of love and betrayal? What kinds of captivity and freedom does she explore? What kinds of love and betrayal? What are the causes and consequences of each kind of captivity, freedom, love, and betrayal?

 

9. At Bikoki Station, in 1965, Leah reflects, "I still know what justice is." Does she? What concept of justice does each member of the Price family and other characters (Anatole, for example) hold? Do you have a sense, by the novel's end, that any true justice has occurred?

 

10. In Book Six, Adah proclaims, "This is the story I believe in . . ." What is that story? Do Rachel and Leah also have stories in which they believe? How would you characterize the philosophies of life at which Adah, Leah, and Rachel arrive? What story do you believe in?

 

11. At the novel's end, the carved-animal woman in the African market is sure that "There has never been any village on the road past Bulungu," that "There is no such village" as Kilanga. What do you make of this?

 

Available at http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_P/poisonwood_bible1.asp

 

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