Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible: Creating great character voices

 

Creating the voice of characters who feel realistic, authentic and engrossing is one of the most difficult parts of writing. My latest blogpost for the OPEN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS blogsite looks my favourite Barbara Kingsolver novel, The Poisonwood Bible, where she creates five independent and distinctive voices. Each female member of the Price family narrates their version of this story. The magic trick Kingsolver achieves as a writer is to make their voices entirely original and independent of each other. When I read the book, this was the remarkable thing that struck me hardest. It was as if Kingsolver truly knew the five women whose stories she will tell.  You can read the blog post here; https://www.oca-student.com/weareoca/creating-great-character-voices-barbara-kingsolver’s-poisonwood-bible

In the summer of 1959, the Price family carry everything they need on a lumbering plane and fly to the Belgian Congo to take up a missionary post in a village called Kilanga on the Kwilu River.  The Poisonwood Bible, (1988), follows three decades of their lives in postcolonial Africa. Barbara Kingsolver spent time in the Congo as a small girl "We were there just after independence, but I had no idea of the political intrigue of that era," she says. For Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible is an “allegory of the captive witness. We've inherited this history of terrible things done, that enriched us in the US and Europe by

The Congo in the sixties

pillaging the former colonies. How we feel about that is the question in the book.”

Nathan Price is a fanatical missionary, with a rigid but simplistic religious code. Although devoted to saving souls, he’s abusive to his wife and daughters. 

He first encounters the Poisonwood tree – the bangala – in his garden. Ignoring warnings from locals not to touch the plant, his arms painfully swell. But he has linguistic difficulties with this tree, too. In the native language the word "bangala" can mean "dearly beloved" if spoken slowly. If said fast, it means Poisonwood Tree. Nathan’s unwillingness to learn anything about the language is a symptom of his general cultural arrogance. On a weekly basis, he preaches that Jesus is a poisonwood tree which can cause intense pain and even death. His congregation sniggers, but Kingsolver seems to be saying that in the hands of people like Nathan, religious beliefs are poison, and that his missionary zeal did cause intense pain and even death.

It is possible that Kingsolver was inspired by Jonathan Kwitny’s 1984 book Endless Enemies in which he exposes the American government’s pattern of backing tyrants in the Third World. Part of this book coveres the death of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba.

 Kingsolver wanted to write about the country she knew from childhood, and took ten years to research all the political turmoil she did not understand as a child. She stuffed her ideas, clippings and notes into a file cabinet labeled “DAB”—the Damned Africa Book. As she told the Guardian in 2013, Kingsolver even moved to the Canary Islands for a year to facilitate quick research trips to Africa. To make matters trickier, she was banned from visiting the Congo for speaking out against strongman Mobutu Sese Seko, further delaying her process.  As she explained to The New York Times Magazine in 1998, "If I were to write a nonfiction book about the brief blossoming and destruction of the independence of the Congo, and what the C.I.A. had to do with it, then probably all 85 people who are interested in the subject would read it. Instead I can write a novel that's ostensibly about family and culture and an exotic locale. And it's entertaining, I hope."

The four daughters in the novel echo my favourite childhood read – Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (also loved by Kingsolver, of course!). In the erstwhile novel, the lives of Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth are investigated deeply, especially their relationship with each other and their parents. In The Poisonwood Bible something similar, but darker and more penetrating, is explored. 

The Poisonwood Bible is  compassionate and passionate, and hugely socially conscious.This, her fourth book, 

sold more than four million copies, was chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, and was voted an all-time favourite of reading groups in Britain. In fact,  Kingsolver has used the rumored $1 million advance for The Poisonwood Bible to establish the Bellwether Prize, an award for unpublished “socially engaged fiction” and authors with “outstanding literary skills, moral passion, and the courage to combine these strengths in unusually powerful fiction.” Since 2012, the award has been known as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Go here to find out more https://pen.org/pen-bellwether-prize/

 Since then, she's written more novels, some with the theme of the climate crisis.

Go to Kingsolver's website to find out about her other books