The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Avoidable Self-Abuse

Women put up with a great deal from men. This is a truism which can’t be reinforced too frequently, if only to remind women that they often collaborate with masculine arrogance to their own - and the world’s - disadvantage. Getting out from under, as it were, requires hitting them where it hurts - not in the private parts but in the intimacies of family life. Essentially, men have no defense against feminine dismissal of their pretensions as merely foolish.

Most of the common male presumptions are contained in The Poisonwood Bible - superior intellect, more serious spiritual existence, greater ability to organise and act, and a keener insight about what it takes to survive in the world. These are observed, suffered, and analysed by a family of four girls who are dragooned with their mother to a remote mission station in the Congo in the early 1960’s. They submit because they have been taught to do so. Submission is a requirement of their interpretation of love, loyalty, and family commitment.

Reverend Paterfamilias is of course incompetent in every aspect of the family’s African endeavour. From his doctrinaire dismissal of local culture, to his refusal to take advice on gardening, he is a persistent failure. The women compensate. The man considers he has learned. He hasn’t. He remains as fundamentally ignorant as he has always been.

“Our Father“, as the disabled daughter refers to him sarcastically, is a misogynistic religious fanatic who would crumble into a heap of ash without the constant hidden and unappreciated support by his female family members and the other women of the village they inhabit. The Reverend is yet another species of animal which thrives in Africa: the parasite.

It takes their African life and its cultural dislocation to demonstrate to the women just how parasitical the man is. Their experience slowly relativises the certainties of their previous cultural existence. From the rationalisation of racism, to the Calvinist mores of work and dress, to the subtleties of their own subservience, they begin to recognise the elements of the cultural prison which encloses them and the oppressive tactics of their chief warder.

“How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness.” This is the point of revelation for the Reverend’s wife. Unlike her husband, she recognises her true helplessness, her profound vulnerability to the world as it is without the mythical protections of either religion or technology. She also begins to understand that most of those purported protections are beneficial not to her but to her husband.

One by one all the women of the family come to recognise the sole male as the exploitative fool he is. “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.” Is how one daughter puts it. In fact he was wrong anyplace, as many men are, men who wield power, who coerce and make victims of those who do not. They need not be fundamentalist preachers of course; but they generally have the same kind of ambition to dominate.

Oddly, this realisation leads to guilt. In part perhaps because it is as much about the culture from which they have emerged and to which they will not return. But mainly because their historic subjugation has led to avoidable tragedy. They should have known better than to have confidence in this man and his delusions. They couldn’t, of course, without the experiences he had imposed upon them. Hence the paradoxical guilt.

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