Kami Steffenauer examines themes of decolonization and motherhood in the best-selling novel.
Speaking honestly, I know very little about the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and I’d venture to say many Americans feel similarly. While much of this is due to our Western based education system, a chunk of debt also goes towards U.S. news outlets, which rarely showcase the DRC or truthfully any African nation, in any light other than civil violence and strife. Yet rarely do we see how this violence started, largely because of Western colonization and U.S. interference, and even less frequently do we see how colonization affects the lives of the average person living under its clutches, the mother raising her children amidst such chaos and cultural changes. Thus, Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 classic The Poisonwood Bible offers a beautifully agonizing perspective of European colonization and U.S. imperialism through the eyes of motherhood, centering mothers’ grief and the painful decisions or indecisions they make to protect themselves, their children, and their communities.
Kingsolver’s magnum opus tells the tale of Orleanna Price, a woman from the deep, evangelical South transplanted by her reverend husband in the late 1950s to the rural village of Kilgana in Belgian occupied-Congo along with her four daughters - Rachel, the Southern belle, Leah, the people-pleaser, Adah the bookworm living with hemiplegia, and Ruth May, the adventurous baby of the family. Despite her husband’s infatuation in converting the indigenous Conogese, Orleanna’s life is forever marked by the Colognese movement for independence and the Cold War, sending the family into shock as each member wrestles with not only the radical change in culture but the ugly truths they are confronted with regarding their religion, their race, and the promise of freedom they were taught to preach.
Initially, one might view Orleanna Price as the story’s main mother, due to the fact that she is the first mother we meet in the novel’s opening lines and the mother of her four fellow narrators. Yet she warns us immediately to “be careful. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they [all] deserve. The mother especially." This foreboding declaration sets the stage as Orleanna describes how she watched her daughters day and night suffer abuse from their father. Each and every time her daughters were struck by her husband or forced to write out the dreaded Verse punishment, she simply watched them suffer or left the room, unable to bear this burden of her daughter’s grief. Her first obligation was to her husband, a man living with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder following his service in the Second World War, whom “occupied [her] as if by a foreign power.” Only after losing her youngest, Ruth May, to her husband’s blindness in the hopes of conquering the Colognese’s souls do we see Orleanna wield her mother power over her children’s father by taking her surviving children and leaving him. Even after this moment of strength, she crumbles once returning to the U.S., spending her remaining days begging Ruth May from the grave for forgiveness and never having another child nor spouse. In this vein, Orleanna’s experience of motherhood mirrors the devastation U.S. imperialism has reaped on the Congo, the latter often personified as a woman who has been raped, forced to bear the children of her occupiers, then left to mourn her children when their fathers murdered them.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we see Adah, Orleanna’s daughter whose disability has paralyzed the right side of her body. Although this paralysis causes her to be viewed by her family as eternally helpless and consequently incapable of ever mothering, in the rural Congolese village of Kilgana, disability is not demonized in the same manner of Western society; many people, including mothers, in Kilgana have physical impairments or mental illnesses that do not disqualify them from rearing and raising children, as a result opening Adah’s eyes to the possibilities her life contains, including mothering. Upon her return from the Congo, Adah becomes a viral disease specialist, where she claims her success is rooted in her mothering of these viruses. She declares, “I don’t have cats or children, I have viruses.” Thus, Adah’s mothering of the thing she adores proves this anti-disability narrative faulty and hints at what disabled mothering could look like in certain socioeconomic and racial standings as a mechanism of decolonization.
Kingsolver's most prominent mother in the novel, however, is Leah, responsible initially for both her younger sister Ruth May and Adah. Adah and Leah are twins and thus Leah automatically became her disabled sister’s keeper, protector, and mother in the eyes of her family and the conservative American culture of their upbringing. Initially, Leah flaunts this responsibility, leaving Adah to be pursued by a lion and not watching Ruth May climb trees far beyond her height and as a vicious snake gave her a fatal kiss. But as the years go by, she is the only one of the sisters who becomes a mother in the traditional sense of marriage and biological children. Unlike her sister Rachel, who moves into elite, white neighborhoods throughout Africa and creates her own bureaucratic empire, and Adah, who returns to the United States, Leah marries one of the men from Kilgana and raises biracial children in the Congo for the latter third of the book. Here she constantly struggles with her whiteness and her husband and sons’ Blackness, battling guilt for the sins of her father and fatherland while attempting to mother the continent both have betrayed, assaulted, and colonized over the past five centuries, in essence, doing the external and internal work of decolonizing through her motherhood.
As a result, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel provides a touching and ever timely perspective of what would happen if we took mothers and placed them at the center of our international politics, reconciliation, and decolonization mechanisms.
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