From the Poisonwood Bible...

I’ve found a new favourite book, though I’m sure my love for it has been fostered by the environment in which I read the book; I read The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver while living in Tanga for a month and sifting through the politics and drama to help Saumu. I truly believe Kingsolver captured the essence of the problems within Africa without passing harsh western judgement many others have in their accounts of Africa. Her story is of a missionary family from America in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1960’s, told through the eyes of a close-minded Reverend’s four daughters. She traces not only the lessons this family learned through trial and error in the Congo, but also of the tumultuous history of the Congo up to now and the lasting effects that life in Africa had on the surviving family members. Her writing is gorgeous and I couldn’t put the book down. These are some of my favourite passages that have stuck with me:

“You’ll say I walked across Africa with my wrists unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods: cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity. Some of us know how we come by our fortune and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same. There’s only one question worth asking now. How do we aim to live with it?"

“There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads on the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the meek inherit anything. What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That’s pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There’s the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace"

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“And only now, after working this same land for ten years, am I coming to understand the length and breadth of outsiders’ failure to impose themselves on Africa. This is not Brussels or Moscow or Macon, Georgia. This is famine or flood. You can’t teach a thing until you’ve learned that. The tropics will intoxicate you with the sweetness of frangipani flowers and lay you down with the sting of a viper, with hardly room to breathe in between. It’s a great shock to souls gently reared in places of moderate clime, hope and dread.”

I happened to read this part of the story, about the mothers in the village mourning the loss of a child, on the same day that my friend Saphia’s nephew died just mere hours after birth. This passage struck me to the bone:

“The trilling of our neighbour’s tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger. We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope: for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”

I've noticed a trend in the growing pile of books I've been toting across Africa up to now... they are almost all accounts of travels in Africa or the atrocities and history here. I don't know how I could read a fantasy novel or something from a more western perspective when I feel as though I'm a world apart? I'm re-reading Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari again for the second time; This is the book that inspired the trip I am on at the very moment. I'm devouring every word and loving/hating/angered by/surprised by the commentary all along. With only two weeks left on this continent and already very sad to leave, I have a feeling I'll still be reading Africa books all summer.