662 Kingsolver, Barbara
rejection of his teachings in an environment that
requires other frames of thinking and looking at the
world than those imposed by this Baptist preacher,
make him and his patriarchal and colonizing atti-
tude obsolete.
Not only does the concept of the traditional
Christian family collapse in this novel, as it finds
no room in an environment that cannot sustain it,
but we also witness the crumbling of the “nation as
family” ideal. The Price daughters are betrayed by
their American Christian education, which does not
apply in the Congo, and by their own nation and its
government, a government that becomes the root
of all evils in the Congo (which becomes known as
Zaire) since it actively participates in the demise of
the Congolese democratic process with the assas-
sination of Patrice Lumumba and the rise to power
of a dictator. As Leah notices after independence,
“The United States has now become the husband
of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one: exploit-
ative and condescending, in the name of steering her
clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature”
(543). In the same way as the Price daughters were
subdued and devalued by a father who embodied
American Christian values, Zaire after indepen-
dence is subdued and devalued through a violent
(though silenced), economic and political colonizing
intervention of the United States.
Sophie Croisy
Guilt in The Poisonwood Bible
For Orleanna and Leah Price, guilt is the result of
introspection—a kind of critical inquiry into one’s
past and present behavior that brings to conscious-
ness the errors committed in dealing with one’s
surroundings. Guilt is thus the consequence of a
moral and political awakening, an awakening that
takes place for them in 1960 in the Congo. Adah,
who does not need to feel guilt, embodies moral
consciousness: She is never complicit with her
father’s sadistic Christian enterprise and always
lays a critical eye on the world and its cruelties. For
Rachel and Nathan Price, however, their lack of
guilt toward others is evidence of mental stasis and
of the absence of moral and political consciousness.
Neither Nathan Price nor his daughter Rachel ever
seem to wake up to the horrifying events happening
in the lives of the people who are closest to them:
their family and the Kilanga people.
When she first arrived in the Congo, Orleanna
Price did her best to fit in a foreign environment,
focusing on the day-to-day needs of her family
without learning from the Congolese people living
around her. Her lack of participation in the outside
world is one of the main aspects of her guilt when,
years later and back in the United States, she recol-
lects her time in the Congo: She was only “a captive
witness” (10) then. She recollects this forced detach-
ment from the Congolese world and its rules, intri-
cacies, dangers—a detachment that she sees as the
reason for her younger daughter’s death: Ruth May
was bitten by a snake placed in their garden by Tata
Ndu, an important figure in the Kilanga community,
and the nemesis of Nathan Price. If she had had
the strength to rise against her husband’s Christian
fanaticism, the Kilanga community might not have
turned against him, and the snake might never have
been put in their garden.
Her daughter Leah’s guilt draws from a child-
ish, blind belief in her father’s words and teachings.
Her childhood actions were essentially centered
around one goal: to be the best Christian daughter
she could ever be. However, the months spent in the
Congo give birth to a desire to know and learn what
lies beyond the patriarch’s ethnocentric envisioning
of the world, hence her being torn for a long time
between her daughterly duty and her need to under-
stand the Congo, its inhabitants, their customs,
and their pains. She eventually chooses the path of
knowledge and consciousness, marries a Congolese
man, and dismisses her father’s monolithic Christian
education as well as her cultural inheritance as an
American. Her guilt also lies in her belonging to a
culture that promotes values and a way of life that
it does not always uphold when economic interests
are at stake. The United States government indeed
participates in the demise of the democratic Congo
(and other African nations) under the eyes of Leah
who remains in Africa all her life to see, among
other things, the United States “trying to bring
down Angola’s sovereignty” in the 1980s to gain
control over its oil and diamond industries.
There is no room for guilt in Adah Price’s frame
of thinking, only room for thinking and trying to