The Poisonwood Bible 659she wants society to view her. As she travels west,
Taylor also reacquaints herself with her Indian
heritage by mailing a postcard of two Indian women
to her mother, foreshadowing her own adoption of
Turtle. Taylor also names the baby “April Turtle,”
giving her a first name signifying springtime and
natural birth. When her aunt abandons her with
Taylor, Turtle finds a second chance at life. Turtle
herself repeats this cycle of reproduction and rebirth
with her first word “bean,” signifying her faith in the
eventual appearance of a tree from the dried up bean
in her hand. The tree will itself reproduce the natu-
ral cycle of life and represents the interdependence
that its parts have with the whole. The wisteria tree,
for example, which grows on almost barren soil,
represents endurance and stubbornness, whereas the
cereus flower, which blooms only once a year and
can be smelled by Edna, represents the fragility of
existence. This flower blooms only in the dark and
needs to be left alone because, if it is plucked, it
loses its fragrance, highlighting the precariousness
of its roots.
This ecologically themed novel also foregrounds
the idea of place and establishing roots. Most of the
women who come to Arizona were born elsewhere.
When Lou Ann’s grandmother visits, she brings
water from Tug Fork to baptize Dwayne Ray. Water
symbolizes continuity and life, and yet Angel pours
the water down the drain before it can be used,
depicting him in opposition to natural life. Espe-
ranza and Estevan had to uproot themselves from
Guatemala and can find only temporary shelter in
Arizona before fleeing to another land with a body
of water, the Lake of the Cherokees. Taylor leaves
Kentucky to find Turtle outside a bar and needs to
return to Cherokee land to legally claim her before
she can live in Arizona with her.
Turtle delights in learning the names of all the
plants, and cares faithfully for the vegetables in her
garden. Yet she also brings death into her cycle of
life when she buries her dolls. At first Taylor thinks
Turtle is burying the dolls and hoping more dolls
will spring up, but later on she realizes that the baby
is repeating her mother’s burial at a cemetery. Turtle
depends on all the women she meets whom she
calls by their name with “ma” added to it, thereby
acknowledging their mothering role in her life.
When Esperanza bonds with Turtle during their
trip to Cherokee land, Esperanza finds in Turtle a
surrogate for her daughter. For Esperanza however,
this rebirth is accompanied by death, as she must
come to terms with her permanent separation from
her daughter Ismene by symbolically giving Turtle
to Taylor at the end of the novel.
Kingsolver associates Turtle with nature (par-
ticularly birds) throughout the novel, as when
Estevan tells an Indian story of how people survived
in heaven with awkwardly shaped spoons by feed-
ing each other. Estevan feeds Turtle and she takes
the food “like a newborn bird.” When Taylor takes
Turtle to see a doctor and he tells her of the terrible
abuse the girl suffered, Taylor sees a bird outside the
doctor’s window where it has made a nest inside a
cactus, surviving amidst painful surroundings. Turtle
utters her first word after seeing how Taylor and
Lou Ann stop on the road to let a mother quail and
her chicks pass by. Finally, after Turtle is attacked,
a sparrow finds itself trapped inside the house but
the women manage to set it free so that it becomes
a harbinger of Turtle’s own resilience and survival.
Nature is featured in the novel as an entity to be
feared and respected. The protagonists are in awe of
the flowers that bloom once a year, the vegetables
that spring from dried up seeds, the wonders of a
summer rainstorm in the desert. Because of their
affinity with the Indian heritage and their interest
in ecological conservation, Taylor, Turtle, and Lou
Ann learn to nurture and respect their environment
and its inhabitants.
Lourdes ArciniegakingSoLvEr, barbara The
Poisonwood Bible (1998)
The Price family moves from Georgia to the Congo
on the eve of Congo’s independence from Belgium.
Baptist preacher Nathan Price has a Christianizing
mission to fulfill in Kilanga. This mission, eventually
jeopardized by the Kilanga community’s unwilling-
ness to accept Price’s Christian authority and by the
political turmoil raging in the country, turns into
a life-changing experience for Orleanna, Nathan,
and their four daughters. They will have to survive
a brutal cultural shock as well as diseases, natural