ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #1

              Our experiences, our actions, our victories and defeats define who we are as people, and are common themes within literature itself. Following this suit is the idea of separation or exile from home and its total impact. One book that follows this idea is “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver. The novel, written in a first person narrative form and based on the perspective of its five protagonists, follows the Southern Baptist missionary Price family on their missionary journey in the Congo. And while the entire family travels and becomes separated from home, they all experience exile differently, but none more so than Leah Price. Who turns from a young idealistic 14-year-old teenage girl into a woman whose ideals have changed from religious conversion to social justice for the people of Africa.  

                Prior to her great conversion, Leah Price’s ideologies were identical to her father’s and her whole goal in life was pleasing him. And by the end of the novel Leah’s exile from her father is both metaphorical and literal. Prior to the beginning of the novel and well into the middle Leah, whose character is idealistic yet highly compassionate and devotional, follows her father’s religious fallacies to a fault and in fact strives solely to please him. Yet unlike her father, Leah's compassionate nature begins to wear down as she begins to see the horrors of the Congo and her father's indifference towards the struggle of the Congo and lack of respect for tribal customs and religion. The final breaking point for Leah begins when both her mother Orleanna and her younger sister Ruth May become sick with Malaria. While mother and sister lay sick Leah's father Nathan again remains indifferent to their condition and continues his sole goal of an African revival, which leaves Leah, her older sister Rachael, and her physically impaired twin sister Adah to care for a breaking household. It is here when Leah and her sisters have reached their breaking point and the full weight of separation from the United States hits, the compassion of her poor Congolese neighbors begins Leah's metaphorical separation from her father's ideals and religious zeal, eventually coming full circle as Leah abandons the faith she once clung to and exiles her father in the Congo to live with and marry Anatole to adopt a new religion of loving her new family and striving for African freedom and independence.

               Leah Price's independence from her father and from the religion she once followed can be viewed as an allusion to not only African independence but also white imperialism a motif and white elephant seen throughout most of the novel.  Being as the novel takes place during the Congolese freedom from Belgium through the CIA involvement in replacing Patrice Lumumba with Joseph Kasa-Vubu Leah's separation and eventual exile from her father and family acts as a metaphor.

              From former religious zeal and complete suppression to her father, Leah Price's transformation to an independent idealist comes straight from the exile and separation from her family and the United States and serves as both a metaphor and allusion to the struggle for African Independence within the novel.

 

(around 40 mins timed)