I recently read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. If you’re up for another work on racism and colonialism from the perspective of white people, it’s well worth your while. Here’s the blurb on the back of the edition I read:
Told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959, The Poisonwood Bible is the story of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it – from garden seeds to Scripture – is calamitously transformed on African soil.
It really is a remarkable novel, but I’m not going to talk about it as a whole just now. One of the daughters, Adah, is disabled. When the young American daughters are new to the village of Kilanga, Adah’s twin, Leah, narrates:
Used to be, Adah was the only one of us un our family with something wrong with her. But here nobody stares at Adah except just a little because she’s white. Nobody cares that she’s bad on one whole side because they’ve all got their own handicap children or a mama with no feet, or their eye put out.
[...]
Father said, ‘They are living in darkness. Broken in body and soul, and don’t even see how they could be healed.’
Mama said, ‘Well, maybe they take a different view of their bodies.’
Nathan Price thinks the people of Kilanga – of the Congo – are inferior because they don’t want Christianity, because they’re black, and because they have a profoundly different attitude to his own towards physical disabilities. He thinks external inferiority, as he sees it, reflects internal inferiority inherent to Africans. If they were Christians, they’d be ashamed of their bodies, because Price thinks that black and disabled bodies are not in the divine image.
I like the vision of Kilanga as somewhere in which both blackness and disability are normative, because they mutually strengthen each other in the interrogation of the idea that the most privileged set ought to be in charge of what kinds of presentation and identity are moral, and whether they’re a reflection of inherent inferiority or something (that ought to be) entirely neutral. As regards Adah in particular, that which has been used to make her inferior in her hometown is neutral here, and she gets to understand her whiteness in ways she didn’t experience being kept largely at home and away from black people in Georgia.
To our next excerpt, then, from towards the end of the book and 1985. Adah has undergone an experimental program put together by a neurologist friend, and has for the first time the use of her side. She has lost a lot, including her extraordinary ways with books and palindromes, and when alone she sometimes limps, ‘trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking’. She regrets having lost the self who did damage in the Congo, because her new self cannot retain the precise cadence of understanding how she ought to be held accountable.
Don’t we have a cheerful, simple morality here in Western Civilization: expect perfection, and revile the missed mark! Adah the Poor Thing, hemiplegious egregious besiege us. Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one’s fault, but one still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed. [...] The arrogance of the able-bodied is straggering. [...] How can I explain that my two unmatched halves used to add up to more than one whole?
My experience of ableism has often been one in which able-bodied people think, ‘Well, of course no one would want to be disabled, the poor dears can’t help it, so let’s acknowledge them as valuable members of society from time to time, although I don’t really think they truly are as valuable, but it’s not nice to say so, even though I’d like the lot of them to stop messing up my pure vision of the world and fuck off and die.’ What of taking pleasure in being who you are? What of not really caring either way? What of disabled people’s lives not actually being about able-bodied people?
The heart of it is the idea that ‘one still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed’. I think that’s why white people and able-boded people can be so affronted when people of colour or disabled people don’t stay quiet and away, or refuse to exist as ornaments on which to project patronising feeling. It’s a horror that these freaks of nature are actually laying claim to being a part of humanity, that expression is coming from us, that we live lives beyond being like that. We’re only acceptable when ashamed and performing dominant ideas of what people like us are like: inferior.
I liked that novel very much, although I remember the first half as being much stronger than the second.
I remember thinking a great deal about the character who chose to stay in Africa, even though her children were suffering and she had the option to take them back to the West.
What you’ve written about it is really interesting though. Makes me want to go back and read it again.
Not my favourite of her books but a very powerful novel nonetheless. And as a woman with a disability I find often that people treat me as invisible. It seems to be easier.
Great post. Thank you.
What was your favourite?
I really disliked it. the way it portrayed African pople was patronising and when the white woman found redemption from the vulgarity of western supermarkets by having sex with a quaint Black man because that’s what Black people are for, to redeem white people from their complex modern world that has gone astray from simple primitive/authentic village wisdom. I hated it, but I never noticed the ableism theme at all, it is interesting different people see different things in the same book.
I really didn’t read Anatole’s and Leah’s relationship that way, and I think Kingsolver really tried to intervene in the modern/authentic primitive/human divide that gets set up in these narratives, but I agree that there were definitely problems in how the Congolese characters were framed.
Perhaps two favourites – which of course do change with moods and what I need from a book at the time. ‘Prodigal Summer’ and ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’. A collection of short stories ‘Small Wonder’ has its moments too. I like that, while acknowledging her flaws, and those of her country, she tries to live an ethical life. In fact she often makes me feel inadequate.
I love it when NT people freak the fuck out whenever they see anything about Mad Pride or Autistic Pride. It’s fun, watching bigots run around trying to preserve their prejudicial worldview.
And I really do hate the idea that (PoCs/DPs/Trans people) are only acceptable if they accept their inferiority. It’s a horrible fusion of ‘I can’t be the kind of person who would say they wanted them dead’ and ‘I hate those things and wish they would go away’.
I, as a mostly able-bodied person, do think that I wouldn’t want to be disabled because I am used to for instance being able to walk, and I think that is what most able-bodied people feel, too, and why they then spend most of their time feeling sorry for disabled people. The problem is here, though, that although of course there are disabled people who wish for nothing else except not being disabled, many disabled people simply don’t care or actually don’t want to be ‘normal’, for instance because they have been disabled from birth and their disability has become their ‘normal’.
Also, and I think this is a tremendously important point, there is definitely a difference between disabled people who want to ‘cure’ their disability because they suffer from it, and disabled people who’d prefer to be able-bodied because society, architecture, media and other people in general are so hostile to them.
Another problem, I think, is that most of the research about/on disabled people is a) done be able-bodied people and b) focuses solely on making disabled people more like able-bodied people, instead of making society (etc.) more open to disabled people.
Bracula-I suspect that what they actually want us to accept is the “rightness” of their attitude that we are inferior, and they want us to be ashamed both of our condition, and that we haven’t gone away to hide. Since St. Paul urged his followers to offer up a church without spot or blemish, this is structural to xianity and to the western pseudociv influenced by the book.
Chally said:
5 February 2012 at 10.19 am
I really didn’t read Anatole’s and Leah’s relationship that way, and I think Kingsolver really tried to intervene in the modern/authentic primitive/human divide that gets set up in these narratives, but I agree that there were definitely problems in how the Congolese characters were framed.
I felt like he just existed so she could show how enlightened she was by marrying a Black guy, how daring! All Black people are just waiting to be chosen by white people and exist to fulfill the fantasies of white people, whenever white people write about sex with non-white people I am immediately suspicious so it could be I am reading too much in to it. The African people weren’t even characters they were background scenery for the story of the white girls. But I read it ages ago maybe I have forgotten or didn’t notice the nuances. To be honest I would probably judge it that way because I’m REALLY not up for another work on racism and colonialism from the perspective of white people, I don’t think I can stomach reading another book like that for the rest of my life! The ableism theme sounds more interesting.
Yeah, I’m pretty suspicious of that, too. The way I read it was that he was there showing that proximity to white people and white ideas doesn’t mean accepting one’s inferiority relative to them, and Leah has to accept that she isn’t knowledgeable simply because of what her father and society taught her, doesn’t have it all right, can never really access enlightenment. And most of the African characters were background scenery, I agree. I wonder what the point of disappearing the village at the end there was? Because it’s like… not only were they scenery, but they’re no longer there to be verified, all anyone has to imagine it is the memory of white women.
True, that makes sense. You make it sound a lot more interesting than I remembered! Maybe I should read it again but it would probably just annoy me more :/
We’re probably both better off reading about racism and colonialism from the perspectives of non-white people! :)