Banned book reviews: ‘The Poisonwood Bible’

This con­tro­ver­sial his­tor­i­cal-fic­tion/­fam­i­ly-saga nov­el was pub­lished in 1998, and has been ruf­fling a few feath­ers ever since. Short-list­ed for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner awards, it did win the National Book Award of Africa, as well as the Boeke Prize. The book was writ­ten by not­ed author Barbara Kingsolver, who grew up in Kentucky. 

Inspired by a non­fic­tion account of the USA’s back­ing of third-world tyrants that was pub­lished in 1984, (Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny), Kingsolver revis­it­ed Africa, where she had spent a year of her child­hood. She became so engrossed in the sub­ject she was research­ing that she actu­al­ly moved to the Canary Islands in order to make fur­ther research trips more accessible.

The book took a decade to write, and the author has been wide­ly acclaimed for the unusu­al nar­ra­tive style: that of telling the sto­ry of the mis­sion­ary Price fam­i­ly from five sep­a­rate points of view.
With the book’s pre­sumed guilt of our gov­ern­ment (par­tic­u­lar­ly the CIA) in the over­throw of some nations as well as the instal­la­tion of oth­ers on the African con­ti­nent, it would be easy to assume that any cen­sor­ship stemmed from objec­tions to that, but no.

Every record of the desire/determination to squelch this book that I have found is a record of church folks and min­is­ters hav­ing strong objec­tion to the por­tray­al of Nathan Price, the mis­sion­ary pro­tag­o­nist. Because of his insis­tence that his way was God’s way and there­fore could not be ques­tioned, he end­ed up with failed crops, an alien­at­ed fam­i­ly, and hos­tile vil­lagers. He refused even lan­guage cor­rec­tion, with one notable case being that he end­ed up insist­ing to the vil­lagers that “Jesus is Poisonwood,” an extreme­ly dead­ly plant that the peo­ple care­ful­ly avoid. 

He is, in short, not only obnox­ious but dan­ger­ous in his blind ignorance.

One mem­ber of Mason’s Banned Book Club asked me, slight­ly bewil­dered, “Aren’t mis­sion­ar­ies like that kind of arro­gant?” One kind mem­ber and I answered togeth­er; the kind­ly one said she could under­stand how it could look that way, while I, in my blunt­ness, mere­ly stat­ed, “Yes.”

Yes, I believe mis­sion­ar­ies who believe and behave the way Nathan Price did are arro­gant. In fact, I believe there are still mis­sion­ar­ies like him, today. No, I don’t think all mis­sion­ar­ies fall into his cat­e­go­ry, (the book even briefly men­tions Price’s pre­de­ces­sor, who behaved noth­ing like Price), but with my back­ground of fun­da­men­tal­ism as well as evan­gel­i­cal­ism, it seems from my POV that many of them can be clas­si­fied as such.

Religious out­rage at that idea has been at the root of wide­spread cen­sor­ship of this book. It is fas­ci­nat­ing, in a trag­ic way, that so much sup­pres­sion of intel­lec­tu­al free­dom comes from those insist­ing they rep­re­sent a divine pow­er, but that’s anoth­er top­ic for anoth­er contributor.

The Poisonwood Bible, while banned in many places, is avail­able at the Clark County Public Library. It can be pur­chased at most book­stores or online from Bookshop.org, a con­ve­nient way to buy books and sup­port inde­pen­dent booksellers.