A Universal Experience

In The Poisonwood Bible, all four sisters have the same experience of being torn from their homes in America and forced to spend almost two years in Africa. This experience proves harrowing and traumatic at times, eye-opening and wondrous at others, but each sister feels one of these emotions at some point in the story. However, before, during, and especially after the experience ends, each sister lives and tells her story from a different perspective. Even though Leah and Rachel both stay in Africa, they represent very different perspectives of the continent, and even though Ruth May never got to return to America, she never got to establish her own life in Africa the way Leah and Rachel did, and so she joins Adah in telling her story from an American perspective. Besides the perspective in which they tell the story, all four sisters are also affected in many different ways, causing them to react in even more different ways.

Rachel represents the Western influence on Africa. The ivory mines of Heart of Darkness and chapel in the forest of Things Fall Apart are resurrected in the form of Rachel’s hotel, and even before she takes on this business venture, she thinks of everything in the context of Western culture (for example, when she cannot name a single person, besides the other white missionaries, in Kilanga). By contrast, Leah represents a more local perspective of Africa. Despite her race, she is experiencing firsthand the social, economic, and political injustices facing the citizens of the Congo, and when she returns to America, she is horrified at the excess and gluttony she finds.

Across the ocean, Adah represents the knowledgeable view of Africa from America. She is safe on American soil, but she knows what is happening in other parts of the world, and she has always felt pity for those who were unlucky enough to be born elsewhere. Finally, Ruth May represents the less knowledgeable view of Africa from America. As a child, her worldview is shaped mostly by that of her family and her religion, and thus, she has a very sheltered and innocent view of what is happening, which can have positive and negative consequences (playing Mother May I despite language and cultural barriers vs. “the Tribes of Ham”).

No matter which continent their perspectives lie in, all four sisters have been affected strongly by Africa. Most notably, it kills Ruth May, but it also opens her eyes to her mother’s suffering, as well as some of the things that happen outside of her father’s gaze. In the cases of the other sisters, it affects them in much more subtle ways than death, but it does still have an impact. Rachel has become a superficial shell of the strong-minded and observant person she once was, pushing down all her thoughts, feelings, and memories of Africa in order to feel like a calm, controlled, successful adult. By contrast, Adah and Leah are unable to push down the atrocities they have seen. Of course, they react to it in different ways: Leah stays in the thick of it and tries to help those around her, as well as herself, survive, while Adah goes home and attempts to save the people of Africa from there.

When those months of mission work in Kilanga are over, they have only ended in the physical sense. Life in Africa stays with all four sisters, even the ones who, for one reason or another, did not spend the rest of their lives there. The trauma they have lived through is universal, even though it manifests in different perspectives and reactions. The time they spent together left the same scars, but they hurt each sister in different ways, and this is evident in the way each side of the story is told.