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Adah In Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

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The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver depicts Adah Price as the forsaken child in a foreign land. Already an outcast in her own family due to her brain deformity, her exposure to the Congo differs from the rest. From “A. D. A. H. Adah” the “ Crooked one” to able body Adah. Her Journey is a sight to behold form the light into the darkness from their somewhere in between and it all begins when the price family goes to the congo. Forced from her home in Bethlehem Georgia by her father and his Holy Mission to bring the “all powerful” Jesus Christ to the savage and native lands of the Congo, Adah’s journey begins. The rift at birth “She grew strong as I grew weak. (Yes! Jesus loves me!) And so it came to pass, in the Eden of our mother's …show more content…

This prominent incident has lead Adah to establish a clinical yet indifferent attitude towards relationships and this mindset persists throughout her entire life. This conviction is further reinforced by the “ant tide” incident in which Adah was deemed to be of lesser value to her mother Orleanna Price. Adah's distraught emotions are clearly felt as she states, “ help me”(305). Adah’s first words to her mother yet she was “left behind”(306). Her mother as everyone else has viewed Adah a lesser than those who are able body or whole. Unlike others, Adah views herself as whole. Yet she struggles to accept in the years to come why she made it out of the Congo, but unfortunately, no answers came. However, hatred and resentment never fade. Adah bares anger and resents those who have done her wrong: her mother, her father, her sisters. Though time has dulled this hatred, she does not let go, for it is the only link to her former self. She has seen good and she has seen evil, all living beings have the right to die and in death there is life and in life there is death. “ She is A.D.A.H. Adah”. Adah’s journey adds a darker hue to the book and adds emphasis to the overall effect of change over time. Nothing remains constant as all things change; this is the universal law of change portrayed through The Poisonwood

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In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Adah’s birds eye view of the world and descriptive voice brings a different view to the events that occur in the Congo. Her character demonstrates this through her genuine compassion towards the Congolese women and by saying that her father’s assessment of the women was illogical through her diction and point of view. Adah’s attitude towards the Congolese women is shown to be compassionate through her diction when describing the mourning women. She used words like “why, why, why” and “crawled” to demonstrate the women's broken hearts. Unlike her father she viewed the women in a state of loss and grief while her father saw them as the culprits behind the childrens death.

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Adah is saying that to make her father pleased even though most of the statements that he says to the people of Kilanga are wrong. The best example to show that Nathan was trying to get himself killed in which his wife and the Price girls try to save him is when He was told by his family that everyone in Kilanga is afraid of baptism because there are crocodiles in the river. In the end when a child really did get eaten by a crocodile, some angry villagers then decided to chase him and kill him as he got blamed for killing most of the innocent children in the village of Kilanga. In this example we saw how Nathan is trying to convince all of the people of Kilanga to baptize themselves in the river which didn’t work out

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Her family, as she realizes the people they truly are, also change her thought process and mindset from when they lived back home in Georgia. As the Congo becomes their home, moral lessons were taught until the day the Price family departs from the Congo, but not all of them. Leah Price was introduced as a fourteen year old girl who is very intelligent and who idealizes her father, a godly man whose rules are stricter than most. The family is departing from Bethlehem, Georgia on a mission trip to Africa for a year with not much from home. Prior to the touchdown in the Congo, Kingsolver helps the reader understand Leah’s character by showing how she describes herself as the favorite and the smartest of the four girls.

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In the novel, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbra Kingsolver, poetry is continuously used to illustrate Adah’s character. Adah Price is the one character that always appears as though she does not belong. During her childhood while her family lived in Africa, she did not speak, and also was born with hemiplegia, which caused her to walk with a terrible limp. She was created to be very analytical, intelligent, and extremely outside the box. Her habits from when she was younger, such as reading and thinking backwards, can directly relate to her disability and is seen as her way of handling how it feels to be so different from those around her.

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Unable to return to his home and to his mother, memories of her inundate Binh’s present life. He says “’She’ was also a fishing village girl, who sat by the shore and darned the nets, who sang the same songs as her brothers but had never been allowed out to sea” (114-115). Because she is a woman, a “she,” Binh’s mother is not allowed to feel the freedom her brothers feel. Similarly, Binh is condemned as “lai cái, which Binh explains, “What they mean is that I am mixed with or am partially a female,” (189). Arguably, their common struggles as feminized, and consequently, externally diminished and lessened by society, bond Binh and his mother so closely.

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he Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver focuses on both real life and fictional events and tells the story of the Price family’s experience in the Congo. Kingsolver makes good use of foreshadowing to dramatize the tragic incidents that occur in Africa. Orleanna Price is the most reliable narrator in the novel and is used to foreshadow future events and to explain various aspects of the past. In the first chapter, Orleanna maps out all the major events that will occur throughout the book.

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