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Summary Of The Poisonwood Bible

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The Poisonwood Bible, a literary text in the Western canon, undermines colonialist ideology through its representation of the lives the Price daughters lead and the things they see and experience in the Belgian Congo, a colonized country with colonized people. Throughout the story, we see as the characters realize the desperate condition the natives are left in following the arrival of King Leopold II. To highlight the gap between the colonizers and the colonized, Kingsolver shows us the differences between Rachel’s Kinshasa, a primarily white town, and towns such as Kilanga, which are populated mostly by the natives. The former is clean and looks much like a modern-day US village. It has everything that could ever be needed and even the problems of nature do not …show more content…

Comparing the two villages, Rachel mentions that they seem to exist in two different worlds. Through this comparison, the book shows us how the colonizers live like kings, due to their horrendous behavior and treatment of the Congolese, while the colonized are forced to live like peasants in their own country. This is but one of the ways Kingsolver undermines colonialist ideology, however, as directly after the ant attack she shows us as the Price family experiences the wild hunt for food the town of Kilanga is forced to resort to just to survive while white men sit in cities of wealth built by stealing and pilfering that which is not theirs; the colonizers take everything the Congo has to offer, from fruits and food to rubber and other riches, and consequently treat the natives terribly, with no human respect for them at all. Much like the situation with the houses, the Belgians take possession of everything of value and leave nothing for the struggling people of the Congo. Through this grotesque representation of colonization, Kingsolver is able to successfully undermine

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