Excerpt – The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Because I feel like updating this thing after so many days of recent neglect, I decided to do what I’ve been wanting to do for a while. What is that, you ask? Well, a book I’ve read recently (well, quite a few months ago, really, but I’ve read it and re-read it several times since then) has some stuff in it that I really wanted to share on my blog because I thought it was so freaking awesome. The book in question is called The Poisonwood Bible and it’s by Barbara Kingsolver. You probably got that already from the title of the post. Whatever.

Before you read the excerpt, here is some background information:

Leah, the girl who is speaking in the first person, is a 14-year-old daughter of a preacher who went on a mission to the Congo to save the souls of people in the (fictional) village of Kilanga. She is very intelligent and is always trying to learn more about all that’s going on around her. Anatole, a Congolese and the village’s sole school-teacher, who is also very intelligent, had her come to his school to help teach his students math. Leah is fascinated by Anatole and loves the fact he doesn’t treat her as someone vastly different than himself, unlike most of the Congolese in the village. “Beene-Beene”, or “Beene” for short, is Anatole’s nickname for Leah. This is an exchange that happens between them:

“Anatole,” I said finally, “if you could have anything in the world, what would you want?”

Without hesitation he said, “To see a map of the whole world at once.”

“Really? You never have?”

“Not all of it at once. I can’t work out whether it’s a triangle, a circle or a square.”

“It’s round,” I said, astonished. How could he not know? He’d gone to plantation schools and served in the houses of men who had shelves full of books. He spoke better English than Rachel [Leah's elder sister]. Yet he didn’t know the true shape of the world. “Not a circle, but like this,” I said, cupping my hands. “Round like a ball. Really you’ve never seen a globe?”

“I heard about a globe, a map on a ball. I wasn’t sure I understood it correctly because I couldn’t see how it would fit on a ball. Have you seen one?”

“Anatole, I have one. In America, lots of people have them.”

He laughed, “For what? To help them decide where to drive the automobile?”

“I’m not joking. They’re in schoolrooms and everywhere. I’ve spent so much time staring at globes I could probably make one.”

He gave me a doubting look.

“I could. I mean it. You bring me a nice clean calabash and I’ll make you a globe of your own.”

“I would like that very much,” he said, speaking to me now as a grown-up friend, not a child. For the first time ever, I felt certain of it.

“You know what, I shouldn’t be teaching math. I should teach geography. I could tell your boys about the oceans and cities and all the wonders of the world!”

He smiled sadly, “Beene, they would not believe you.”

I love this part because of how Leah takes her knowledge of the world for granted—-that she knows the world is round, that there are so many countries, wonders and oceans. Even Anatole, a voracious reader who cannot be called uneducated, is skeptical when she tells him that in the USA each family has an automobile and sometimes more than one. In their culture, they don’t understand excess. If there is extra food, it is always shared, never stocked up. Leah’s enthusiastic suggestion to have him teach 10 and 12-year-olds geography was akin to spinning tall tales to people who were of a world where they were never told what lay beyond it. It is beyond their imagination…and I find that utterly fascinating. The fact that our one little planet could hold such mystical wonder to people who are living on it, is amazing. You don’t know the value of what you hold as common knowledge until you meet someone who doesn’t share the same information. This is why I love this passage so much.