Resumo de The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver, Barbara

ABSTRACT ? KINGSOLVER, BARBARA ? THE POISONWOOD BIBLE HarperPerennial 1999 The Poisonwood Bible is a powerful novel that unfolds in one of the most turbulent of eras of African history. The Price family, Baptist missionaries from Georgia, board an airplane in 1959, bound for the isolated village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo, to undertake a mission that has fateful and life-wrenching consequences for each member of the family: As the family struggles to become acclimated to life in the village of Kilanga, the Congolese revolt against the Belgian colonial regime seethes just beneath the surface. Nathan and Orleanna Price arrive in Kilanga with four daughters, aged 3 to 15, where Orleanna, especially, confronts a life of unimaginable hardship. Nathan Price?s ministry goes poorly. Narrow and rigidly authoritarian, viewing the natives as benighted savages in need of redemption, he alienates most of the people of Kilanga and finally his own family. When the Congolese revolution erupts violently, the Price family is ordered to evacuate. Nathan refuses to leave?or to allow his family to leave?despite Orleanna?s pleadings. The tiny stipend that the family depends on for survival is cut off, drought and famine strike the village of Kilanga, Orleanna and Ruth May fall ill?apparently with malaria?and Rachel, Leah, and Adah find themselves managing a destitute household under the eye of an exacting father, increasingly enraged at his daughters? incompetence and oblivious to the extremity to which the family has been reduced. Orleanna eventually recovers from her illness, but Ruth May?s suffers repeated relapses. Tata Ndu, chief of Kilanga, proposes to alleviate the Price family?s struggle for survival in the midst of the famine by offering to marry Rachel, the very blonde and self-absorbed eldest of the Price girls. Rachel is in hysterics, and the Price family is horrified. To avoid offending Tata Ndu, the Price family regretfully declines Tata Ndu?s offer by claiming that Rachel is engaged to Eeben Axelroot, the dirty and dissolute airplane pilot who flies supplies to Kilanga.. But Axelroot has a still more sinister side. The Price girls have sometimes spied on Axelroot?s hut at night, where his short-wave radio blares orders for the assassination of the popularly elected Congolese president, Patrice Lumumba: Axelroot is an undercover operative. Yet Rachel and Axelroot are compelled to act the part of an engaged couple, for the benefit of Tata Ndu and the village of Kilanga. When Lumumba is murdered and Mobutu is installed as head of a US puppet regime, violence in the Congo escalates. Inspired by ever-more-violent discontent with the white colonialist presence, Chief Tata Ndu rises in church to call for a vote on whether the village will accept Christianity. In the impromptu election, Christianity?and the contemptuous and high-handed Nathan?suffer a humiliating defeat. Soon villagers who associate with the missionaries are endangered. Village schoolteacher Anatole Ngemba finds a deadly green mamba snake in his hut one morning. Another green mamba is discovered in the chicken house where Nelson, the Price?s houseboy, sleeps. The perpetrator is Tata Kuvudundu, the traditional priest, or nganga, whose footprints are unmistakable because he has six toes. To save the village from starvation, Tata Ndu, the chief of Kilanga organizes a hunt. Anatole arranges for Leah Price to participate in the hunt, and also to teach in the village school, both contrary to village customs regarding the role of women. In a late-night visitation of army ants?nsongonya?the villagers flee to the river to avoid being eaten alive, and Anatole carries Adah, Leah?s slow-moving disabled twin, to safety. Axelroot refuses to fly Orleanna and her daughters to safety because they have no means to pay. When Ruth May dies almost instantly from the bite of a green mamba, Orleanna, after preparing the tiny body for burial, sets off to walk to Bulungu, and thence to Leopoldville, her surviving daughters following behind in the midst of torrential rains. Clouds of mosquitoes rise from the mud, and Leah is overcome by malaria and carried, unconscious, to Bulungu. Rachel chooses to fly to Johannesburg with Eeben Axelroot. Orleanna and Adah continue on to Leopoldville where they are evacuated, while Leah, who is still too ill to travel, is cared for by Anatole in Bulungu. Nathan remains behind in Kilanga. The book follows the fate of family members after they are scattered by cataclysmic events. Leah marries Anatole and remains in Africa, raising four sons in the horrendous conditions of Mobutu?s regime, ultimately establishing a soybean cooperative in Angola. Rachel makes advantageous marriages and ultimately becomes the owner of a luxury hotel in the French Congo. Back in the US, Adah becomes a medical research scientist and Orleanna becomes a civil rights activist. The family is reunited briefly when Orleanna and Adah visit Rachel and Leah in Africa, where Leah relates the story of their father?s lonely death in the Congo. The nominal purpose of the family reunion is make their way back to Kilanga to find Ruth May?s grave. But the Congo has again been swept by war, and it is impossible to cross the border. In the marketplace, a woman in a yellow pagne gives Orleanna a carved wooden okapi and speaks of her home in Bulungu. When Orleanna asks for news of Kilanga, the woman assures her there is no such place, only jungle.

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