The Poisonwood Bible:
Cultures, Nations, and Families in Conflict
“Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
The slideshow above shows images of the beauty of the Congo.
Materials and Resources
Background Information
Please click the image above to go to Barbara Kingsolver's author's website. Her "About" page is fascinating!
|
Click on the image above to listen to Barbara Kingsolver discuss her novel, The Poisonwood Bible.
|
Warning: SPOILERS! The video above is a creative, student-made analysis of The Poisonwood Bible.
Literary Elements
Narration
Think about the purposes and effects of Kingsolver's narration strategies, such as the frame story, shifting narrators, epistolary, and unreliable narration. The film clips below show this in action.
|
Forrest Gump - frame story
|
Crash - shifting narrators
|
|
Gone Girl - unreliable narrator
|
Dangerous Liaisons (based upon a novel written totally in letters) - epistolary
|
Humor
|
Key & Peele "Teaching Center" - Satire
|
Weird Al Yankovic "Amish Paradise" - Parody
|
Allusions
Above you will find a clip from the film, The Chronicles of Narnia. What biblical allusion is being made here?
Putting the Novel in Context
Below, you will find an 8 part series published by the British Broadcasting Company in 2018 about the Congo River Valley.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you are interested in learning about the history of the international missionary work in which the Price family is involved, click on the image below. PLEASE NOTE that this specific organization has been involved in much controversy and you should think critically about their specific bias as you peruse their website. Consider how their motivations form their views.
|
Click on the image below to go to Boston University's Pardee School of Global Studies to find information on European Colonialism in Africa.
|
The videos below will give further information on European Colonialism of
and its effect upon the Congo.
and its effect upon the Congo.
|
Dig into the Rubber Terror, the period in which King Leopold II’s horrific regime in the Congo resulted in the deaths of 10 million people.
Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Malcolm X called him “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent,” while the US and Belgium plotted at the highest level to kill him.
As far as African dictators go, there is probably no single greater illustration of the nuances and complexities that underpin dictatorships in Africa, than Joseph Desire Mobutu’s 31 year stint, as the leader of the nation known today as the DRC.
|
European missionaries especially from Portugal, France, Britain, and Germany went to Africa under the premise of going to convert the locals to Christianity. However, they actually aided in the colonization of Africans by Europeans. In many cases Christian conversion looked more like European Capitalist conversion.
The video below (Congo Mission-1961) is a propaganda film used to encourage missionary work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The attitudes displayed in the documentary may reflect the zealotry expressed by the father, Nathan Price, in The Poisonwood Bible (1998).
TedGlobal 2007Botanist Corneille Ewango talks about his work at the Okapi Faunal Reserve in the Congo Basin -- and his heroic work protecting it from poachers, miners and raging civil wars.
|
| kipling-thewhitemansburden.pdf |
| johnson-theblackmansburden.pdf |