Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

I got some inkling of this from Anatole long ago, I suppose, when he explained why he translated Father’s sermons. It wasn’t evangelism.just full disclosure. Opening up the bargaining table to a would-be congregation. I multiplied my perception of Anatole’s intelligence by ten that day, and now looking back I have to do the same for everyone we knew. The children who hounded us daily for money and food weren’t dim-witted beggars; they were accustomed to the distribution of excess, and couldn’t fathom why we held ourselves apart. The chief who proposed to marry my sister surely didn’t dream Father would actually hand over his whining termite! I think Tata Ndu was gently suggesting we’d become a burden to his village in a time of near famine; that people here accommodate such burdens by rearranging families; and that if we found such an idea impossible we were perhaps better off somewhere else. Tata Ndu certainly had his arrogance in the ways of command, even calling down a vote in church to humiliate my father, but in matters of life and death, I can see now, he was almost incomprehensibly polite.

It’s a grief to see the best of Zairean genius and diplomacy spent on bare survival, while fortunes in diamonds and cobalt are slipped daily out from under our feet. “This is not a poor nation,” I remind my sons till they hear it in their sleep. “It is only a nation of poor.”

No paycheck tonight, of course, let alone the supplementaire. But Anatole came home excited about the general strike and spoke of it quietly through dinner, careful as always to use code words and false names. Any such knowledge could endanger the boys. Though I believe Pearl Harbor itself would have passed by them tonight, intent as they were on devouring the manioc. To make it last longer I pinched up little bites with my left hand while I nursed Martin on the right. With every gulp he drew, I felt more ravenous.

“One of these days,” I announced, “I am going to take my bow and sneak through the bars of the Residence” Mobutu’s Kinshasa mansion is surrounded by a park, where some zebras and one pitiful elephant paw at the grass.

Pascal was all for it. “Oh, Mama! Abattons I’elephant!”

Patrice soberly informed us he didn’t think an arrow could pierce an elephant’s hide.

Pascal was unconcerned. “Have you seen that thing? Mama’s arrow will knock it over,plaf! Kufwa!”

Elisabet asked thoughtfully, “Mondele, how would you cook an elephant?”

What we eat is manioc, manioc, manioc. Whether it’s tinted pink with a tomato skin or green with a leaf of cress, it’s still manioc. Rice and soy meal help when we can get them, to balance our amino acids and keep our muscle tissue from digesting itself in the process known picturesquely as kwashiorkor. When we first moved to Kilanga, I remember thinking the children must get plenty to eat because their bellies all bulged out. Now I know their abdominal muscles were too weak to hold their livers and intestines in place. I see signs of it in Patrice. Any food that reaches us in Kinshasa has to come over impossible roads in dilapidated trucks from the interior, so it costs too much even if you can find it. Sometimes Anatole reminds me of our long-ago conversation when I tried to explain how we grew food back home, in huge fields far from the people who eat it. Now I understand his dismay. It’s a bad idea, at least for Africa. This city is a foreigner’s premise of efficiency planted on this soil, and it’s a very bad idea. Living in it, no one could think otherwise. It’s a vast congregation of hunger, infectious disease, and desperation, masquerading as opportunity.

We can’t even grow any food of our own. I did try it, right at the metal flank of our back door, under the clothesline. Pascal and Patrice helped me scratch up a little plot that eventually produced a few bleak, dusty bouquets of spinach and beans, which were gobbled up one night by our neighbor’s goat. The children of that household looked so starved (as did the goat), I couldn’t regret this donation.

We, at least, have the option of leaving. In the back of my mind I think this-we could try again in Atlanta. And while we stay here for Anatole’s teaching and organizing, and live on the next-to-noth-ing that work earns, we still have a measure of privilege incomprehensible to our neighbors. I’ve taken my sons to the States for vaccinations that aren’t available anywhere in Zaire. I’ve seen them all born alive, and not one lost to smallpox or tuberculosis. We’re luckier than most. That’s what’s hardest to bear: the view out the window. La cite is a grim, dust-colored homeland, and I suffer nostalgia for our life in the interior. In Bikoki and Kilanga we could always pick something off a tree, at least. We never passed a day without seeing flowers. Epidemics sometimes devastated the village, but they always ended, not far from where they began.

I can have a good laugh at my former self, remembering how my sisters and I nervously made our list of prospects: oranges, flour, even eggs! At our low point as missionaries, we were still fabulously wealthy by the standards of Kilanga. No wonder any household item we carelessly left on our porch quietly found a new home in the night. No wonder the neighbor women frowned in our doorway when we pulled out the linings of our pockets as evidence of our poverty. Not another soul in town even had pockets. They must have felt exactly as I do now glaring at Mobutu on the doorstep of his fairy-tale palaces, shrugging, with his two hands thrust deep into the glittering loot of his mines.

“I thought you said the Congolese don’t believe in keeping riches to themselves,” I told Anatole once, inclined toward an argument.

But he just laughed. “Who, Mobutu? He is not even African now.” “Well, what is he, then?”

“He is the one wife belonging to many white men.” Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and “wide from men “who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.

“Oh, I understand that kind of marriage all right,” I said. “I grew up witnessing one just like it.”

But it dawns on me now that, in the end, Mother carried every last one of our possessions outside as a farewell gift to Kilanga. There are wives, and then there are wives. My pagan mother alone among us understood redemption.

The rest of us are growing into it, I suppose. God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves. Janvier 17, Mort de Lumumba and Ruth May, that’s still the bleak day at our house. Anatole and I grow wordless and stare into the distance at our own regrets, “which aren’t so far apart anymore. On January nights I’m visited by desperate dreams of stretching myself out over the water, reaching for balance. When I look back at the shore, a row of eggs become faces of hungry children, and then comes the fall into blue despair, where I have to move a mountain that crumbles in my hands. It’s a relief to wake up drenched in sweat and find Anatole’s body next to me. But even his devotion can’t keep this weight off my shoulders. “Have mercy upon me, O God, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies,” I catch myself praying, before I’ve fully awakened to a world where I have no father, and can count on no tender mercies. Anatole says recurring dreams are common to those who’ve suffered seriously from malaria. When I’m nervous or sad I also fall prey to the awful itch from filaires, tiny parasites that crawl into your pores and cause a flare-up every so often. Africa has a thousand ways to get under your skin.