"Poor Africa. No other continent has experienced such an eccentric combination of plunder and benevolence from foreigners.
In one phrase is the whole essence and history of any African country. And the Congo, which Barbara Kingsolver describes, is no exception. The Portuguese who discovered the continent in the 15th century and established the slave trade, then the Belgians who pumped out resources and brutally suppressed any rebellion, and after World War II - the United States fighting the "communist plague" for some reason also in Africa and the Soviet Union trying to take Africans to "a bright communist future". They were all trying to explain to the Congolese how to live correctly. But then 1960 came.
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in Africa in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in Biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her most famous works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.
The year 1960 is a turning point for the Belgian Congo. The Belgians were forced to admit that it was time to give the colony independence (what could they do? And the cooler empires were disintegrating before their eyes). The first election was won by Patrice Lumumba, a fighter for the rights of the working people known to all Soviet children. But what is independence in a country that hates white colonialists, and where will it lead? No one knows.
It is at this time that the family of an American pastor, Price, arrives in the Congo. The pastor is a fanatical preacher, brutal and oppressive, always knowing the right thing to do and pushing through in all circumstances. And if he has decided that all the children of the village must be baptized in the local river as in the waters of the Jordan, nothing can stop him. Not explanations that it is not easy to persuade the natives to accept Christianity, nor the fact that the river is teeming with crocodiles and that the natives are hysterically afraid to even go near it. He wanders through the village with his eyes burning, spouting biblical truths.
The pastor's family - his wife and four daughters, aged 5 to 16 - aren't even used to discussing their father's decisions. They obediently follow all of his instructions, endure beatings, and do not dare to cross him. A kind of family-sect with a half-mad leader. But each - his own view of the whole story, which the author will tell in the form of consecutive monologues all women of the family. The technique is not new in literature, but it is very effective, giving the novel incredible depth. The musings of Rachel's eldest daughter, a selfish and short-sighted 16-year-old girl who worries most about her appearance, will give an idea of all the domestic inconveniences faced by the completely unfit American country life. Leah, a tomboy girl with an irrepressible thirst for learning about the world around her, will talk about everything that goes on in the village. The younger Ruth-Maya, with the spontaneity of a five-year-old child looking at the world and loving everyone in the world - about living and inanimate creatures. And Orleanna, the pastor's wife, will try to explain how it was that she and her children were held hostage by a not entirely sane man in a faraway country where they are not at all welcome. Everyone will contribute to this story. But the diamond among all these monologues will be the diary of Ada, Ada's half-paralyzed, speechless twin sister Leah. Her nontrivial brain and love of verbal equilibrium transform reality into a mixture of poetry and scientific investigation. And the more the Price family tells of their life in the Congolese countryside, the stranger they seem, and the more understandable and reasonable the habits of those "ignorant savages" they have come to teach life. The family will spend a little more than a year in the Congo, but it will change their lives forever.
Of course, Barbara Kingsolver's social allegories are often too straightforward: the pastor who embodies all the evils of white colonialism, the eldest daughter Rachel, with her selfish pragmatism, the mercenary smuggler Axelroot, as a symbol of foreign interference. It seemed to me that even Price's pet parrot, used to living in a cage and suddenly released into the wild (and, of course, immediately eaten by predators) is a symbol. A symbol of the recently gained independence of the Congo, which ended a year after the murder of Lumumba. And if the author's female characters are really interesting and versatile, all the men are simple and one-dimensional: a wise tribal chief, an abusive pastor, a flaming revolutionary teacher, a greedy smuggler and cutthroat. I do not know, maybe the author intended (very fashionable now fempovestka), but it seemed that this oversimplifies the novel.
It is the details that save the novel. There is so much Africa in the book that you can forgive the author anything. Red desiccated land on which it is impossible to grow anything, roads that are useless to pave because they wash away in the rainy season, fufu porridge made from ground cassava, killer ants, hordes of malarial mosquitoes, snakes, tarantulas, invisible parasites. Legends and superstitions, proverbs on kikongo and rituals (I love such ethnographic inclusions). And as the girls grow up - not only does the language of the book change, but so does their view of Africa. Ada, who has become a virologist, reasons, "Africa has a thousand ways of self-cleaning. Swarming ants, the Ebola virus, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome-these "brooms" were invented by nature to cleanly sweep out limited areas. None of them will make it across the river. Big cities, roads, crowds of people are God's gifts to viruses. Gifts from foreign magi, brought from afar. In its quest to save African children and take away Africa's useful-fossilized soul, the West has unleashed an avalanche of disasters on Africa." Leah, who over the years has not lost her thirst for justice and has become a true daughter of Africa, laments the horrendous poverty and corruption: "It is sad to see our best abilities and diplomacy wasted only on finding ways to survive, while countless treasures of cobalt and diamonds slip from under our feet every day. This is not a poor country, but a country of the poor." And, telling bedtime stories to her sons, will compare her country to a princess: "The Congo was born too rich and attracted the attention of men from all over the world who wanted to rob the princess to the bone."
I love books like this, when the whole tragedy of the country is shown through the small and inconspicuous stories of individuals. Without excessive moralizing and a clear division into good and bad. Without labels and evaluations. Yes, in Africa everything is complicated. And difficult. But Africa is the "cradle" of humanity for a reason; it knows how to heal its wounds. Ten million years it keeps its fragile balance on the "shaking geological plate" of the East African Rift, and it will not even remember in a thousand years about all the colonizers and missionaries who passed through this land like a hurricane. All will be washed away by the rains and hidden by the jungle...
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