The Poisonwood Bible Leaves Me Thinking 8-20-2015 (Part Three)

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from The Poisonwood Bible Leaves Me Thinking 8-20-2015 (Part Two) sch 10/5/2025] 

Barbara Kingsolver shares with Joseph Conrad a jaundiced view of imperialism. Her language differs from Conrad's. I think she belongs to that America where the King James version was a common sound in American ears. (I made this comment to Joel C. about the language of FX's Justified: its Kentuckian characters grew up in a church where ministers read from the King James Version and aspired to speak at the same levels of speech. Joel C. disagreed with me, but he was an Italian from Staten Island, and what what would he know about the King James Bible!). "He" in the following refers to the father, Nathan Price.

But his kind will always love in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them. The Pharaoh died, says Exodus, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of their bondage. Chains rattle, rivers roll, animalsstartle and bolt, forestgs inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Evan a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flad, casting themselves in bronze. Washington crossing the Delaware. The capture of Okinawa. They're desperate to hang on.

The paragraph following that is where I especially hear Conrad:

But they can't. Even before, the flagpole begins to peal and splinter, the ground underneath arches and moves forward into its own desitny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become possessions of the land. What does Okinawa remember of its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on. The great Delawre rolls on while Mr. Washington himself is no longer what you'd call good compost. The Congo River, being of a different temperment, drowned most of its conquerors outright. In Congo's slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular stupefecation, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music, and sang a new song of her own.

"Oleanna Price, Sanderleng Island, Georgia", Book 5: Exodus; p. 384 - 85

I have almost said all I can about The Poisonwood Bible. My head cramps. It is almost time for recall to my unit building. I leave you with this from Adah on page 496:

...The power is the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

That hit home as a particular truth as well as a general one.

Certainly a novel I would give to any teenage child of mine - as to a few females I know.

J.G. Ballard's Millennium People is next.

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