Most thoughts connected to “exile”
are unpleasant, and for good reason. Many
times it isn’t a pleasant place to be, exiled.
However in The Poisonwood Bible, by
Barbara Kingsolver, exile proves to be both beneficial as well as unfortunate. While the entire Price family is uprooted
from they’re home in Georgia when they move to the Congo, Leah Price seems to
have suffered and learned the most from the move.
Leah Price truly believed in her
father and his work. She wanted to help
him baptize the entire village and bring God’s word to the “uncivilized”, but
very quickly she learns that maybe her dad isn’t entirely right and that their
new home has more to offer than meets the eye.
Leah has many difficulties learning that her father’s approach to their
missionary trip is incorrect and must reevaluate her prior thoughts when
something and someone that once seemed so certainly correct is now quite
possibly wrong. She always believed in
God and her father and being exiled to a new country and a new culture as shown
her that maybe just because the Congolese do things differently, doesn’t mean
they’re wrong.
Leah also absorbs the new home her
family has found, taking in the culture and traditions. She starts to adapt to her environment, unlike her father,
learning the language and the customs. She learns to hunt like the men in her
new home and even falls in love with a local teacher. Leah’s exile turns out to
be a very good thing for her even though in the beginning, it looked like it
would affect her and her father in similar manners.
The word “exile” isn’t used to
being used in such a positive way. But Leah’s exile certainly enriched her as a
person and changed her life in many positive ways.
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