Essay #1

Edward Said wrote that “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home; its essential sadness can never be surmounted." But he also states that exile can be “an enriching experience.” Change is inevitable, but what is gained from that change is what bears the fruit. In The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, a family raised during the counterculture era takes on an odyssey, a mission trip to Congo. The change, physically and mentally, takes a toll on the characters. Adah Price, the “one that does not speak,” has been distanced ever since her birth. Exiled practically since she was born, Adah cannot emotionally connect with the people she calls her family. Stripped of the only thing she knew about and put into a new place in the puzzle board, Adah opens up her eyes to possibilities never before seen.

Adah was different even when immersed in her culture. Born the black sheep of the family, she was pushed aside by everyone she deemed important. Living in the US with a disability so blatantly clear Adah had to isolate herself from the verbal abuse. The icing on the cake was living under the shadow of her twin sister. Leah portrayed by society as the perfect specimen, Adah had to struggle to try to keep up to the appraisal her twin received. Congo proved to be her stepping stone to the real world. As a person that viewed the world as a silent stump, Adah’s journey proved to be the most distinguished.

She held back from the world, often times using her illness as the root cause of the problem. However, she starts to evaluate her life and the importance of self-reliance during near death experiences.As a result of a lack of physical and emotional comfort, Adah lacked warmth, often resulting to very analytic descriptions of the world around her. Finding comfort in the beauty of the land and its people, she strayed farther away from her family and grew closer to loving the land. After a miss with the lion, Adah comes to realize that she needed to participate in order to get the most out of life. The loose connection she had with her family is strained even more when her mother chose Ruth May over her. That results to her questioning her worth causing her to take two steps backwards from the one step she took forward opening up to the world.

           

The journey to Congo allowed her to realize her worth at end. But most importantly allowed her to find her passion and religion in life: research. Living in Congo, where resources were scarce and life drastically different, helped her get insight on her love of illnesses and viral diseases. It pushed her to come out of her shell and overcome her illness.