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“We used to be baffled by Kikongo words with so many different meanings: bangala, for most precious and most insufferable and also poisonwood. That one word brought down father's sermons every time, as he ended them all with the shout ‘Tata Jesus is bangala!'”
In The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998), Leah, one of four sisters, is describing her experience of a paranoid, grandiose, intellectualized missionary father intent on subduing the body Africa through the ritual of baptism. The Poisonwood Bible is a story told in five voices, a postmodern version of A. Kurosawa's (1950) film Rashomon. It is not simply the same events described through different eyes, but a whole tapestry of the growing up together of a mother and four daughters that articulates subjective experience as much different as it is similar. Mother Orleanna Price, Rachel, the twins Leah and Adah, and the youngest, Ruth May, are seared by their experience of the Reverend Price, an increasingly mad evangelical preacher, and by the experience of living in Africa. Africa may be seen as symbolic of the body of the mother, the embodiment of nature and of real bodily experience that both resists the laws of culture and gives rise to the laws of culture. The Reverend Price's increasingly manic attempts to impress the Law of the Father onto the land may be seen as a great Lacanian failure to instantiate the domination of the paternal order onto the feminine body. Obsessed with defeating the flesh, and with bringing his form of salvation to a people he refused to allow to touch his own soul, he retreats further and further into stereotypical language and behavior, mistaking the toxic poisonwood for a simple weed, pulling it out