Death in The Poisionwood Bible

I just finished reading The Poisionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and a quote stuck out to me near the end. On page 528 she writes:

They worshiped everything living and every dead, for voodoo embraces death as its company, not its enemy. It honors the balance between loss and salvation. This is what nelson tried to explain to me once, while we scarped manure from the chicken coop. I could not understand how muntu could refer to a living person or a dead one with equal precision, but Nelson just shrugged. ‘All that is being here.’

This idea of death being a necessary part of life is critical throughout Kingsolver’s novel. The equality of life and death is not something we really talk about in America and in the west. I was raised by a thoughtful family and I cannot recall having ever talked about death. There are so many ideas about death, but many in western culture are still fearful of it, and view ‘death’ as a bad thing, and perhaps it is (interesting blog). It takes people away. It literally kills people.

Death in The Poisionwood Bible is more fluid, more mathematical. A person who is living or dead is muntu. They are still alive when they are dead, and in some ways dead when they are alive. Death is still sad, the Congolese women scream and screech when their children die, but they understand that without death there is no life. Throughout the book, one thing dies so that another may live, and that is the price you have to pay to stay You must hunt and kill animals to keep your children alive. You must choose a child to save when the driver ants come. Adah considers herself to be alive because her younger sister Ruth May is dead. Adah did not kill her, she tried to save her, but she survives later because Ruth May is not there. Death is a necessary part of life, at least the Congolese life as portrayed in The Poisionwood Bible. There is a cycle of life and death that is forever upheld in the Congo.