A life in writing: Barbara Kingsolver
"I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political. Literature is a powerful craft, so we have an obligation to take it seriously"
Maya Jaggi
The Guardian, Saturday 12 June 2010

Left - Barbara Kingsolver. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Barbara Kingsolver, who this week won the Orange prize for fiction for her sixth novel, The Lacuna, spent two years in the early 1960s in the Republic of the Congo, where her American parents were vaccinating people against smallpox outbreaks. For a seven-year-old girl, it was simply a "grand adventure in a forest full of snakes and lions, with cobras on the doorstep". It was only later that she grasped the historical significance of that moment.
"We were there just after independence, but I had no idea of the political intrigue of that era," she says. Until, that is, some 20 years later, when she read of the CIA-backed coup against the elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba, his murder in 1961, and the installing of the dictator Colonel Mobutu. "I knew nothing about postcolonial Africa or Europe's role, or my own country's complicity in what went on."

 It took another decade before Kingsolver combined her childhood memories of place with her later awareness of history, in a far-reaching parable of responsibility and redemption, The Poisonwood Bible (1998). As an American Baptist missionary drags his family to the Belgian Congo (later Zaire), his bullying evangelism is paralleled by cold-war jockeying for mineral wealth, amid plagues of ants and floods, lethal green mamba bites and blood diamonds smuggled from breakaway Katanga. The story is told through the voices of his wife and four daughters, who are "occupied as if by a foreign power", and implicated in his pursuits without ever having chosen them. For Kingsolver, it is an "allegory of the captive witness. We've inherited this history of terrible things done, that enriched us in the US and Europe by pillaging the former colonies. How we feel about that is the question in the book."

The Poisonwood Bible, which was her fourth novel, sold more than four million copies, was chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club and was voted an all-time favourite of reading groups in Britain. All her later novels have made the New York Times bestseller list.
The broad appeal of her story of a mother and daughters may owe something to its faint echoes of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (loved by Kingsolver as a child) or The Joy Luck Club, the bestselling novel by Amy Tan with whom Kingsolver has played keyboards in a charity rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, alongside Stephen King and Carl Hiaasen.
Yet although she says books belong to their readers, she clearly hopes to communicate her political views in the palatable form of page-turners. In much the same way, as a biologist and former science writer and journalist, she aspires to tell people in plain English about science. Her fiction is saved from didacticism or sentimentality by a keen ear for speech, an eye that is sensitive to the natural environment and by a cool scrutiny: "I'm a scientist," she says.

The novelist Russell Banks wrote of Kingsolver's "Chekhovian tenderness towards her characters" and of her humour as "contemporary American – fast, hip and a little outrageous". Critics such as Lee Siegel, who waspishly dubbed her the queen of "Nice Writing", have suggested she appropriates others' pain in a parade of empathy.
"I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political," she says. "Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life. Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people. How can that not affect you politically?" It is, she adds, a "powerful craft; there's alchemy. So we have an obligation to take it seriously – and I do. Perhaps that's why I'm marked. I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing."

Full story at The Guardian.