The author on the long gestation of The Poisonwood Bible, a book that she proscrastinated about for 10 years
Biding her time ... Barbara Kingsolver. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian
Before I wrote The Poisonwood Bible, it haunted my office for a decade in the form of a file cabinet labelled "DAB" – the Damned Africa Book. Into that cabinet I stuffed notes, clippings, photographs, character sketches, plot ideas, anything that struck me as relevant to the huge novel I wished I could write. I did not believe I would ever be writer enough to do it. So the files grew fat, in proportion to my angst about the undertaking.
The whole thing began around 1985 when I read a book called Endless Enemies, by g. It's an analysis of US foreign policy that lays bare the business of governments making enemies by overruling the autonomy of developing nations, much the way a condescending parent would rule a child. The analogy struck me as novelesque: a study of this persistent human flaw – arrogance masquerading as helpfulness – could be a personal story that also functioned as allegory. The story of the CIA-backed coup in the Congo in 1960 struck me as the heart of darkness in a nutshell. I began to imagine a household of teenaged daughters under the insufferable rule of an autocratic father, as a microcosm of the Congolese conflict. And what if I placed them in the Congo, right at the moment when it's trying to throw off colonial rule? The characters would be ignorant of the political drama around them, but the reader would see everything.
The idea seemed so compelling, but to write a novel like that, I would have to know a million things: political history, CIA secrets, the quotidian details of missionary life (because of course, these characters would be Christian missionaries), the teenage culture and language of the late 1950s. And the Congo itself: its flora and fauna, sounds and smells, language and art, its spirituality. I had lived briefly in a Congolese village as a child, and so I had a bank of very visceral memories without any adult context. As for the rest, I was utterly ignorant: what did teenagers care about in 1959? Who assassinated Patrice Lumumba? I couldn't see beyond the walls of my ignorance.
Still, I considered the questions that could be asked in a novel like this. I was hardly even born when my country stole the Congo's fledgling independence and resources, but undoubtedly my country and I have benefited materially from that piracy, so how am I supposed to feel about that? Guilty? Indifferent? Scientifically curious, or politically apologetic? I saw many possible answers, and I liked the idea of creating a character who would personify each point of view: a gaggle of sisters under the dominance of a fierce patriarch, each of whom would try to survive him in her own way. They would tell the story. Gradually each sister gained a personality, and a voice. I practised telling the same scene from three points of view. I discovered I needed a fourth, so one sister split into twins. That's the kick of being a novelist, you get to be God: "Let there be another sister! And there was. And the Novelist said, that is good."
I read and read, for years. Political history, African religion, the King James Bible, self-published missionary memoirs. I found an antique Kikongo-English dictionary. I moved to the Canary Islands for a year so I could make brief research trips into Africa while leaving my young daughter safely ensconced in a European pre-school. Those trips were no place for a child, believe me. I could have written a book about them: waiting 24 hours in one spot until the cab driver collected enough passengers to make a trip to another town (one rode on the roof). Slipping into secret religious ceremonies. Being stopped at a border and lined up for a mandatory anti-cholera injection from the same hypodermic that was used on the 10 people ahead of me. (Luckily I carried my own needle, for just such emergencies.) I saw astounding sights and ate previously unimaginable things.
But one research goal eluded me: I needed to go back to the region of central Congo where I'd lived as a child. That was my setting, but I doubted the accuracy of my memories. In the 90s it was still ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator the US had helped to install 30 years earlier, and because I'd publicly spoken against him, I was not allowed into the country. So I wrote other books instead, biding my time, reading and making outlines and fattening my file cabinet, postponing the project. As long as Mobutu kept me out of his turf, I could never write the damned Africa novel.
Then one day in 1994, my husband called my bluff. "You know what?" he asked. "That's just an excuse. Really, you're scared. You know enough to begin this novel, so just write." I did not know whether he was right or wrong about my knowing enough.
But as for my using Mobutu as an excuse, he was right. So I did it. I began.
• Join John Mullan for a discussion with Barbara Kingsolver at 7pm on Wednesday 29 May in Hall Two, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU.
The idea seemed so compelling, but to write a novel like that, I would have to know a million things: political history, CIA secrets, the quotidian details of missionary life (because of course, these characters would be Christian missionaries), the teenage culture and language of the late 1950s. And the Congo itself: its flora and fauna, sounds and smells, language and art, its spirituality. I had lived briefly in a Congolese village as a child, and so I had a bank of very visceral memories without any adult context. As for the rest, I was utterly ignorant: what did teenagers care about in 1959? Who assassinated Patrice Lumumba? I couldn't see beyond the walls of my ignorance.
Still, I considered the questions that could be asked in a novel like this. I was hardly even born when my country stole the Congo's fledgling independence and resources, but undoubtedly my country and I have benefited materially from that piracy, so how am I supposed to feel about that? Guilty? Indifferent? Scientifically curious, or politically apologetic? I saw many possible answers, and I liked the idea of creating a character who would personify each point of view: a gaggle of sisters under the dominance of a fierce patriarch, each of whom would try to survive him in her own way. They would tell the story. Gradually each sister gained a personality, and a voice. I practised telling the same scene from three points of view. I discovered I needed a fourth, so one sister split into twins. That's the kick of being a novelist, you get to be God: "Let there be another sister! And there was. And the Novelist said, that is good."
I read and read, for years. Political history, African religion, the King James Bible, self-published missionary memoirs. I found an antique Kikongo-English dictionary. I moved to the Canary Islands for a year so I could make brief research trips into Africa while leaving my young daughter safely ensconced in a European pre-school. Those trips were no place for a child, believe me. I could have written a book about them: waiting 24 hours in one spot until the cab driver collected enough passengers to make a trip to another town (one rode on the roof). Slipping into secret religious ceremonies. Being stopped at a border and lined up for a mandatory anti-cholera injection from the same hypodermic that was used on the 10 people ahead of me. (Luckily I carried my own needle, for just such emergencies.) I saw astounding sights and ate previously unimaginable things.
But one research goal eluded me: I needed to go back to the region of central Congo where I'd lived as a child. That was my setting, but I doubted the accuracy of my memories. In the 90s it was still ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator the US had helped to install 30 years earlier, and because I'd publicly spoken against him, I was not allowed into the country. So I wrote other books instead, biding my time, reading and making outlines and fattening my file cabinet, postponing the project. As long as Mobutu kept me out of his turf, I could never write the damned Africa novel.
Then one day in 1994, my husband called my bluff. "You know what?" he asked. "That's just an excuse. Really, you're scared. You know enough to begin this novel, so just write." I did not know whether he was right or wrong about my knowing enough.
But as for my using Mobutu as an excuse, he was right. So I did it. I began.
• Join John Mullan for a discussion with Barbara Kingsolver at 7pm on Wednesday 29 May in Hall Two, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU.
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