(published in “Avrupa” newspaper)

Barbara Kingsolver is a writer with many talents; she has a degree in biology, wrote for scientific journals and has produced some of the greatest books in our lifetime. Many of her books address broad social issues which make one to pause and furrow their eyebrows as they contemplate over a subject that they really had not thought of considering in the first place. She wrote the famous The Poisonwood Bible (1998) depicting the stern evangelical Nathan Price who takes his family to the Congo jungle, believing that he could save the souls of the natives, little does he know, that his mission turns out to be a test of his own faith. Kingsolver is a writer who believes in writing for the sake of social change, it is refreshing to find female writer in our time who is consciously considerate of not only our social consciousness, but also of our treatment of the planet which has been put so graciously into the care of our hands. Kingsolver even established the Bellwether Prize which awards literature of social changes. Her most recent book, called, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in which Kingsolver and her family learn to live off the land by growing their own vegetables and having some livestock (chickens) and buying food locally from farmer’s markets. But this is not the book that I have chosen to bring to light; instead, it is a book that she wrote in 1993 called Pigs in Heaven, which is the sequel to her first book The Bean Trees (1988).

Pigs in Heaven depicts the lives of Taylor and Turtle, when Taylor was at a rest stop, a Cherokee woman tells her that her sister has died and she can not look after her 3 year old niece and so Taylor finds herself an automatic mother, turning out to be quite a good one, but due to freak circumstances, three years later, it turns out that the Cherokee nation want her back. One of the first impressions that one draws from the novel is Kingsolver’s description of rural Kentucky and the way that she describes the arid land of the desert. Her ability to depict the physical surroundings is paramount to the themes addressed throughout the novel. Dessert settings alert the readers mind to the prospect of survival and how only those as resilient as the cactus can truly make it. The novel questions the importance of belonging to a tribe as well as the blindness that one’s own past hurt can inflict pain upon others, as seen with Annawake Fourkiller who is trying to return Turtle to the Cherokee Nation. The history of the Native American is a sad one, one in which families had been torn apart and reduced to small reservations in which their culture and rights turned into a sick joke. Kingsolver retells the history of their Cherokee nation through strong characters such as young Fourkiller who is trying to maintain a way of life that has been dispersed, as well as through old Cash Stillwater who finds himself returning to his people / tribe in his old age. Kingsolver’s writing his heavily weighed by reasoning and emotion all at once whilst contemplating the duality between love and loyalty.

The importance of the family is prevalent throughout the story, on one side there are the women of Greer family, Alice, Taylor and Turtle which may appear to be a disjointed family, but are far from being so, and to contrast this, there is the tight knit community of the Cherokee nation in which someone always has another person to fall back on. The torment of the novel is the fact that you find yourself agreeing with both sides at the same time, hoping that a compromise will be available to prevent a family being torn apart. During a Q&A session, Kingsolver stated that she tries to “seek out the voices of marginalised people,” and she certainly manages to achieve that in this book. She not only provides a voice for the masses, she also provides one for the individual, which is rarely found to be attainable in one story, especially one that leaves one questioning their own belief system.

©Zehra Mustafa