Essay #1

            People often say that they want to travel and get away from home, but what if once you traveled you could not return home? This is the basis of exile. Never returning and being completely barred from your native land that you call home. Edward Said says that, “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,” but he also says that it can be “potent, even enriching”. This idea of exile is experienced dramatically by one of the characters in the book The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver named Adah who is both alienated from her home but also finds that she is enriched by the struggles that she experiences.

            Adah is a young girl that lives with her family that is very religious and follows the Christian faith very closely. She also has a mental condition that doesn’t allow her to use the left side of her body at all. This means that she is constantly watched and cared for by her family. This all changes when the family is “exiled” to the Congo when they go on a mission trip. While they are there the village is attacked by ants and Adah has trouble getting away from them because of her limp. While struggling to save herself, Adah is left by her family. Adah is not only alienated from her native land at this point but she is also alienated from the family that she thought cared for her.

            Even before she was exiled Adah decided that she didn’t want to talk unless it was an emergency because she was always more keen on observing what was happening around her than actually involving herself. This starts to change when Adah becomes “enriched” through the daunting struggles that she must overcome while exiled from her home. She becomes enriched while the village is under attack by ants and she realizes that she wants to actually save herself and do something for herself. At this moment Adah decides that she may no longer want to be the observer that she once was in her native land. The experience that Adah goes through changes her entire mentality so much that she eventually overcomes her handicaps that she has and decides that she wants to study science and get involved with the way the world works around her.

            While being exiled from her home and forced to live somewhere else, Adah overcomes strenuous challenges that have both enriched her mentality and alienated her from not only her home but also her family. In the novel, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver we can truly understand what is being said about exile by the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said. Alienation from one’s native land and enrichment of oneself is what truly can be expected from exile.