Adah In Emily Dickinson's Poems

In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Adah’s birds eye view of the world and descriptive voice brings a different view to the events that occur in the Congo. Her character demonstrates this through her genuine compassion towards the Congolese women and by saying that her father’s assessment of the women was illogical through her diction and point of view. Adah’s attitude towards the Congolese women is shown to be compassionate through her diction when describing the mourning women. She used words like “why, why, why” and “crawled” to demonstrate the women's broken hearts. Unlike her father she viewed the women in a state of loss and grief while her father saw them as the culprits behind the childrens death.

Adah Price: an embodiment of the Congo. In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Adah Price serves as an embodiment of the Congo before and after imperialism. By having Adah symbolize the Congo, Kingsolver emphasizes her message of the society’s lack of understanding and discrimination of different cultures and ideals: and idea still prevalent today with the rise of islamophobia across America. To begin, Adah’s initial purpose in the novel is to serve as an embodiment of the pre-imperialism Congo. Kingsolver quickly introduces this as even Adah herself remarks, “When you do not speak other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded” (Kingsolver 34).

Adah is saying that to make her father pleased even though most of the statements that he says to the people of Kilanga are wrong. The best example to show that Nathan was trying to get himself killed in which his wife and the Price girls try to save him is when He was told by his family that everyone in Kilanga is afraid of baptism because there are crocodiles in the river. In the end when a child really did get eaten by a crocodile, some angry villagers then decided to chase him and kill him as he got blamed for killing most of the innocent children in the village of Kilanga. In this example we saw how Nathan is trying to convince all of the people of Kilanga to baptize themselves in the river which didn’t work out

Ada did not know anything about life, and being able to live off of the land. It was almost as if her education was completely pointless. Being a girl during the civil war you had no rights to anything. It was not really her fought that she did not know anything about living off the land because she never had the option to learn how too. Ada was living day-to-day trying to survive off eggs that she would find every now and then.

Adah felt that she wasn’t a freak unlike how she felt back home because so many people in the Congo had missing limbs and handicaps so no one looked at her as if she was so different, besides the color of her skin. She was also very affected by the physical surroundings one night when there was a large swarm of ants on the village and there was no way she was able to save herself from almost being trampled to death, that was when she finally realised that she truly cared about her life. This lead her to becoming a doctor in the future and putting her intelligence to the test and finding a cure for her disease and overcoming her limp.. In Orleanna’s case the physical surroundings (green mamba snakes) had taken her youngest daughter Ruth May from her and had affected her like nothing else in her life had. She was finally able to act for herself and her family once again.

Since Adah can’t speak she writes in a palindromes to communicate her thoughts in a journal. Palindromes are a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backwards as forward. Using this signifies the way that Adah thinks and how she can see things in a different way than what others can. This symbolizes that Adah sees more than one side to things, and will always look for another perspective on something before she makes her final opinion on

Adah alludes to the fact that her mother, Orleanna, finds herself “owning, disowning, recanting and recharting” the events that took place after her husband moved her and her children to congo (Kingsolver 492). That maybe why her chapters are the only ones written in past tense. Orleanna

Being in the Congo forces Adah to look at her disability in a different way—almost like reading a book backward. "Nobody cares that she 's bad on one whole side," she says, "because they 've all got their own handicap" (1.7.11). People in Kilanga are missing arms, legs, and eyes, and they go on about their daily business like it 's no big thing. We have a feeling she has the same view of her body as many people in Kilanga do: it 's just a tool, a vessel to carry her through this life.

Her twin sister, Adah, even labeled Leah as Nathan’s “star pupil” in regards to her knowledge in the Bible. This helps to show the commitment Leah had to Nathan’s judgement and conservative ideals that marked those of the Congo as rotten and sinful in the eyes of God. Due to her dedication and choice to follow the ideas and footsteps of her father, Leah was unable to see the Congolese

She refuses to communicate with anyone including her family which causes others to think she is mentally ill. Yet she is intellectual and is the only daughter to attend college. Which proves the claim that Nathan states about sending a girl to college fallacious. Adah is also one of the first daughters to cease her connection with God. “[...] while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice [...] I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God” (pg 171).

Not only does Adah have her own unique ways of thinking, but also she is very connected to poetry. She uses it often to connect her problems to other people, since she cannot always relate to those in her family. “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me,” (Kingsolver 365). This

Diction is an important literary device used to shape Melinda’s character and mannerism. Diction is the author’s choice of phrases to express ideas in their work. Anderson uses this to depict Melinda’s thoughts, such as,“ I grab a seat. Another wounded zebra turns and smiles at me.” The author’s word choice of “wounded zebra” communicates Melinda’s thoughts; or voice, through her clouded interpretations of her peers.

Additionally, the narrator realizes her consciousness is constantly changing as she “loves the thing untouched by lore…the thing that is not cultivated… the thing built up” (473). The narrator’s consciousness faces another struggle between trying to find equal good in both the culture of her people and the new culture that has been introduced to her. Yet, she stands boldly “one foot in the dark, the other in the light” (473), as she forms a bridge between the two cultures and is stuck while she tries to understand her sense of self. Finally, the silent voice, a metaphor for her faith, calls out to her.

Unlike others, Adah views herself as whole. Yet she struggles to accept in the years to come why she made it out of the Congo, but unfortunately, no answers came. However, hatred and resentment never fade. Adah bares anger and resents those who have done her wrong: her mother, her father, her sisters.

Adah is a cynical person who never fully experiences life. Adah speaks little to nothing in the beginning of the novel because “When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.” (Page 34) As Adah grows older, however, she loses her negative viewpoints she had when she was younger. After overcoming her health issues, she was born a new person.