ABSTRACT
This book considers contemporary representations of childhood; they struggle to approximate the way one thought and imagined as a child, always with a sense of the presentness of the past. Arundhati Roy chose to tell the tragic story of the disintegration of a family through the perspective of children. Both Arundhati Roy and Barbara Kingsolver explore the connection between childhood and history, childhood as history of the self. Their stories depict childhood as a microcosmic site of colonization, similar to the colonizing of the less industrialized nations by white imperialist nations. The extraordinary sensuousness of childhood offers a highly poetic narrative. The book is teeming with images, sounds, tastes, and tactile impressions that suggest our earliest memories and ways of perceiving the world. In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver makes manifest her hatred of patriarchal oppression of women, children, and nations. The Poisonwood Bible becomes the story of the construction of the story of childhood.
