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Idioms
Definition of Imagery
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition
Book 1, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Picture the Forest:
In the highly descriptive opening of Book 1, Orleanna describes the Congolese jungle with imagery, similes, personification, and metaphor. This figurative language in the following passage forms a motif that will recur throughout the book: a living, personified land that reminds readers of Africa's unique environment, culture, history, and future.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.
Book 1, Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—The Platter:
In Book 1, Adah describes the left-behind broken furniture and décor in their Kilanga house. The last item she describes, with evocative imagery and a religious simile, is a beautiful platter:
Unlock with LitCharts A+And in the midst of this rabble, serene as the Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock, one amazing, beautiful thing: a large, oval white platter painted with delicate blue forget-me-nots, bone china, so fine that sunlight passes through it. Its origin is unfathomable. If we forgot ourselves we might worship it.
Book 3, Chapter 31
Explanation and Analysis—The Mwanza Family:
In Book 3, Leah asks Anatole why Americans are in the Congo if Belgium owns the Congo. In response to her poor choice of words, Anatole asks her to look around: does this village really belong to Belgium? Did it ever? Leah sees the Mwanza family and describes their life with similes and imagery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I looked, as he commanded: Mama Mwanza with her disfigured legs and her small, noble head both wrapped in bright yellow calico. In the hard-packed dirt she sat as if planted there, in front of a little fire that licked at her dented cooking can. She leaned back on her hands and raised her face to the sky, shouting her bidding, and a chorus of halfhearted answers came back from her boys inside the mud-thatch house. Near the open doorway, the two older daughters stood pounding manioc in the tall wooden mortar. As one girl raised her pounding club the other girl’s went down into the narrow hole—up and down, a perfect, even rhythm like the pumping of pistons.
Related Themes:
Book 3, Chapter 41
Explanation and Analysis—Permanent as a Heartbeat:
In Book 3, Leah and Anatole once again talk about the differences between the Congo and the United States. Leah describes the jungle and compares the Congo's natural environment that of the United States using metaphors, similes, and imagery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I stared at the edge of the clearing behind us, where the jungle closed us out with its great green wall of trees, bird calls, animals breathing, all as permanent as a heartbeat we heard in our sleep. Surrounding us was a thick, wet, living stand of trees and tall grasses stretching all the way across Congo. And we were nothing but little mice squirming through it in our dark little pathways. In Congo, it seems the land owns the people. How could I explain to Anatole about soybean fields where men sat in huge tractors like kings on thrones, taming the soil from one horizon to the other? It seemed like a memory trick or a bluegreen dream: impossible.
Book 3, Chapter 44
Explanation and Analysis—Ants:
In Book 3, Leah describes her first sight of the ant swarm with similes, metaphors, and imagery.
Unlock with LitCharts A+Ants. We were walking on, surrounded, enclosed, enveloped, being eaten by ants. Every surface was covered and boiling, and the path like black flowing lava in the moonlight. Dark, bulbous tree trunks seethed and bulged. The grass had become a field of dark daggers standing upright, churning and crumpling in on themselves. We walked on ants and ran on them, releasing their vinegary smell to the weird, quiet night.
Book 4, Chapter 52
Explanation and Analysis—Hunting:
In Book 4, Adah describes the climax of the animal hunt with imagery, metaphors, and personification.
Unlock with LitCharts A+As the ring burned smaller we suddenly caught sight of its other side, the red-orange tongues and black ash closing in. The looming shapes of animals bunched up inside: antelopes, bushbucks, broad-headed warthogs with warthog children running behind them. A troop of baboons ran with arched tails flying as they zigzagged, not yet understanding their entrapment. Thousands of insects beat the air to a pulpy soup of animal panic.
Explanation and Analysis—Slow Scavengers :
In Book 4, Kilanga experiences a drought that begins a famine. The villagers decide, as a last resort, to undertake a special kind of hunt, during which they will set fire to a section of the landscape to trap and kill animals. With imagery and similes, Adah describes scavenging through the burnt land for dead insects to eat:
Unlock with LitCharts A+We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. Slow scavengers. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep.
Book 4, Chapter 59
Explanation and Analysis—Birth and Death:
In Book 4, Adah reflects on Ruth May's death with imagery and metaphors.
Unlock with LitCharts A+I was not present at Ruth May’s birth but I have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The closing parenthesis, at the end of the palindrome that was Ruth May. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby’s first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living.
Book 6, Chapter 77
Explanation and Analysis—The Land Howls:
In Book 6, Leah uses multiple literary devices (metaphor, simile, personification, imagery, and idiom) to explain the natural environment of the Congo and the unique farming techniques it requires:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Clearing a rain forest to plant annuals is like stripping an animal first of its fur, then its skin. The land howls. Annual crops fly on a wing and a prayer. And even if you manage to get a harvest, why, you need roads to take it out! Take one trip overland here and you’ll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream. The soil falls apart. The earth melts into red gashes like the mouths of whales. Fungi and vines throw a blanket over the face of the dead land. It’s simple, really. Central Africa is a rowdy society of flora and fauna that have managed to balance together on a trembling geologic plate for ten million years: when you clear off part of the plate, the whole slides into ruin.
