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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... 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 4
Explanation and Analysis—Here Comes Moses:
In Book 1, Rachel describes the prayer Nathan gives when the Prices are being welcomed to Kilanga. She compares Nathan to Moses, alluding to an important biblical figure. While Nathan would probably find this comparison flattering, Rachel means it derogatorily and accompanies it with an unflattering simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Then he began to speak. It was not so much a speech as a rising storm. “The Lord rideth,” he said, low and threatening, “upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt.” Hurray! they all cheered, but I felt a knot in my stomach. He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life. “Into Egypt,” he shouted in his rising singsong preaching voice that goes high and low, then higher and lower, back and forth like a saw ripping into a tree trunk, “and every corner of the earth where His light,” Father paused, glaring all about him, “where His light has yet to fall!”
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Book 1, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Garden Graves:
In Book 1, Leah and Nathan start a garden, but Mama Tataba insists their method of planting will be ineffective. She reshapes their garden in an attempt to help them, and Leah describes the result with metaphors and similes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Right after prayers I went out to check the progress of our garden, and was stunned to see what Mama Tataba had meant by hills: to me they looked like graves, as wide and long as a regular dead human. She had reshaped our garden overnight into eight neat burial mounds. I fetched my father, who came walking fast as if I’d discovered a viper he meant to behead. My father by then was in a paroxysm of exasperation. He squinted long and hard with his bad eye, to make out the fix our garden was in. Then the two of us together, without a word passing between us, leveled it out again as flat as the Great Plains.
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Book 1, Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Education:
When Nathan learned that Adah and Leah were considered gifted by their teacher, he dismissed this information with a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+On first hearing Miss Leep’s news he merely rolled his eyes, as if two dogs in his yard had reportedly been caught whistling “Dixie.” He warned Mother not to flout God’s Will by expecting too much for us. “Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,” he still loves to say, as often as possible. “It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.”
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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 2, Chapter 13
Explanation and Analysis—Father of Fish Bait:
In Book 2, Orleanna describes Nathan's understanding of Christianity with metaphors, similes, and irony that highlight her confusions about his faith:
Unlock with LitCharts A+But Nathan wouldn’t hear my worries. For him, our life was as simple as paying in cash and sticking the receipt in your breast pocket: we had the Lord’s protection, he said, because we came to Africa in His service. Yet we sang in church “Tata Nzolo”! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment.
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Book 2, Chapter 21
Explanation and Analysis—Disease:
In Book 2, children and babies in Kilanga begin falling seriously ill. Adah describes their deaths with a metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They are all dying. Dying from kakakaka, the disease that turns the body to a small black pitcher, pitches it over, and pours out all its liquid insides.
Book 3, Chapter 26
Explanation and Analysis—No Wings:
In Book 3, Orleanna describes her childhood and eventual marriage to Nathan. As the reader already knows from the rest of the novel, Nathan has treated Orleanna poorly. As if to defend or explain her choices (perhaps to the reader or to Ruth May), Orleanna uses metaphor, personification, and simple to describe why she put up with Nathan's behavior for so long:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Like Methuselah I cowered beside my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found, like Methuselah, I had no wings. This is why, little beast. I’d lost my wings. Don’t ask me how I gained them back—the story is too unbearable. I trusted too long in false reassurances, believing as we all want to do when men speak of the national interest, that it’s also ours. In the end, my lot was cast with the Congo. Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.
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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.
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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 49
Explanation and Analysis—Sacrificial Pawns:
Book 4 opens with an extended metaphor and simile that explain the history of the Congo. In part through a chess metaphor, Orleanna relates to the reader the Belgian Congo's attempts to achieve self-government and independence, which more powerful nations such as the United States and Belgium undermined:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Languidly they bring their map to order. Who will be the kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at a distance? Which sacrificial pawns will be swept aside? African names roll apart like the heads of dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and forefinger—Ngoma, Mukenge, Mulele, Kasavubu, Lumumba. They crumble to dust on the carpet.
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Book 4, Chapter 50
Explanation and Analysis—Voting on Jesus:
In Book 4, village chief Tata Ndu interrupts one of Nathan's sermons to hold an election on Jesus Christ. In The Poisonwood Bible, democracy and Christianity are both ideologies that Westerners encourage Africans to adopt. By combining them, Tata Ndu undermines Nathan's power and generates situational irony: the two programs seem to have a fundamental incompatibility.
Unlock with LitCharts A+Tata Ndu turned directly to Father and spoke to him in surprisingly careful English, rolling his r’s, placing every syllable like a stone in a hand. “Tata Price, white men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” he said. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.”
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Book 4, Chapter 52
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 5, Chapter 62
Explanation and Analysis—Grief:
In Book 5, Orleanna uses similes to describe her grief over Ruth May's death:
Unlock with LitCharts A+As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop. The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be.
Book 5, Chapter 68
Explanation and Analysis—The Price of a Life:
In Book 5, Leah describes the Congolese reaction to Mobutu's corrupt and inept rule. She uses metaphor and simile to explain that no one powerful cares when Congolese people die, and that only white people's lives will be protected:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They know who stands behind Mobutu, and that in some place as far away as heaven, where the largest rules are made, white and black lives are different kinds of currencies. When thirty foreigners were killed in Stanleyville, each one was tied somehow to a solid exchange, a gold standard like the hard Belgian franc. But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant’s hand, and still not purchase a single banana.
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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.
Book 7
Explanation and Analysis—New Life:
In Book 7, the reader gets a glimpse into a hopeful future for the Congo. Mobutu, stricken with cancer, has given up his dictatorship of the Congo, and an unknown narrator describes the hope this fresh start inspires with metaphorical language and personification:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath, moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests. The eyes in the trees are watching. The animals open their mouths and utter joyful, astonishing words. The enslaved parrot Methuselah, whose flesh has been devoured now by many generations of predators, is forcing his declaration of independence through the mouths of leopards and civet cats.
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