The Things We Took Away Orleanna simply says it best: “We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away”(10). The five Price women enter the Congo with certain things: a stainless-steel thimble, materialistic tendencies, Betty Crocker cake mixes, white privilege, ivory hand mirrors, and stereotypical American ignorance, to name a few. However, the things they leave with are significantly different. They took away a sense of enlightenment, worldly balance, guilt, and shame from Africa, and, most importantly, the loss of Ruth May. Throughout The Posionwood Bible, the Congo molded the Price women, it shaped their souls. Orleanna, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May were all affected by their time in the Congo, varying greatly in their final philosophical perceptions— they lie on a spectrum of apathy to deliberating guilt, with cynicism, realism, and balance speckled throughout the …show more content…
Her balance, however, is less about the equilibrium between right and wrong,; it takes more of a scientific viewpoint. She sees a sense of natural balance between the dead and alive, hunter and hunted, virus and infected. Adah goes through her life depending on empirical analysis, taking in her surroundings and learning from them. Because of this, her disposition seems to span across the boundaries of cynicism and realism; however, Adah as she is in the end would not be the Adah she is, if she were not the Adah she was in the beginning. She was cynical as a child, as she felt disadvantaged and passed over due to her circumstances. This early cynicism eventually developed into her happier, but still very much objective, realism. Her time in the the Congo allowed Adah to realize this, to observe what life gives and what it takes away, to take in nature’s everything, muntu: “‘All that is being is here’’’(528). Adah views the world as it is, and gives everything that lives in it