ＥＳＳＡＹ ＃１

For the average person, the idea of "home" varies. Some view it as their house, some view it as their town, and some even just view it as the people and things around them that make up their average day. There's a lot of nostalgia within the idea of a home - family, friends, objects, places. When you're stripped away from this, it makes the idea of losing the familiarity you've grown accustomed to twice as hard. As Edward Said wrote, "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home; its essential sadness can never be surmounted." This quote can be applied to many different stories, real and fiction, but one it applies well to is The Poisonwood Bible. The story is filled with themes of living as an exile and longing for home. 

In The Poisonwood Bible, the Price family is stripped from their home in the south. Due to the fact that their family includes six members varying in age, the nostalgia of home and the worrying of the unknown are different for each member. When you're stripped from your home, you'd want to take every possible thing with you. The fact that the Prices had to travel so lightly and hardly made use of anything they brought also helped the major disconnect of living in the Congo. Trying to make your new home like your old one because of the nostalgia factor and feeling of loss is something that would come natural to them, but when the family finds out about how the Congo really is, there is an even more immense feeling of loss of home. As the quote stated, this sadness could never be surmounted. This is seen by *mostly* everyone in the family.

Throughout the story, you can see the characters' perspectives change about their big move. Whether it was not what they expected or they finally understood the controlling and suppressive ways of their father, the young daughters were the most alienated from their normal lives. The feeling of loss is heavier for them because of the friends, family, and basic comfortable home life they had only been used to for a short time was gone. It is easier for adults to be exiled, due to the fact that they've at least lived a comfortable home life for most of their lives. For the youth, they are in the middle of the biggest change in their lives. To be stripped from all of that, especially to a place as underdeveloped and different as Congo, is crushing. They also see their fathers crazed thirst for controlling and changing the natives, and begin to wonder why they were dragged here in the first place. This disconnect from their old lives also ends up turning the blame on the people who removed them, even if it's their own family. 

In the end, exile does not leave many happy endings. The Price family, who in the beginning of their move was worried about how many coats they'd bring, ended up facing more than they ever thought they would. The guilt of Orleanna over her daughter's death shows the darkest side to this, and how exile ended the life of her own daughter. The rift created between each family member forever changed their lives, when they could have had a normal comfortable life in their home. Despite this, some good did come from exile. The other daughters' career paths are proof of this. But it never had to be this way, if they had just continued living in their home, instead of Nathan exiling himself and his family from his own home.