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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.
Orleanna seems to speak directly to the reader, asking them to identify with the forest and imagine themselves within it. She personifies the jungle such that it has a conscience and eyes in its trees. The trees are metaphorically columns, as if part of an awe-inspiring structure. In the same sentence, Orleanna uses a simile to describe the trees as "like muscular animals," further personifying the forest and emphasizing how alive it is. The frogs are metaphorically "war-painted," and a simile compares them to skeletons. The vines personified into stranglers of other vines. The ant queen is personified into a "ravenous" monarch. Even seedlings on the jungle floor are personified into a choir; Orleanna gives them necks and implies they have agency. All of this imagery not only helps the reader imagine this foreign setting, but also sets up one of the themes of the novel: life and death are deeply intertwined.
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:
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.
Adah uses a simile to compare the platter to the Virgin Mary at the time of Jesus's birth. Like the Virgin Mary, who gave birth in a barn surrounded by animals, the plate is "one amazing, beautiful thing" amid surroundings that the Prices find unpleasantly rustic. This is yet another of the biblical allusions that fill the novel. Adah describes the appearance of the plate with rich visual imagery, and it seems so delicate that it glows when sunlight passes through it. Her claim that "we might worship it" could be read as a joke. But it can also be taken somewhat literally because, at this point, the Price women do seem to crave beautiful objects and reminders of their American lives. The earlier comparison to the Virgin Mary also complicates the "worship" statement: the Prices, as Protestants, would likely disapprove of the Catholic ritual of praying to and venerating Mary. So in this paragraph, the plate becomes a semi-taboo idol of what they might few as a lesser religion.
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:
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.
One simile says Mama Mwanza sits "as if planted." This is a comparison that allows readers to better imagine the sitting position of this woman, whose legs are damaged. This simile also suggests that it is Mama Mwanza, and not Belgium or any other power that lays claim to the Congo, who is of this land. In other words, she grows from the Congolese environment. In another simile, Leach says that the Mwanza daughters pound manioc with the steady rhythm of pistons. This device, as well as the imagery throughout the paragraph, allows readers a taste of the everyday life of a Congolese family. Visual and auditory details such as Mama Mwanza's call and the fire licking a "dented cooking can" not only allow readers to more vividly imagine the domestic life of a rural Congolese family, but they also indicate that Leah is paying more attention to the people around her and their lives.
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:
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.
Leah metaphorically calls the jungle a green wall, a seemingly impenetrable and mysterious force. And her simile says that this jungle is "as permanent as a heartbeat"—in other words, the jungle is a steady and often unnoticed but necessary and omnipresent part of Congolese life. Another metaphor makes the humans into "little mice," which demonstrates that anyone living in the Congo is vulnerable and will have to fight for his or her life without any certainty in what comes next. When Leah reflects on American farming, she uses a simile to compare farmers on their tractors to "kings on thrones." Americans, she says, feel an ownership and power over their land. In contrast, the Congo's natural environment seems to control the people who live there. Leah also conjures up visual, tactile, and auditory imagery to describe the forest: she mentions bird calls, the breathing of animals, and the color and wetness of the flora.
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.
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.
The ants are metaphorically "boiling" the landscape. With a simile, Leah compares the ants to "black flowing lava." The ants also make the trees metaphorically seethe and turn the grass into a "field of dark daggers." The first two of these comparisons evokes painfully hot liquid, and all of the metaphors are violent or destructive in some way. Additionally, Leah's description of the ants is full of visual and sensory imagery: every surface is covered by these tiny black creatures that constantly scurry over the landscape, and the ants even smell "vinegary" when stepped on. All of this figurative language allows the reader to imagine the overwhelming violence and pain of an ant swarm.
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:
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.
One simile compares the scavengers to "ruined flagpoles," bent to search for food with their clothes flapping behind them. Notice as well that Adah says "we were like odd ruined flagpoles," as opposed to saying either "I was" or "they were." The use of "we" suggests that she has become one of the villagers in this moment, and just like them, she must scrounge for burnt insects in order to feed herself. The imagery is visual and auditory: the flagpole metaphor allows readers to better imagine the sight of the scavenging, and Adah also tells the reader that the field still hisses from the fire that has passed over it. The caterpillars look like "small twigs" that blend into the ground so well that Adah must sense them rather than seeing them.
Explanation and Analysis—Hunting:
In Book 4, Adah describes the climax of the animal hunt with imagery, metaphors, and personification.
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.
Several different animals are personified: the "warthog children," the baboons that do not understand their imminent death, and the insects that panic. This allows the reader to sympathize with the animals' predicament, and it also emphasizes how life and death are connected: only by burning these innocent animals alive can the villagers survive. A metaphor makes the air, filled with insects, into a "pulpy soup," while the insects swarm so thickly that the air seems to turn to liquid. The visual imagery, which includes this metaphor as well as the descriptions of the animals and the fire, gives the reader a vivid picture of what this unique hunt looks like:
Others would not come out and so they burned: small flame-feathered birds, the churning insects, and a few female baboons who had managed against all odds to carry their pregnancies through the drought. With their bellies underslung with precious clinging babies, they loped behind the heavy-maned males, who would try to save themselves, but on reaching the curtain of flame where the others passed through, they drew up short. Crouched low. Understanding no choice but to burn with their children.
The baboons are further personified here: the females have "precious clinging babies," and the males "[understand] no choice but to burn with their children." The word choice here is subtle, but it effectively humanizes and creates sympathy for these animals. They do not have "offspring" or "juveniles" but instead have "precious clinging babies." The male baboons likewise seem to eventually have enough intelligence to resign themselves to death.
Book 4, Chapter 59
Explanation and Analysis—Birth and Death:
In Book 4, Adah reflects on Ruth May's death with imagery and metaphors.
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.
Adah reflects on the connection between life and death: in her reasoning, one is necessary for the other to exist. Adah metaphorically turns Ruth May's death into a reverse-birth by comparing two physiological elements: a person's first and last breaths, and the "howling" of both a baby and a dying person. She calls the death a "closing parenthesis," and Ruth May herself a palindrome (a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards, of which Adah has made several throughout the novel). "Other-than-life" is a poetic way to refer to death, and it reminds the reader of the fragility of life and the interconnected, cyclical nature of life and death. As Adah says, death metaphorically "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:
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.
This description of the jungle helps the reader understand how its composition influences farming and life in the Congo. The visual imagery of red soil, fungi, and vines allows us to imagine this elaborate and fragile balance of plants and animals. Leah personifies the jungle, first with simile in which she compares "clearing a rain forest" to "stripping an animal first of its fur, then its skin," which indicates how abhorrent she finds deforesting. The personified land "howls," has a face, and can die. Another simile compares the destroyed soil to "the mouths of whales." Metaphorically, "fungi and vines throw a blanket" over the destroyed earth. Finally, the "rowdy society of flora and fauna" evokes a crowded, lively, and barely cooperative community.
Leah also uses the idiom "fly on a wing and a prayer" to describe the often unsuccessful attempt to grow annual crops. (As opposed to perennial plants, annuals must be replanted each harvest, so they are not permanent parts of the land.) To fly on a wing and a prayer means to attempt something that will probably not succeed, like a plane landing with only one wing left.
She metaphorically calls this ecosystem a "trembling geologic plate." This is also literal, since Africa (like all continents) is shaped by the movement of tectonic plates. But the plate becomes metaphorical when Leah describes deforestation in the Congo as "[clearing] off part of the plate" and creating an imbalance. This imbalance causes the plate to tilt and everything to fall off, just as deforestation hurts the rest of the environment in the Congo.
