Lit Circle #4: Exodus: Physiological Critic

Adah:
Through this chapter Adah struggles with self-acceptance as well as self-discovery. Characteristics that were once a burden to her now seem self-defining and precious. Adah did not realize what her differences were worth until they were gone. Her limp was once considered a handicap and liability but, now that she has lost her benduka, she longs to feel the old slanted Ada; which she has lost. “I find I no longer have Ada, the mystery of coming and going. Along with my split body drag I lost my ability to read in the old way.” (Adah: 492). Adah has a hard time accepting her new self, “Oddly enough, it has taken me years to accept my new position.” (Adah: 492). She misses what she used to see, her slant, and the person she no longer is. “When I open a book, the words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page; the mirror-image poems erase themselves half-formed in my mind. I miss those mirror poems.” (Adah: 492). Sometimes when you wake up you realize you are a different person, every day you change and form into a whole new being. Adah feels nostalgic and has a sort of ache for the past. She sometimes tries to recreate what she use to have, “Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up within me. Sometimes it almost comes. The books on the shelf rise up in solid shapes snap forward to meet my eyes. But it never lasts. By morning light, the books are all hunched together again with their spines turned out, fossilized, inanimate.”
Adah also searches for personal answers in this chapter, the main one being why her mother chose her to take out of Africa. Adah felt sure of everything she knew, she was steady in where she belonged in the world, her worth, her rank. “Oh, I knew it all, backward and forward. I learned the balance of power in one long Congolese night, when the driver ants came: the bang on the door, the dark hustle and burning feet, and last of all Adah dragging the permanent singsong of her body left . . . behind. Out into the moonlight where the ground boiled and there stood Mother like a tree rooted motionless in the middle of a storm. Mother staring at me, holding Ruth May in her arms, weighing the two of us against one another. The sweet intact child with golden ringlets and perfectly paired strong legs, or the dark mute adolescent dragging a stubborn, disjunct half-body. Which? After hesitating only a second, she chose to save perfection and leave the damaged. Everyone must choose.”(Adah: 412). This defined how Adah thought of herself, she was not the worthy child, she was not the chosen one and so that is how she founded her worth. But, in this chapter Adah found herself to be worth more than she had ever thought, and so all that she ever thought was now put into question. Her life was complicated, she was not first, but neither was she last, “There was room in Adah for nought but pure love and pure hate. Such a life is satisfying and deeply uncomplicated. Since then, my life has become much more difficult. Because later on, she chose me. In the end she could only carry one child alive out of Africa and I was that child. Would she rather have had Ruth May? Was I the booby prize? Does she look at me and despise her loss? Am I alive only because Ruth May is dead? What truth can I possibly discharge?”(Adah: 413) This is the state we left Adah at the end of the chapter, a time of questioning and self-discovery both because of her new way of seeing the world as well as her new place in her mother’s life.

Orleanna:
Orleanna began the chapter by describing her grief and how she dealt with it. “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 comes floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”(Orleanna: 381) And so, to deal with her unrelenting pain that followed her, she never did stop moving until she brought her baby, Adah back to the U.S. safe and alive. Orleanna had a special attachment to Ruth May, it was her last born and unlike the others, she wanted baby Ruth May to stay with her forever, she cradled her and fed her, cherishing every moment. This was the last first step she would see from her own child and so it counted three fold. Ruth May was the lucky last one, and so by order she was the favorite, but once Ruth May died, Adah was next in line.
Orleanna left Nathan without a word; she never turned around but moved forward, right through anything that might cross her path. She knew deep inside herself that she should have left him long ago and so she feels guilt about it, but also anger. “Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still.” (Orleanna: 384).
After Orleanna had settled back down to life in America, she began to become her own again. Nathan and the Congo forever scarred her, but she was becoming a person apart from him. “The odd thing is when Father was around she never gardened at all. That was his domain, and he directed us all in the planting of useful foods, all to the Glory of God and so forth. We never had one flower in our yard the whole of my childhood. Not so much as a dandelion. Now Mother’s shack is the mere peak of a roof surrounded by a blaze of pinks, blues, oranges. You have to bend under a wild arch of cosmos when you come up the walk, and use your whole right arm to push the hollyhocks aside to get in the front door. It turns out Mother has an extraordinary talent for flowers. She was an entire botanical garden waiting to happen.” (Orleanna: 410). And that’s just it, Orleanna was waiting to happen, perhaps now, she cannot be what she could of, or would have been without Nathan, but she is still becoming someone new and independent. “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.” Orleanna is slowly through an unbearable journey, gaining back her wings. “When I visit her out in her walled garden with her hands sunk into the mulch, kneading the roots of her camellias. If she isn’t home, I walk down to the end of the historic cobbled street and find her standing on the sea wall in her raincoat and no shoes, glaring at the ocean. Orleanna and Africa at a standoff. The kids flying by on bicycles steer clear of this barefoot old woman in her plastic babushka, but I can tell you she is not deranged. My mother’s sanest position is to wear only the necessary parts of the outfit and leave off the rest. Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of the story. All human odes are essentially one. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.”” Orleanna has returned to her unmanaged, shoeless self. No one is controlling her except herself and her ever-haunting guilt.