[Ken Gray]
I have long admired the writing of Barbara Kingsolver. From her debut novels The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, her early non-fiction essay collection High Tide in Tucson, her novel The Poisonwood Bible, and most recently the epic Pulitzer and Women’s prize winning Demon Copperhead I have enjoyed her intelligent and insightful portrayal of life from America to Africa and many places in between.
The notes below are extracted from a recent feature article by Hannah Marriott in The Guardian; I highly recommend you read the full text. I include here her comments in relation to what she calls the “terrifying damage” Trumpians have already done to America and the world. She wields an important countervailing voice to J D Vance’s memory of growing up in Appalachia (Hillbilly Elegy). I repeat, please read the full article. My truncated extracts now follow.
‘The damage is terrifying’: Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel.
Kingsolver, who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, tells [an enthusiastic] audience that the area’s struggles “are things we are supposed to be ashamed of – but they are not our fault.” Rather, she says, they are the legacy of “big companies who came here to take something away.” First that was timber, then coal, “then they came to harvest our pain.”
Kingsolver has been a towering figure in American culture for decades.
She grew up in rural Kentucky, and, after a stint as a journalist in Arizona, has spent most of her adult life on a farm in Washington County, southwest Virginia. Her longstanding literary preoccupations – nature and the web of relationships between people and systems – derive from growing up “around wildness and woodlands”, and from living in a rural community, through which she became aware of “the interconnectedness of our every ambition and accomplishment.”
Rural life and the opioid crisis have not been sufficiently represented in fiction, she says. “Appalachian life in general has not been sufficiently represented. People don’t know the complexity and the nuance.”
Appalachians represent “ecosystems of people, the people in need and the people who give; the Memaws (grandmothers) who take care of all the kids.” She dismisses one infamous account – vice president JD Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy – as a book that was “really all about himself, how he got out and made good, and the people that stay behind, well, are just lazy.”
Appalachian culture, she says, is about modesty and self-reliance. “If he were a real Appalachian, he wouldn’t tell that story.”
Pride, denial and shame are longstanding Kingsolver fascinations. She says that the archetypal American story of the lone hero pulling themselves up by their bootstraps “is just bullshit. We have classes in this country. We have class barriers. There are places you can be born that you’re never going to get out of.” Still, she says, that myth is powerful: it “brainwashes” people; it can lead to self-blame.
It has become so easy for urban people to dismiss all of rural America, to paint us all with the brush of backward, dumb – that was toxic. I’m sure she read this book, and I’m sure she didn’t like that I used that word, but I didn’t mean it personally. It’s just awfully important to get it across that, as Demon says, we have cable. We know what you’re saying about us – and we’re mad about it.”
Trump understands this, she says. He’s the guy who says: “I’m not like them. I’m not a fancy educated guy. I’m one of you. That’s what appealed to people. Shame is such a part of this. He got under people’s sense of shame and found other places to put it.”
She lives in Trump country, and says she understands how he “hooked” so many people, but she never demonises Trump voters herself, describing her neighbours as “some of the most generous, kindhearted people you will ever meet.” She has no kind words for the man himself. His presidency is, she says, “a circus. That’s too kind a word for it. Circuses make you laugh. This one makes you cry. It’s stunning how much damage one ignorant man can do.”
She points out that Trump’s “so-called Big Beautiful Bill” could be devastating for the region, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area.
“The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.”
Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? “Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don’t even know the answer to that,” she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will “come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that’s a depressing subject.”
She writes to her Republican congressman every other day to say: “You studied history. You know better than this. Come on!”
She is seethingly angry with the administration “because the Congress people do know the law. Pretty much all of them come from wealthy backgrounds. They know what all this means, and they’re not standing up to him. I just want them to grow a spine.”
She is not thrilled with the Democrats, either. “I’m very critical of both political parties in this country in terms of how beholden they are to corporate interests. Corporations run this country. It’s really just a question of how much or how little they are willing to spare for the public good. A lot of us have been reading about late capitalism for a long time, and now we’re seeing it.”
In the long term, she says she believes in the Martin Luther King Jr quote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
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