Hopefully, this is my final connection to The Poisonwood Bible (oh so lovingly nicknamed: the PWB). So if you haven't read the book but are planning to one day, this should be the last post you'll have to skip (there's a few spoilers).
Adah Price is one of five narrators within the book; Her first moment in the spotlight, ie. Chapter 5 in Genesis, provides us with the information that she has the condition hemiplegia. It's appropriate that this is one of the first things told to us since Adah often let her condition define her and her abilities.
She seemed to not always completely agree, but never seemed to directly challenge what the doctors said either. On page 34, Adah writes "sent my parents home over the icy prediction that I might possibly someday learn to read but would never speak a word...It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell."
Throughout the PWB, Adah chose to let her condition define her. She considered herself an observer as opposed to a participant in life. It wasn't until the life threatening invasion of the ants that Adah realized she really did value her life. She began to demand slightly more of herself and enrolled in Emory in Atlanta, Georgia. There, science became her new religion.
What really made a statement to me, however, was the discovery made on page 439. A friend of Adah's, more specifically a neurologist, indicates her condition should not have affected her physical ability. Her limp, is psychological; it's there because she thought it was there and has created it through practice.
Although out of an attempt to prove him wrong, Adah under goes experiments only to discover he is correct.
Adah assumed she would always have physical limitations because that's what she was told and how she was treated. That is the flaw. We can't let the discourses of others or actions of others define our own lives. You don't know something until you can say you proved it to yourself.
In the very cheesiest of ways to end a post -
hold true the steadfast cliche: "You never know until you try".
Figure your own life out for yourself, forget the others.
Interesting take on Adah's paralysis, Alyssa. Though I don't agree that Adah disagreed with the doctors at first (I thought the quote you provided was more about Adah seeing her inability to successfully express herself with words much more common than the doctors did), I think it's a really valuable challenge to an assumption you've brought up: that other people's labels on us are our true limitations. In the future, I'll try to remember that this isn't true. Thanks for your thought-provoking post!-- Kate H
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