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Dramatic Irony
Definition of Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved directly or indirectly, by making... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the... read full definition
Book 1, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Garden Graves:
In Book 1, Leah and Nathan start a garden, but Mama Tataba insists their method of planting will be ineffective. She reshapes their garden in an attempt to help them, and Leah describes the result with metaphors and similes:
Right after prayers I went out to check the progress of our garden, and was stunned to see what Mama Tataba had meant by hills: to me they looked like graves, as wide and long as a regular dead human. She had reshaped our garden overnight into eight neat burial mounds. I fetched my father, who came walking fast as if I’d discovered a viper he meant to behead. My father by then was in a paroxysm of exasperation. He squinted long and hard with his bad eye, to make out the fix our garden was in. Then the two of us together, without a word passing between us, leveled it out again as flat as the Great Plains.
Leah thinks Mama Tataba has created a garden with hills that look "like graves" or "neat burial mounds," a morbid comparison that adds to the strangeness of her new environment. The burial mound metaphor is ironic because these "burial mounds" will actually produce life-sustaining food. In another simile, Leah says her father "came walking fast as if I'd discovered a viper he meant to behead." He seeks to impose American norms on African soil and treats the Congolese villagers' way of life as an evil—like a viper he has to kill in order to be safe. Leah and her father again make the garden "as flat as the Great Plains," a simile that references a part of America dominated by agriculture.
But the flood washes away the seeds and plants, and Nathan realizes Mama Tataba was right:
Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds.
Not long after he leveled the garden, Nathan reshapes it in the way Mama Tataba did earlier. This moment foreshadows much of the book's later events, when the Prices first reject, then accept, and finally rely upon the knowledge and generosity of the villagers.
Related Themes:
