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Books by George Bernard
Shaw
The
Adventures
of
the Black Girl in Her Search for God
/
Pygmalion /
Saint Joan /
Major Barbara
Man and Superman /
Arms and the Man /
Heartbreak House /
The Philanderer /
Mrs. Warren's Profession
My Fair Lady /
Back to Methuselah /
An Unsocial Socialist /
Shaw on Shakespeare
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Tending
One’s Own Garden
A
Review of Bernard Shaw’s 1933 Fable
The
Adventures
of the Black Girl in Her Search for God
By Rudolph Lewis My recent discovery of Bernard Shaw’s
The
Adventures of Black Girl in Her Search for God (1933) made
me realize that Western perspectives of Africa can be surprising
and delightful. Professors and pundits too often believe we
Negro authors are touchy, too inclined toward the untypical and
the improbable. This literary trait reveals itself also in
Shaw’s portrayal of a young African woman attacking Western
values and hypocrisy.
Professor Ward reminds me that Shaw had a
“penchant for thesis plays.” That critique, still potent,
questions whether “prodigies,” such as Shaw’s Black Girl,
can lead to “serious art.” My friend H.L. fondly and
mockingly called the use of such devices as “sociology.”
The 1930s indeed flowered this genre: proletarian art or
utilitarian art, as its detractors called it. Art, they tell us,
“deals with normalities.”
But Shaw’s Black Girl is no simple
“word-machine,” as some contend. A feminist may respond she
is a “cipher.” Black Girl indeed is a mask Shaw used to mock
Western religion. But there is more. In the African mask, Shaw
is captured and realizes how humanity is restricted and
artificially limited. An African fable inundated by ideologies,
Shaw wretches at that which justifies horror and destruction.
Forgivingly, Shaw uses the old exotic props
of primitivism—the forest (jungle), talking animals,
nakedness, voodoo, the African’s innocence and lack of
sophistication, and the God-like overarching British colonial
presence. He realizes that this is the norm of the Western view
of the native. Shaw himself, however, is no racialist and this
fact becomes evident in Black Girl’s escape from the hostility
of the “Caravan of the Curious.”
She dared challenge the behavior and
cynicism of Europe’s modern civilized elite, both gentlemen
and ladies. As one British lady insists, Black Girl should not
have been at all allowed to speak, and threatens to “put a
bullet through her.” Black Girl “knew that what she had done
was a flogging matter.” Refusing to be silent by the
externalities of power, she states her awareness of racial
oppression, for “no plea of defence would avail a black
defendant against a white plaintiff.”
But she “did not worry about the mounted police; for in
that district they were very scarce.”
So Shaw keenly appreciated the racialist
blindness as well as the religious sentiments that have engulfed
the civilized reasoning of Western culture. Though we may wince
at Shaw’s use of terms like “picaninny” and “fetischism,”
he has characterized a discerning black woman who is not easily
bamboozled. Feet planted solidly on the earth, there is no
flightiness about her. She knows how to tend her own garden.
Nevertheless, some have concluded that
Shaw’s fable, written in South Africa in 1932, was not about
“black liberation.” On the contrary, the witty barbs of
Shaw, I suspect, were directed at the British enclave in
colonial South Africa. Their racialism concealed on the foggy
isle revealed itself in all its ghastliness in sunny Africa. We
may indeed have here Shaw’s prescription (his food) for
“black liberation.”
The missionary in Shaw’s tale is also a
British woman. She suffers a lack of intimacy with men, that is,
with white men. Religion became her blanket. She was “steeped
from her birth in the pseudo Christianity of the Churches.”
Shaw’s African woman can sense this missionary’s faulty
ignorance. She searches for her own truth.
A book of 70 pages,
The
Adventures of Black Girl in Her Search for God is interlaced with drawings
of Shaw’s “Black Girl” – unashamedly naked. The
artist’s renderings of Black girl fall short of Shaw’s
representation of blackness. Distressingly the mix of race and
sexuality remains an unsettling matter in Western culture and
religious sensibility. In the end Black Girl marries an Irishman
and has his children.
Black girl critiques the self-pleasing
manner in which the “image maker” moulds Western notions of
womanhood.
“Why,” she asks, “is her lower half
hidden in a sack. She is neither a goddess nor a woman: she is
ashamed of half her body, and the other half of her is what the
white people call a lady. She is ladylike and beautiful; and a
white Governor General would be glad to have her at the head of
his house; but to my mind she has no conscience; and that makes
her inhuman without making her godlike. I have no use for
her.”
These words are not those of a “cipher”
or that of a simple “mask.” The cultural sentiment here
indeed may be a “normal” sensibility of actual African
women.
Black Girl’s nakedness is symbolic rather
than an object of Shaw’s moral distaste or mockery. Shaw’s
compassion for the African woman calls into question Western
notions of womanhood and civilized airs of racial superiority.
Old Testament morality and its repressive patriarchy failed to
reach disastrously deep to thwart the African’s love of the
dance and rhythm that liberates the spirit.
With her knobkerry (a carved stick) in
hand, ready to smash “nonsense,” Black Girl concludes,
“There are too many old men pretending to be gods.”
This African woman refuses to relinquish control over her own
body.
In her search Black Girl encounters the
Gods of the Old Testament (of Noah, Job, and Micah) and the Gods
of the New Testament (of Jesus, Peter, and Paul) and converses
with both Muhammad and the conjure man. Their “cure-all
commandments,” are like “pills
the cheap jacks sell . . . useful once in twenty times perhaps,
but in the other nineteen they are of no use.” They are no
substitute for the mind that God gave her.
Shaw’s critique is directed also at the
materialist gods of science. Shaw’s “myop,” a behaviorist,
cannot distinguish a log from an alligator. To him, Black Girl
responds, “Have you ever considered the effect of your
experiments on other people’s minds and characters? Is it
worth while losing your own soul and damning everybody else’s
to find out something about a dog’s spittle?”
We lack that needed internality
(spirituality) of true divine inspiration and thus we carry
churches (or synagogues or mosques or temples or stools or
microscopes) upon our shoulders, while we throw “stones” at
the harlot in the market square. Held up for five weeks in
Knysna [South Africa] seventy years ago, Shaw wrote
prophetically then of our “present world crisis.”
We experience in Shaw’s fable the
absurdity of Western presumptiveness. Colonial efforts to
transplant political, economic, and cultural kingdoms fail in
foreign soil. That may indeed be Shaw’s disturbing thesis.
Black Girl, however, represents realistically an African
sentiment that shuns all demagoguery: “when people come loving
you and wanting your soul as well as your mind and body, you cry
‘Keep your distance: I belong to myself, not to you.’”
Life’s answers are in each of us and
their truths can be discovered as we each tend our own gardens,
Black Girl realizes. In
The
Adventures of Black Girl in Her Search for God Shaw produced an art that causes scales to
fall away, rather than propaganda with a fixed ideological view.
A second reading of Shaw will make us all wiser.
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updated 4 November 2007 |
