|
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
* *
* * *
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 Jerry 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.
* *
* * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
* * *
|
Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
updated 4 November 2007
|
