The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God E-Book

Bernard Shaw

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 116

Beschreibung

Where is God? Taking the maxim 'seek and ye shall find' literally, a recently converted African girl embarks upon her own quest to find God. With only her bible as a guide she plunges into the jungle, where alongside snakes and lions she meets a dazzling array of religious and philosophical figures, from the God of Noah to Jesus, the Prophet and Voltaire, each one seeking to convince her of their claim to truth. So controversial was Shaw's Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God when it first appeared in 1932 that it provoked a public outcry, with Shaw decried as a blasphemer. This brilliantly sardonic allegory showcases some of Shaw's more unorthodox thoughts on race, religion and God, while remaining a fascinating tale of the universal search for truth.

Leseprobe

THE ADVENTURES OF THE BLACK GIRL IN HER SEARCH FOR GOD

BERNARD SHAW

FOREWORD BYCOLM TÓIBÍN

WOOD ENGRAVINGS BYJOHN FARLEIGH

DEFINITIVE TEXT UNDER THE SUPERVISION OFDAN H. LAURENCE

First published in 1932

Copyright © 1932, 1934 by George Bernard Shaw

Copyright © 1959, 1961 The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2006

Ebook edition published in 2024

Foreword © Colm Tóibín, 2006

ISBN (e-book): 978-1-84391-346-7

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-422-8

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Colm Tóibín

The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

Afterword

Notes

Biographical Note

FOREWORD

COLM TÓIBÍN

There is nothing more quintessentially Irish than a displaced Irish Protestant. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a number of these Irishmen triumphed in London, using their Irishness as a weapon to mock and unsettle and seduce the English. Their Irishness came in the form of eloquence, an abiding disrespect for all pieties and accepted truths, especially English ones, and a sense, despite setbacks and relative poverty, that the world belonged to them, and that their destiny lay in having this fully understood by all who came within their sphere of influence and many who did not. Some of them were greatly helped by having ‘the important advantage,’ as Bernard Shaw put it, ‘of not being nearly as disagreeable personally as one would suppose from my writings.’

Thus Lady Gregory could note in her diary in 1894 that she had been impressed by the poet W.B. Yeats whom she met at Lord Morris’s in London. He was, she wrote, ‘looking every inch a poet, though I think his prose “Celtic Twilight” is the best thing he has done.’ Yeats, not yet thirty years old and almost penniless, had set about establishing the romantic mystery of Ireland against the hard dull clarity of England, had made the English feel that the smaller, weaker island could slowly become in poetry and plays the cultural centre rather than the periphery. At that same time, Oscar Wilde could turn out a number of well-made plays that would deeply undermine the seriousness of the English ruling class, mocking their very voices and their most basic beliefs, leaving his audiences unsure whether they were enjoying a good laugh, or a joke at their own expense.

Bernard Shaw arrived in London from Dublin in 1876, at the age of twenty, armed with his own intelligence. When the critic William Archer first saw him he was in the Reading Room of the British Museum balancing a French translation of Das Kapital against the orchestral score of Tristan und Isolde. He was in the process, as his biographer Michael Holroyd so brilliantly makes clear, of reinventing himself in London, just as Yeats and Wilde were to do, losing his provincial manners and his shyness. He was ready to do battle for human progress and reason, using a tone, as one of his critics would point out, that mixed the morally purposeful and the deeply frivolous.

In a letter to Shaw, W.B. Yeats remarked on the playwright’s method: ‘Hitherto you have taken your situations from melodrama, and called up logic to make them ridiculous.’ Shaw’s character Larry Doyle in John Bull’s Other Island gives voice to this wonderful dichotomy between fantasy and logic in Shaw’s own way of thinking and writing: ‘Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal.’

For Shaw, as for Jonathan Swift, logic had no limits. He could begin with the brutality of facts and add logic to render them absurd, as insult can be added to injury. He loved the workings of his own mind, and this love made him seem brave and outspoken. When Queen Victoria died, for example, he had no trouble writing to the newspapers to announce, in the name of reason and progress, that her lying-in-state was ‘insanitary.’

For such a mind as Shaw’s, religion was a godsend, so full of dreams, so open to mockery and so lacking in logic. He could have a lifetime laughing at it. When he was twenty-three and looking for work at the Imperial Bank in South Kensington, a family friend warned: ‘Your son must not talk about religion or give his views thereon.’ Clearly, these unhelpful views were known to both Shaw’s family and the family friend. His own background as an Irish Protestant had not given Shaw cause for much devotion or soul searching. ‘Irish Protestantism,’ he explained, ‘was not then a religion: it was a side in political faction, a class prejudice, a conviction that Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons who will go to hell when they die and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession of Protestant ladies and gentlemen.’

For Shaw the music critic, the allure of music, his life in contact with its dreams, did not stretch to oratorio or religious music. Brahms’s German Requiem was ‘patiently borne only by the corpse,’ he wrote. It is easy to imagine him, favouring socialism and detachment from the fear of death, sitting impatiently as a choir and soloists called sonorously on God. As Michael Holroyd has written: ‘He empties these works of poetry and makes them colossal monuments to boredom. He literally cannot listen to them.’

A whiff of blasphemy would surround some of Shaw’s most important plays, such as Major Barbara (1905) in which Barbara tells Undershaft: ‘You may be a devil; but God speaks through you sometimes.’ In The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Blanco refers to God as ‘a sly one... a mean one.’ Shaw would write more than fifty articles against the censorship of plays, which added to the reputation of his plays as objects much in need of censorship. In his Preface to Blanco Posnet he wrote:

I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals. In particular, I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong, and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as understood in England today with abhorrence.

In his introduction to Major Barbara Shaw referred to the ‘part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the black races of Africa to their subjugation by European capitalism.’ Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, written in seventeen days in South Africa in 1932, used the form of Voltaire’s Candide to explore further the theme of religion and the future of the black and white races. On the latter subject he favoured intermarriage (‘I believe in fusion. The more fusion the better.’) On the former subject he allowed once more logic and absurdity to undermine religion’s authority.

The book was published on 5th December 1932, looking slightly like a Christmas card with engravings by a young artist called John Farleigh. It sold in large numbers: 100,000 in England and more than 50,000 in the United States. ‘If it were not for the author’s prestige,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary, ‘it would be considered blasphemous by all churchmen, conventional or genuine.’ It was banned in the Irish Free State.

To one religious admirer who disapproved of the book Shaw wrote: ‘Has it never occurred to you that I might possibly have a more exalted notion of divinity?’ He might equally have defended himself by saying that the Black Girl stood for his own restless search, logic in one hand and dreams of a bright future for mankind in the other, for a truthful way to live. Like the girl, Shaw was asking questions all of his long life; he answered many of them before he had finished, not being one of nature’s listeners. Like her, he was always ready to move on, to the next issue and argument, the next delightful phrase, the next glorious paradox. His own adventures, in all their intensity, had, despite his best intentions, and sometimes because of them, an almost divine tinge.

THE ADVENTURES OF THE BLACK GIRL IN HER SEARCH FOR GOD

Where is God?’ said the black girl to the missionary who had converted her.

‘He has said “Seek and ye shall find me”’ said the missionary.

The missionary was a small white woman, not yet thirty: an odd little body who had found no satisfaction for her soul with her very respectable and fairly well-to-do family in her native England, and had settled down in the African forest to teach little African children to love Christ and adore the Cross. She was a born apostle of love. At school she had adored one or other of her teachers with an idolatry that was proof against all snubbing, but had never cared much for girls of her own age and standing. At eighteen she began falling in love with earnest clergymen, and actually became engaged to six of them in succession. But when it came to the point she always broke it off; for these love affairs, full at first of ecstatic happiness and hope, somehow became unreal and eluded her in the end. The clergymen thus suddenly and unaccountably disengaged did not always conceal their sense of relief and escape, as if they too had discovered that the dream was only a dream, or a sort of metaphor by which they had striven to express the real thing, but not itself the real thing.

One of the jilted, however, committed suicide; and this tragedy gave her an extraordinary joy. It seemed to take her from a fool’s paradise of false happiness into a real region in which intense suffering became transcendent rapture.

But it put an end to her queer marriage engagements. Not that it was the last of them. But a worldly cousin, of whose wit she was a little afraid, and who roundly called her a coquette and a jilt, one day accused her of playing in her later engagements for another suicide, and told her that many a woman had been hanged for less. And though she knew in a way that this was not true, and that the cousin, being a woman of this world, did not understand; yet she knew also that in the worldly way it was true enough, and that she must give up this strange game of seducing men into engagements which she now knew she would never keep. So she jilted the sixth clergyman and went to plant the cross in darkest Africa; and the last stirring in her of what she repudiated as sin was a flash of rage when he married the cousin, through whose wit and worldly wisdom he at last became a bishop in spite of himself.

The black girl, a fine creature, whose satin skin and shining muscles made the white missionary folk seem like ashen ghosts by contrast, was an interesting but unsatisfactory convert; for instead of taking Christianity with sweet docility exactly as it was administered to her, she met it with unexpected interrogative reactions which forced her teacher to improvize doctrinal replies and invent evidence on the spur of the moment to such an extent that at last she could not conceal from herself that the life of Christ, as she narrated it, had accreted so many circumstantial details and such a body of home-made doctrine that the Evangelists would have been amazed and confounded if they had been alive to hear it all put forward on their authority. Indeed the missionary’s choice of a specially remote station, which had been at first an act of devotion, very soon became a necessity, as the appearance of a rival missionary would have led to the discovery that though some of the finest plums in the gospel pudding concocted by her had been picked out of the Bible, and the scenery and dramatis personae borrowed from it, yet the resultant religion was, in spite of this element of compilation, really a product of the missionary’s own direct inspiration. Only as a solitary pioneer missionary could she be her own Church and determine its canon without fear of being excommunicated as a heretic.

But she was perhaps rash when, having taught the black girl to read, she gave her a bible on her birthday. For when the black girl, receiving her teacher’s reply very literally, took her knobkerry and strode right off into the African forest in search of God, she took the bible with her as her guidebook.

The first thing she met was a mamba snake, one of the few poisonous snakes that will attack mankind if crossed. Now the missionary, who was fond of making pets of animals because they were affectionate and never asked questions, had taught the black girl never to kill anything if she could help it, and never to be afraid of anything. So she grasped her knobkerry a little tighter and said to the mamba ‘I wonder who made you, and why he gave you the will to kill me and the venom to do it with.’

The mamba immediately beckoned her by a twist of its head to follow it, and led her to a pile of rocks on which sat enthroned a well-built aristocratic looking white man with handsome regular features, an imposing beard and luxuriant wavy hair, both as white as isinglass, and a ruthlessly severe expression. He had in his hand a staff which seemed a combination of sceptre, big stick, and great assegai; and with this he immediately killed the mamba, who was approaching him humbly and adoringly.