The Black Girl in Search of God
Original cover design
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| Author | George Bernard Shaw |
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| Illustrator | John Farleigh |
| Publisher | Constable and Company |
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Publication date
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1932 |
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (and Some Lesser Tales) is a book of short stories written by George Bernard Shaw. The title story is a satirical allegory relating the experiences of an African black girl, freshly converted to Christianity, who takes literally the biblical injunction to "Seek and you shall find me." and attempts to seek out and actually speak to God.
After she becomes dissatisfied with the inconsistencies of the answers the missionary who has converted her gives to her questions, the girl leaves to wander in the forest, searching for God. One by one, she actually meets several versions of "God" - from the vengeful deity of the early books of the Bible, to the philosophical version of the Book of Job. She also meets two versions of Jesus - a kindly but ineffective young man, and another who makes a living by posing for an artist depicting him on a cross. Muhammad, and the Muslim view of God, fares no better. She then meets an atheist behaviourist (with a strong resemblance to Ivan Pavlov) and a coterie of intellectuals who explain that speculations about God are passé, and that a better quest lies in abstract mathematics. She disposes of them all, first and last, by trenchant logic and the occasional skilled use of her knobkerry. Eventually she meets an old gentleman who (like Voltaire) persuades her to seek God by working in a garden. He eventually persuades her to abandon her quest, settle down with a "coarse" red-headed Irishman and rear a "charmingly coffee-coloured" family. Only after the children are grown and gone does she resume her searching, and by then her "strengthened mental powers take her far beyond the stage at which there is fun in smashing idols".
The Black Girl, as protagonist, serves the same purpose as Christian in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress; that is to say her own "inner", or "spiritual" life is represented as a series of physical events and encounters. The over-all tone of the argument is agnostic: through all the rejection of false gods there remains an implied conviction that there is a true god to find: at the end of the work the girl, now an old woman, resumes her search rather than finally abandoning it. She may also be viewed as an emerging feminist figure, able to defend herself with her knobkerry and—although apparently naïve—having a powerful intellect capable of formulating searching theological questions, and exposing vapid answers. Her intellectual powers and red-blooded humanity are contrasted with the "white" characters—especially the insipid missionary woman who "converted" her in the first place, and her thoroughly non-intellectual husband. This use of a superior person supposed by popular prejudice to be inferior, both by her sex and her race, is paralleled by the character of "The Negress"—a powerful figure in The Thing Happens, which is the third part of Back to Methuselah.
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