THE ADVENTURES
OF
A BLACK GIRL
IN SEARCH OF GOD
By Djanet Sears
Playwrights Canada
122 pages, $16.95
ISBN 0-88754-712-5
One of Djanet Sears’s most distinctive characteristics as a playwright, apart from her expressionistic devices and flair for black comedy, is her compassion. While most of her characters in The Adventures of a Black Girl In Search of God are not fully drawn, there are quiet, intimate images to accompany their frequently comic hubbub, and in a story with real sadness and anger, there are human figures of sweet, eccentric, trivial folly, good-natured gregariousness, and inarticulate desperation. Sears doesn’t go for the kill even when she is angry, and her satire does not leave either the main characters or the audience in ruins.
Although it takes its title from a fictional tale of South Africa by George Bernard Shaw, Sears’ play is a black protest against God and history in modern Ontario. Its heroine, Rainey, is a former obstetrician, now an academic, who is, in a radical way, in mourning for her life. She has lost her young daughter to meningitis, is in a badly damaged marriage, and she challenges the Judaeo-Christian God who would have us believe that every evil is part of a plan to test and better us. Rainey’s cynical wit is her strength, but she also has a tenderness which is expressed in her painful remembrances of her lost daughter and in her scenes with her elderly, ailing father, a former judge, who is ringleader of an eccentric group that practices “liberation theology” whereby they relieve institutions and private homes of historical artifacts and kitschy, racially stereotypical lawn ornaments.
The two main lines of this play are Rainey’s crises of faith and love, and her father Abendigo’s “salvation” mission, and these are contextualized by the southern Ontario setting (Holland Township) where a road called Negro Creek for almost two hundred years is suddenly renamed after a 19th century white settler. Sears’ play, however, weakens this historical context by electing to use it simply as a flash reference point rather than as an organizational theme for the drama. It isn’t enough to have a large musical chorus of black “ancestors” that functions both as a dynamic expressionistic device and an agent of scene-changes. The play is further diluted by the comic tone in the liberationist sub-plot. Laughter can be a good weapon, but by treating her black raiders as lovable eccentrics, Sears softens their satiric impact.
Sears’ chorus employs hymns, chants (many African by way of Benin), and hums to create a vibrant sound pattern that connects the black diasporic movements in Canada to those of their African ancestors. The chorus also makes extensive use of mime to charge some of the ritualized narrative elements and to express some of the emblematic moments. As Sears explains in her Introduction, the chorus suggests that the characters are not alone but are supported by a host of souls, “below, beside and beyond” them. She derives her device from a West African proverb that asserts (in her words) “we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.” As a woman of colour, she never loses sight of the fact that her own personal history links to the stories of her ancestors from Africa or North America, and so her play is rooted in African oral tradition, “a significant cultural characteristic of the African diaspora here in the Americas. A tradition that has withstood nearly four centuries of institutionalized attempts at eradication.”
But her play isn’t only about diasporic culture. It creates both a mystical and a natural world, delicately weaving (as Leslie Sanders notes in his essay at the end of the book) “history, sorrow, resolve and faith.” Sanders comments on the ways the play underscores the theme of reclamation in all its meanings, so there is no need to rehearse his discourse here. However, his academic argument, despite its many excellent insights, downplays Sears’ rich tonal balance. Adventures of a Black Girl In Search of God mixes extraordinary moods and devices. It is both dark and light, and both these sides are well exposed by Girlene (a woman in the habit of repeatedly divorcing the same man), Darese, and Ivy (Abendigo’s second wife who bears a heavy burden of resentment mixed with love). Bert, the chronic name-changer, has a comically fluctuating identity, but old Abendigo connects moral passion, physical and emotional vulnerability, and comic idiosyncrasy in one. His intimate scenes with Ivy are some of the play’s highlights, as are those between Michael (the faithless preacher) and Rainey. Sears’ main character is extremely touching. Rainey is a woman who needs reassurance that she was a good mother and pastor’s wife. A mother, bereft of a child, filled with grief, bitterness, and fear, she retains an intellectual force and cynicism that make her a conflicted human being of complicated reality.
While the play’s full force can be experienced only on stage, the script is alone a marvel of powerful suggestiveness. Its soul reaches down to the roots of a tree of life.
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