Black Winesburg

CANAPE-VERT--PhilippeThoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin. Translated by Edward Larocque Tinker -- Farrar & Rlnehart ($2.50).

Canape-Vert (Green Hill) is a Winesburg, Ohio of the Republic of Haiti. Its Negro characters have the same violent moods, the loneliness, the incomprehension, the longings, the same sudden impulses as Sherwood Anderson's Middle Westerners.

Houngans and Zombis. But where the people of Winesburg move like ghosts through a familiar, everyday world, the people of Canape-Vert live like human beings in a world of spirits. The native worship of the Negroes finds demons everywhere, in graveyards, in bedroom shrines, in dreams and visions. The houngans, who interpret dreams, guide worship, cure nervous disorders and placate the demons, are real figures, a curious combination of physician, priest, and justice of the peace. The villagers, who plant potatoes, gamble, drink absinthe, fight, may dance through Saturday night in voodoo ceremonies and attend mass the next morning. In the hills the zombis are living proof of the power of voodoo. They are will-less, speechless people, with no mem ory of their identity or past, who move in a trancelike state, staring, vacant, auto matic, and yet obey orders and do work.

The villagers believe the zombis are disinterred corpses restored to partial life by the witch doctors. Even the many gods of Haiti have abandoned the zombis -- the gods whose names fit into village talk as familiarly as the names of streets in U.S.

towns: the Arada family of gods, who are entirely beneficent: Damballa Oueddo, the Master of Heaven, Papa Legba, guard ian of the gate of Heaven, Granck Erzilie, goddess of love, the symbolic wife of all the men of Haiti.

Toxic Thought. The simple stories in Canape-Vert are the work of two brothers.

They are Haitian Negro poets, and the older, Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, is Secretary General of Haiti's Department of Public Works. Their highly condensed, dis tilled prose presents the first picture of Haitian peasant life seen through Negro eyes, a convincing account of a subject that white writers have failed to master.

Each of the 16 chapters of Canape-Vert is squeezed down to its essentials, so that the story of each character seems to fall like one drop of the blood that stains the voodoo altars.

Most of the book's terror results from its casual indifference to human life cou pled with its extraordinary psychological subtlety of understanding. Its people are sick. They are sometimes unnerved, some times intense, sometimes merely languid and somnolent, or apathetic and drugged with their confused desires, their fears.

Roused, they burst into violence.

Cool Assault, Hot Breath. In Canape-Vert it is usually night. "The moon shone. She had just appeared in the eastern sky, where breaks in the clouds had left a great watery hole, somber and chill. To the tragic silence that follows the tempest was added the far-off rumbling of the river in spate, and the unctuous exhalations of the soaked earth. The trees, wet and shining, slept like chickens with their heads under their wings, and the breeze, coming from the bay and neighboring isles, brought odors that were both sweet and savage. All the countryside shivered at this cool assault. But at times there arose from the secret depths of the soil, in gusts, a hot breath, persuasive and disquieting."

Bucket of Blood. In this sticky, pulsing, tropical world, Aladin, a field Negro of good stock, suddenly abandons Sanite, who has cared for him for five years, to court Fiorina, a 15-year-old girl whose intelligence is in inverse proportion to her physical beauty. Later Aladin loses Fiorina to Jose, a villager who fled to Cuba and returned wearing a sea-blue coat, flannel trousers, black & white shoes, and a sombrero.

Savagely jealous, Aladin invokes General Anglessou, the "Bucket of Blood," the fierce African god who "mounts" him, dispossesses him of his reason, and drives him to murder. When Aladin runs to the house of Jose and Fiorina, waving his machete, people scurry away like poisoned rats. "Suddenly a terrible anguish gripped [Jose]; his hair stood on end. ... He saw Aladin advancing, his machete in the air, growling like a furious wind, his mouth red with a bloody froth. Jose flung himself forward to disarm him but before he reached him, a violent blow from Aladin's machete at the base of his neck killed him immediately. Then drunk with the sight of blood [he] rushed at Fiorina, who had fainted. Killing her in turn, he set upon her body, splitting open her stomach, striking, digging, chopping with savage frenzy. His work of death concluded, he bent over the young woman and glueing his mouth to her wounds, drank voluptuously of her blood. . . ."

The happenings in Canape-Vert are so violent that removing them from their context of fiction and the somber prose of the Brothers Marcelin makes the book seem more brutal than it is. Its weird setting, superb descriptions, and fine translation make it unforgettable. It illuminates the Negro peasant mind, briefly but clearly, like a scene in a jungle glimpsed in a flash of lightning.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.