Out of Africa

By R.Z. Sheppard

A WOMAN NAMED SOLITUDE by ANDRE SCHWARZ-BART 178 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

For writers like Andre Schwarz-Bart, it must sometimes seem that history is a dream with no awakening. There is a heightened talking in one's sleep, however, that is called prose fiction. In 1959 Schwarz-Bart, the French-born son of a Polish Jewish family annihilated by the Nazis, published The Last of the Just. It was a novel that rose directly out of 700 years of history and anti-Semitism onto the bestseller lists. Schwarz-Bart shaped his book around the ancient Hebrew legend of the 36 just men, whose job it was to suffer mankind's collective grief. Often they were unaware of their divine mission, but collectively, by storing human suffering, they kept it from poisoning the world.

In his new novel, Schwarz-Bart asks the 36 men to move over and make room for a woman. Her name is Solitude, a green-eyed mulatto who was conceived at sea during the pariade, the official rape fest common aboard 18th century slave ships when sailors were let loose in the cargo hold.

Schwarz-Bart begins his dramatic moral fable in a timeless, tribal Africa, where spirits inhabit the trees, tom-toms breathe lightly under agile fingers and the dead are buried in the fields so they can blow life into the roots of the crops. Ancestors who tire of the underground may slip into a passing pregnant woman and be reborn.

When the slave raiders come, Bay-ungumay, Solitude's mother-to-be, is chained and shipped off to the plantations on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. There, African animism and life cycles are replaced by the auction block and the permanent registry system: the list of slaves never changes, and the names of the dead are transferred to the living.

In Bayungumay and a few others, an ancient spirit survives. She flees to the mountains, leaving her green-eyed daughter to grow into an exotic and desirable commodity. Sometimes a drawing-room doll, sometimes a field hand.

Solitude passes from master to master like a pliant zombie. She and other slaves become, as one wise old black says, "puppets in the white man's dream." When the French Revolution reaches Guadeloupe, the slaves are freed and the plantations burned. But in 1802 a treaty between France and England reopens the seas to the sugar trade, and bondage returns. Eventually Solitude joins the scattering of rebels, hunts her hunters in a trance of fury and becomes something of an island legend.

An historical woman called Solitude actually existed. Schwarz-Bart notes that she was captured and executed on Nov. 29, 1802, immediately after giving birth. His fictional Solitude has a more complex background. Married to a Guadeloupian woman, Schwarz-Bart, 44, set out some years ago to write a se ries of novels that would record the hardships of several generations of black women, both in Europe and the Americas. A Woman Named Solitude seems to be an attempt to get it all in -- all the legend and history, the com passion and private sentiment, including a parting volley for the victims of the Warsaw ghetto. It does not quite work. Somewhere, not too long after the first chapter, Andre Schwarz-Bart for got that a fable must be a unicorn, not a zebra.

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