White Spirit

By Paule Constant

Book Overview

After answering a classified ad placed by an import-export company looking for energetic young men willing to take on responsibilities for its African branches--no diploma required--Victor finds himself on The Will of God, a dilapidated boat heading into the heart of darkness as even Conrad couldn't have imagined. With the piquant mixture of hilarity and painful disenchantment characterizing Paule Constant's vision of the "colonial novel," White Spirit follows three innocents--Victor; Lola, a mulatto prostitute; and Alexis, who does not know he's a monkey--as they negotiate the perverse system of desires and hatreds on an African banana plantation.

Selling what no one wants or needs, Victor takes delivery of a barrel of mysterious powder promptly christened "white spirit" for its ability to bleach the black arms of the workers handling the shipment. To become whiter and worthier of love, Lola buys some--and then the rest vanishes. In this nightmarish Africa where colonized and colonizers have each other in a stranglehold, the "white spirit" unleashes an obsession that merges whiteness with a return to paradise--an obsession that can only end in catastrophe. Through it all, with her characteristic caustic language, fierce irony, and enormous tenderness for human frailty, Constant portrays the ridiculous without ridicule--and, miraculously, sparks a light of hope in the midst of the torment and suffering.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803264410
• ISBN13: 9780803264410
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

White Fantasy

Betsy Wing translates well, though the book hardly ever sounds natural: perhaps that stiffness and mock-eloquence comes from the original? "Happy and reassured, the well-aimed messenger gave free rein to a joy that was just as spontaneous as his recent sorrow; his fifteen years did the rest: in his joy he raped a girl who had been granted the name of Mary. A crisis!" The balanced sentences, the mock heroics of the exclamation mark, the unusually ornate adjective (such as "well-aimed," hardly a word in English, is it?) all contribute to the cardboardy feel of WHITE SPIRIT. "Emmanuel" is said to mean "well-aimed" by the clergyman, Father Jean, and perhaps this is a satire on the clergy's support of colonial initiatives and ideology. Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the idea of the "White Spirit," a powder with chemical effects so strong that they bleach a black native's skin white, and in consequence becomes in demand like tulips in Holland, isn't this idea on the face of it something that only a white person would dream up? The understory is that naturally everyone wants to be white and no one given a choice would want to be black. I suppose there's a long tradition in France of the white avant-garde setting its surrealist narratives in an enslaved Africa, from Raymond Roussel and Picasso on down, but by 1990 this conceit must have seemed pretty creaky, no? Truman Capote and Harold Arlen did the same thing as a musical back in the 1950s with HOUSE OF FLOWERS. WHITE SPIRIT's story itself is well told, with lots of room for Constant's own patented metaphors and similes (a true poet, everything is something else for La Constant--"Lola looked at the whores as enviously as a neglected child watching spoiled children who are so dreadfully used to happiness.") which I can never get enough of. English, I think, is implicated in Constant's search for meaning: even the title WHITE SPIRIT used to be WHITE SPIRIT in the original, as though it were chic to sport an English (or American) name.