DATE: Sunday, August 10, 1997               TAG: 9707310543

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY MARGARET B.S. BRISTOW 

                                            LENGTH:   73 lines

``BLOOD'' RAISES VOICE AGAINST RACISM

THE NATURE OF BLOOD

CARYL PHILLIPS

Alfred Knopf. 212 pp. $23.

In his sixth novel, The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips captures in innovative literary style and convention how one feels when one is displaced, wrenched from the comfort of a native land and forced to sever blood and ethnic ties. Phillips, a black West Indian who was reared in England, exposes the anatomy of racism through characters whose oppression ranges from the 15th century through present-day Tel Aviv.

The novel has one alarming, recurring word: silence. It appears to be Phillips' intent not only to give voice to victims of displacement, history's wanderers, but also to give a black voice to the oppression of others, particularly Jews.

We first hear the voice of Jewish doctor Stephan Stern who has abandoned his wife and child to fight in Palestine. He comforts the young Moshe, torn from his native Romania by the fight for a Jewish homeland, and now living in a south Cyprus refugee camp.

Stern's niece Eva, 18, a native of Amsterdam, has been moved to a German concentration camp, where in spite of the atrocities and hopelessness, she falls in love with Gerry????. After the war, she locates Gerry in England and learns he has a wife. At 21, Eva succumbs to madness.

Eva parallels Anne Frank, whose life captivated Phillips after he visited the house in which she and her family hid. Like Anne, Eva, too, has a sister named Margo, who accompanies her in hiding and later dies in a concentration camp. Also like Anne, Eva is able to fall in love amid the unspeakable inhumanity of the Nazis.

Phillips plumbs the 17th century with the displaced voice of an African Othello who becomes a general for the Venetian army. He misses his homeland, but tries hard to fit into Venetian society. Against her father's wishes, he marries Desdemona (of course), a senator's daughter. Like Stephan Stern, he, too, has abandoned a wife and child, leaving them in Africa while he fights the Turks.

Eva's and Othello's stories are told in a first-person stream of consciousness. But an omniscient third-person narrator recalls the story of three Jews in 1480 in Portobuffole, Venice, who strangle a 7-year-old Christian boy in order to use his blood in making unleavened bread. They are tried for the crime and burned alive. Phillips gives us a graphic description of the 1480 Venice ghetto that houses Jews who eventually fled to Germany:

``On Sundays and Christian holy days, the Jews were imprisoned for the full length of the day and they were obliged both to appoint and to pay the Christian guards themselves. . . . In addition Jews were forbidden to run schools or teach Christians in any subject. . . . Any Jew found outside the ghetto at night was likely to be beaten, fined and imprisoned.''

The novel ends with Stern, now in his 60s and in modern Tel Aviv, falling in love with a black Ethiopian, Jewish woman, Malka, who tells what it was like to be an oppressed black Jew in Israel.

``You say you rescued me,'' she says. ``Gently plucked me from one century, helped me to cross two more, and then placed me in time. . . . Have you seen the ugly housing at the edges of the city where we live? . . . My mother is tattooed on her face, her hands and her neck. She finds it difficult to leave the apartment for people stop and stare. And my father is incapable of adjusting to this land of clocks.''

Despite a structure as complex as the labyrinth of alleyways in 17th-century Venice, The Nature of Blood succeeds in making us experience the disturbingly ambivalent and ambiguous nature of ethnic blood. Through the diasporic, yet connected lives of his characters, Phillips poignantly shows how ethnic blood can be both beautiful and dangerous, evocative of respect and scorn. Blood is a common denominator that can tie us racially together, yet can also rend us apart. MEMO: Margaret Bernice Smith Bristow is an English professor at Hampton

University. She lives in Newport News.

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