Song of the Turtle : PAINTED TURTLE Woman With Guitar<i> by Clarence Major (Sun & Moon Press: $14.95; 159 pp.; 1-55713-002-7) </i>

This novel is as slender, mournful and poetic as the Zuni folk singer whose story it tells.

Painted Turtle is an artist and a rebel. It is her difficult fate to be born female in a conservative Pueblo society where men take the principal singing and performing roles. Behind their extraordinary masks, the kachinas (deities impersonated in ceremonies) are all male.

Painted Turtle first appears on stage in a grimy cantina: “That one-string-at-a-time guitar kept leaping between her words like tongue-flames between the toes of a firewalker.”

Ironically, we see her through the eyes of a man. (Two men, counting Clarence Major, the author of “Painted Turtle: Woman With Guitar” and five previous novels.) Major’s knowledge of Zuni culture works well here: Zuni fire walkers, tree swallowers, dung eaters and urine drinkers ritually test human limits, and so does Painted Turtle.

The narrator, Baldwin Saiyataca, is another vagabond Indian guitarist, but half Hopi-Tewa and half Navajo, and his guitar is electric. He’s sent to Painted Turtle by their small-time agent “to make her more commercial, to get her switch to electric” too.

He finds romance and his own Indian identity. Painted Turtle is a woman who smells “of mint and freshly tanned leather”; her Zuni jewelry “sparkle(s) dimly in the dark light” of the bar. Saiyataca becomes her admirer, her lover and finally her biographer.

The book moves in quick chapters from Painted Turtle’s birth, in 1936, into the Coyote Clan at the Middle Anthill, through the major events of her life up to the 1960s.

She wants to be a boy, and her life as a woman is a series of disasters: rape, agonizing childbirth, attempted infanticide, miserable jobs and rejection both off and on the reservation. A displaced woman in a traditional matrilineal, matrilocal society is a lost soul indeed and occasionally unbelievable.

But this is not a realistic novel. Major, also a poet and the editor of “The Dictionary of Afro-American Slang,” spikes simple prose with songs, Zuni words and strange images.

This is the kind of book where the presence of two Chapter 30s and no Chapter 32 may be deliberate. In a sense the entire novel is a poem. Yet it is also a Cinderella story, exotic and touching, and a parable about art and alienation as well.

Only in her singing can “Painted Turtle” succeed. When she meets Saiyataca, the one person with whom she is ever happy, at last she becomes the kachinas in her songs. She sings best after she and Saiyataca fail to locate, yet do find, the Spirit Lake of the Zuni in eastern Arizona:

There are ways to speak of

the scarecrow in the cornfield

the taste of paperbread

the souls of one’s ancestors

the corrals of one’s sheep camp

the drying of fruit and pepper

ways to speak of your place in it all.

By the end of the novel Saiyataca is playing acoustic guitar too.

“If you are a man it’s hard to always know exactly how to write about a woman,” he observes. The same is true of writing about a foreign culture. Colorful and resistant to assimilation, Zuni (Coronado’s fabulous Cibola) has fascinated many non-Indians. Major, who is black, possesses a special perspective on his subject. His forbiddingly intellectual novel “My Amputations,” which won the Western States Book Award in 1986, also centers around an unlucky artist--a black male writer who is haunted by Painted Turtle.

Her story is a victory: lyric over prosaic, female over male, writer over material. Like Painted Turtle, Major deserves applause.