Bridge of Beyond

by Simone Schwarz-Bart

  SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART (née Brumant) was born in 1938 in Charente, on the southwest coast of France, and moved with her mother to Guadeloupe when she was three months old. Her father was a soldier in the French army and was absent for the first six years of her life. She later studied in Paris, where she met her future husband, the French writer André Schwarz-Bart. They collaborated on two novels, Un plat de porc aux bananes verts (A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas) and La mulâtresse Solitude (A Woman Named Solitude), as well as a six-volume encyclopedic work, Hommage à la femme noire (In Praise of Black Women). Schwarz-Bart has traveled widely, living in Senegal and Switzerland and Paris, and eventually settling in Goyave, a small community in Guadeloupe. For a time, she ran a Creole furniture business, and later a restaurant. The Bridge of Beyond, a best seller that Patrick Chamoiseau called “inexhaustible and unfathomable,” was awarded Elle magazine’s literary prize. Schwarz-Bart is also the author of the novel Ti Jean L’horizon (Between Two Worlds), and a play, Ton beau capitaine (Your Handsome Captain).

  BARBARA BRAY (1924–2010) was a translator of twentieth-century French literature into English. She was an early champion of Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett, and also translated the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh, and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

  JAMAICA KINCAID was born in St. John’s, Antigua, and has lived in the United States since she was sixteen. She is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including At the Bottom of the River, A Small Place, Annie John, Mr. Potter, My Brother, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas, and most recently, the novel See Now Then.

  THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND

  SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART

  Translated from the French by

  BARBARA BRAY

  Introduction by

  JAMAICA KINCAID

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1972 by Simone Schwarz-Bart and Éditions du Seuil

  Translation copyright © 1974 by Atheneum Publishers

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Jamaica Kincaid

  All rights reserved.

  Published in French as Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle

  Cover art: Elsa Mora, The Hand; courtesy of the artist

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Schwarz-Bart, Simone.

  [Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle. English]

  The bridge of beyond / Simone Schwarz-Bart, Jamaica Kincaid, (translated by)

  Barbara Bray.

  pages cm.—(New York Review Books Classics)

  Translation of: Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-680-1 (alk. paper)

  1. Caribbean Area—Fiction. I. Bray, Barbara translator. II. Title.

  PQ2679.C43P5313 2013

  843'.914—dc23

  2013015580

  eISBN 978-1-59017-691-7

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND

  Part One: My People

  1

  2

  Part Two: The Story of My Life

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  INTRODUCTION

  A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART’S The Bridge of Beyond (originally titled Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle) is a seminal work of literature that cannot be contained within the usual confines of “the novel” or “a work of fiction.” It arises, as Rilke says a true work of art must, out of necessity, telling the story of a little-known island and the long-lasting effects of slavery through the eyes of a woman. It is profoundly original. It is exceptionally good. That a book so radical in style, in form, and in content is not widely known in this country, and its influence not deeply felt, is one of those unfortunate mysteries of Time and Place. Literature like this does not offer the comfort of an already digested plot. It seeks out the truth of history, which turns out to be most powerfully and effectively conveyed through fiction.

  Here is the book’s wonderfully evocative and memorable opening paragraph, as conveyed from the original French by the extraordinary translator Barbara Bray:

  A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart. I’ve never found my country too small, though that isn’t to say my heart is great. And if I could choose, it’s here in Guadeloupe that I’d be born again, suffer and die. Yet not long back my ancestors were slaves on this volcanic, hurricane-swept, mosquito-ridden, nasty-minded island. But I didn’t come into the world to weigh the world’s woe. I prefer to dream, on and on, standing in my garden, just like any other old woman of my age, till death comes and takes me as I dream, me and all my joy.

  The narrator is a woman and the characters in Schwarz-Bart’s story with heart and courage are mostly women. The people of Guadeloupe are lost just as many people who were forcibly brought from Africa and deposited throughout the West Indies are lost. This chain of islands that make up the Lesser Antilles was formed by multiple ancient volcanic eruptions; and on a few of them the volcanoes are not entirely dormant—there the violence of man and the violence of nature take turns causing sorrow. In The Bridge of Beyond the reader learns of the sorrows of lost-ness as they are passed down through the generations. We see them disperse and mingle, sometimes in the same paragraph, the same sentence, the same breath. These sorrows are the sorrows of mothers and daughters, who then become mothers themselves—mothers and daughters who continue to pass down traditions and rituals that are part of everyday existence. Each daughter will be a mother, each mother has been a daughter: a bond that is never broken and persists in the presence of love or its opposite.

  Schwarz-Bart tells the story of five generations of Lougandor women. In their names are echoes and commemorations of a multicultural past: Minerva who is the mother of Toussine, also called Queen Without a Name; Toussine is the mother of a pair of twins, Eloisine and Merance, who perish in a blaze they cause while not being able to share the lamplight as they learn their alphabet, and is also the mother of the great Victory; Victory is the mother of Regina, who is the mother of Tulemee. Their names make the past present and so do their actions: When Queen Without a Name dies, people make the sign of the cross and sprinkle holy water in the four corners of the room in which her body lies; a group gathers and the individuals pass a rock between them from one hand to the other while chanting:

  Accursed one, accursed one

  Even if your mother is accursed too

  Say a prayer for her.

  Catastrophe follows the women closely almost as if they had invented it but they are never vanquished. As the late scholar of Caribbean literature Bridget Jones once noted, they continue to rebuild their village communities in spite of the threats presented by social discrimination and by the plantation system. Love is like a ghost haunting their past, prese
nt, and future—and sometimes it’s solid and good and they experience a moment of lightness:

  As we stood in the door and watched the people going, one of them gave a little shout and pointed to a patch of pink sky that had just appeared over the highest peak of the mountain, above the volcano. The rosy light soon spread over half the sky, and seeing it, the one who had shouted murmured as if in a dream: “And now may ugly souls be absent.”

  The islanders meet the unchanging duplicity of the world around them, be it from faraway France or across the road, with humor and wisdom and resignation, but never defeat.

  Simone Schwarz-Bart was born in 1938 in Charente-Maritime on the southwest coast of France. When she was three months old her mother, a schoolteacher, took her to live in Guadeloupe; her father was in the French army and absent for the first six years of her life. It was on his second voyage to a world new to him that Christopher Columbus found the island of Guadeloupe—he was looking for drinking water. He found some, for Guadeloupe has lots of it, and he also came across the pineapple for the first time. The people who lived on the island at the time (the Caribs) were not as pleasant and innocent as those he had met on his first voyage (the Arawaks). On that Sunday of November 4, 1493, he named the island, like the other islands he found, after the Virgin Mary, Santa María de Guadelupe de Extramadura. Later Guadeloupe was claimed by Spain, then for some years traded hands between France, England, and Sweden. From early on, African slaves tended to the sugar production. Guadeloupe was ceded to France in the Treaty of Paris in 1814 and though it is a vast ocean away France still claims the island as its own.

  In The Bridge of Beyond, Schwarz-Bart’s lyrical, incantatory words create a lush, nuanced world that exists between dream and memory. This is a book that might be difficult to read for someone who is at the beach to sun and sip and stop thinking. (By the way, the characters in this story are very familiar with the beach, and yet remarkably no one ever goes there.) The characters head into the mountains, they cross the many rivers for which Guadeloupe is famous, they walk through forests of flowering trees, the names of which they do not know. It is as if they are on a journey farther inward to hold on to the last threads of their spoiled civilization.

  The cultural traditions and historical events from which this work of art springs cannot be contained in a strict linear narrative. In fact, such a device might even lend a veneer of inevitability to them. For the narrative that began with a search for fresh water on an island one Sunday morning has no end—it circles back on itself, it begins again, it staggers sideways, it never lurches forward to a conclusion in which the world where it began is suddenly transformed into an ideal, new world. Schwarz-Bart’s prose awakens the senses and enlarges the imagination; it makes me anxious for my own sanity and yet at the same time certain of it; her sentences, rooted in Creole experience and filled with surprising insights and proverbs, resonate in my head and heart.

  Some writers make a fetish of that edifice called “the Novel.” They write to reinforce this edifice down to the last full stop. But the novel, like the essay, or the poem, isn’t subject to formulae or laws. A book like The Bridge of Beyond establishes its own order, its own sense of being, tugging one way into the painfully personal and then taking another turn into the joys and sufferings of the community.

  Here I’ve tried to express my deep admiration and love for this courageous book, a book that is Fiction, Nonfiction, and History, categories that are of little use if they interfere with the greater truth of a work of art. As if from out of the blue, from the Great Beyond, from the margins, a woman from Guadeloupe has given us an unforgettable hymn to the resilience and power of women.

  —JAMAICA KINCAID

  THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND

  FOR YOU

  Belle sans terre ferme

  Sans parquet sans souliers sans draps

  PAUL ÉLUARD, Les Yeux fertiles

  Beautiful without solid earth

  Without floor without shoes without sheets

  Part One

  MY PEOPLE

  1

  A MAN’S COUNTRY may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart. I’ve never found my country too small, though that isn’t to say my heart is great. And if I could choose it’s here in Guadeloupe that I’d be born again, suffer and die. Yet not long back my ancestors were slaves on this volcanic, hurricane-swept, mosquito-ridden, nasty-minded island. But I didn’t come into the world to weigh the world’s woe. I prefer to dream, on and on, standing in my garden, just like any other old woman of my age, till death comes and takes me as I dream, me and all my joy.

  When I was a child my mother, Victory, often talked to me about my grandmother Toussine. She spoke of her with fervor and veneration: Toussine, she’d say, was a woman who helped you hold your head up, and people with this gift are rare. My mother’s reverence for Toussine was such I came to regard her as some mythical being not of this world, so that for me she was legendary even while still alive.

  I got into the habit of calling her, as men called her, Queen Without a Name. But her maiden name had been Toussine Lougandor.

  Her mother was Minerva, a fortunate woman freed by the abolition of slavery from a master notorious for cruelty and caprice. After the abolition Minerva wandered in search of a refuge far from the plantation and its vagaries, and she came to rest at L’Abandonnée. Some runaway slaves came there afterwards, and a village grew up. The wanderers seeking refuge were countless, and many would not settle anywhere permanently for fear the old days might return. One Negro from Dominica vanished as soon as he learned he had sired a child, and those in L’Abandonnée whom Minerva had scorned now laughed at her swollen belly. But when dark-skinned Xango took on the shame of my great-grandmother Minerva, the laughter stopped dead, and those who had been amusing themselves at others’ misfortunes choked on their own bile. Little Toussine came into the world, and Xango loved her as if she were his own. As the child grew, shooting up as gracefully as a sugar cane, she became the light of his eyes, the blood in his veins, the air in his lungs. Thus through the love and respect lavished on her by Xango, Minerva, now long dead, could walk without shame along the main street of the hamlet, head high, back arched, arms akimbo, and foul breath turned from her to blow over better pastures. And so life began for young Toussine, as delicately as dawn on a clear day.

  They lived in a hamlet swept alternately by winds from the land and winds from the sea. A steep road ran along by cliffs and wastelands, leading, it seemed, to nothing human. And that was why it was called the deserted village, L’Abandonnée. At certain times everyone there would be filled with dread, like travelers lost in a strange land. Still young and strong, always dressed in a worker’s overall, Minerva had a glossy, light mahogany skin and black eyes brimming over with kindness. She had an unshakable faith in life. When things went wrong she would say that nothing, no one, would ever wear out the soul God had chosen out for her and put in her body. All the year round she fertilized vanilla, picked coffee, hoed the banana groves, and weeded the rows of sweet potatoes. And her daughter Toussine was no more given to dreaming than she. Almost as soon as she woke the child would make herself useful sweeping, gathering fruit, peeling vegetables. In the afternoon she would go to the forest to collect leaves for the rabbits, and sometimes the whim would take her to kneel in the shade of the mahoganies and look for the flat brightly colored seeds that are made into necklaces. When she came back with a huge pile of greenstuff on her head, Xango delighted to see her with leaves hanging down over her face, and would fling both arms in the air and shout: “Hate me, so long as you love Toussine. Pinch me till you draw blood, but don’t touch so much as the hem of her robe.” And he would laugh and cry just to look at the radiant, frank-faced child whose features were said to be like those of the Negro from Dominica, whom he would have liked to meet once, just to see. But as yet she was not in full bloom. It was when she was fifteen that she stood out from all the other girls with the unexpected grace of a red can
na growing on a mountain, so that the old folk said she in herself was the youth of L’Abandonnée.

  There was also in L’Abandonnée at that time a young fisherman called Jeremiah who filled one’s soul with the same radiance. But he paid no attention to girls, to whom his friends used to say, laughing, “When Jeremiah falls in love it will be with a mermaid.” But this didn’t make him any less handsome, and the girls’ hearts shriveled up with vexation. He was nineteen and already the best fisherman in Caret cove. Where on earth did he get those hauls of vivaneaux, tazars, and blue balarous? Nowhere but from beneath his boat, the Headwind, in which he used to go off forever, from morn till night and night till morn; all he lived for was hearing the sound of the waves in his ears and feeling the tradewinds caressing his face. Such was Jeremiah when Toussine was for everyone a red canna growing on a high mountain.

  On windless days when the sea was dead calm Jeremiah would go into the forest to cut the lianas he made into lobster pots. One afternoon when he left the beach for this purpose, Toussine appeared in his path, right in the middle of a wood. She was wearing one of her mother’s old dresses that came down to her ankles, and with her heap of greenstuff coming down over her eyes and hiding her face, she looked as if she didn’t know where she was going. The young man asked her, “Is this L’Abandonnée’s latest fashion in donkeys?” She threw down her burden, looked at him, and said in surprise, almost in tears: “A girl just goes to collect greenstuff from the forest, and here I am, insulted.” With that, she burst out laughing and scampered off into the shadow. It was then Jeremiah was caught in the finest lobster pot he ever saw. When he got back from his excursion his friends noticed he looked absentminded, but they did not ask any questions. Real fishermen, those who have taken the sea for their native country, often have that lost look. So his friends just thought dry land didn’t agree with Jeremiah, and that his natural element was the water. But they sang a different tune in the days that followed, when they saw Jeremiah neglecting the Headwind, deserting her and leaving her high and dry on the beach. Consulting among themselves, they came to the conclusion he must be under the spell of the Guiablesse, the most wicked of spirits, the woman with the cloven hoof who feeds exclusively on your desire to live, and whose charms drive you sooner or later to suicide. They asked him if he hadn’t met someone that ill-fated day when he went up into the forest. Eventually Jeremiah confessed: “The only Guiablesse I met that day,” he said, “is called Toussine—Xango’s Toussine.” Then they said, chuckling, “Oh, so that’s it! Now we see. But it’s not such a problem as you might think; if you want our opinion there are no prince’s daughters in L’Abandonnée that we know of. Fortunately we’re only a pack of Negroes all in the same boat, without any fathers and mothers before God. Here everyone is everyone’s else’s equal, and none of our women can boast of having three eyes or two tourmalines sleeping in the hollow of her thighs. True, you’ll say she isn’t like all the others, the women you see everywhere, like lizards, protected by the very insipidity of their flesh. We answer: Jeremiah, you say well, as usual. For we too have eyes, and when Toussine brushes against our pupils our sight is refreshed. All these words to say just one thing, friend: Beautiful as she is, the girl is like you, and when you appear with her in the street you will be a good match for her. One more thing. When you go to tell her parents of your intentions, remember we don’t have any cannibals here, and Xango and Minerva won’t eat you.”