5. Simone Schwarz-Bart - The Bridge of Beyond

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AMY HELMES, HOST: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes...

KIM ASKEW, HOST: And I’m Kim Askew… 

AMY: … we’re best friends and co-authors of the “Twisted Lit” series of young adult novels, and we’re on a mission to unearth some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Today we’re exploring a masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond. And Amy, I can’t believe this book wasn’t included on my reading list in grad school, because it’s just incredible. 

AMY: No kidding! And that’s exactly why we’re so excited to tell everyone about it. The book was originally published almost 50 years ago, but its author, Simone Schwarz-Bart, now 82 years old, continues to leave her literary mark on the world, having published her latest book, a marital memoir, just last year.

KIM: Hmmm.. she doesn’t sound very “lost.”

AMY: That’s a good point. But she’s not really widely known in the U.S., so I’m willing to bet there are a lot of listeners out there who have yet to discover this French-speaking, literary lodestar of Guadeloupean descent, and we’d argue that The Bridge of Beyond deserves a much more prominent place on people’s bookshelves. Now, if you’ve already read this book, then you were probably as captivated by it as we were. If you’re unfamiliar with it, we’re excited to give you your introduction today.

KIM: Jamaica Kincaid, who wrote the introduction to The Bridge of Beyond in the New York Review of Books’ edition, which came out in 2013, said this: “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 … 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.” 

AMY:  I agree with Kinkaid that more people really ought to know about this book, which was translated beautifully from the French by Barbara Bray. There’s something transcendent about it, honestly, and I can almost feel a balmy island breeze beginning to blow as we kick off this discussion … so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

INTRO MUSIC.

AMY: I’m going to start off by saying I really wish I knew even a little bit of French going into this episode. There’s a 100 percent certainty that I am going to really botch some pronunciations over the course of the next 30 minutes.

KIM: Yeah, I’m right there with you. In fact, we just had a sidebar on how to pronounce “Guadeloupe.” So, for those of you that do speak French, try not to cringe, we’ll do our best.

AMY: And with that embarrassing caveat out of the way, let’s learn a little bit about Simone Schwarz-Bart. She was born in 1938. Her parents were both from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. The backbone of the economy in Guadeloupe was its sugar plantations, which were supported by institutional slavery from the 17th century until the mid-19th-century, and in Schwarz-Bart’s writings we clearly see how the Caribbean, French, and African influences all converge.

KIM: So, Simone’s father was abroad serving in the French army during WWII, and for the first six years of her life, she lived solely with her mother, who was a primary school teacher, in Pointe-a-Pitre, which is the main port city in Guadeloupe. One reference described their living conditions as “dilapidated,” so I can imagine that the poverty that’s front-and-center in The Bridge of Beyond is something she actually witnessed all around her as a girl. 

AMY: It’s also said that Simone was inspired by the wisdom of her grandmother during that time. Her grandparents lived in a much more remote part of the island. Schwarz-Bart has said that she did not grow up on books, but instead on tales from the oral tradition, which we learned from them, and we see directly paralleled in the book in the relationship between the main character, Telumee, and her almost-prophet-like, mythical grandmother.

KIM: So at 18, Simone went to study in Paris, and this was a turning point in her life. She met the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart. He was ten years her senior, and their relationship became both romantic and professional. He encouraged her to write, and they collaborated on two novels that address racism, as well as a six-volume encyclopedia called Homage a la Femme Noir, which chronicled noteworthy black women. 

AMY: Your French was very good there, Kim!

KIM: Thank you!

AMY: Andre Schwarz-Bart’s parents were Polish Jews who were killed by the Nazis when he was 13. He wrote about the centuries of persecution of Jewish people in his award-winning novel Le Dernier des justes (French for The Last of the Just). It was written in 1959 and it won the Prix Goncourt, which is the highest literary award in France. So, one can imagine that these two writers, though from seemingly different cultural backgrounds, would look at the world with a fairly familiar point of view in a lot of respects. I loved going online and seeing photos of these two back in the 60s. 

KIM: They look like such a cool literary couple, and they seemed so happy together, right up to his death in 2006. It made me want to know more about their love story, and I really love the fact that, as writers, they were collaborative, rather than competitive. You hear a lot of stories about married artists who have turbulent relationships, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with the two of them ... at least as far as we know, anyway. 

AMY: No, and in fact, Schwarz-Bart has said that it was Andre who actually first encouraged her to write. He asked her to try writing a short story for him, and when she showed it to him, he basically said, “Okay, you need to start writing down everything that comes into your mind, because you are a really talented writer.” So that’s how she got her start basically.

KIM: Oh, I love that. And then, every evening — oh, wow, this is very romantic — the Schwarz-Barts would read a love poem by Pablo Neruda to each other. They also started a family, and one of their two sons is a jazz musician who lives in New York City. 

AMY: In addition to their time spent in France, the couple lived at various points in Senegal and Switzerland but eventually they settled back in her native Guadeloupe. At a certain point, he stopped writing, and her literary career really kind of eclipsed his. He died in 2006, but she’s still very much alive looking every bit as chic and cool as you would hope she would be.  And Kim, you mentioned wanting to know more about her love story with Andre, the last book she co-wrote and published just last year was a memoir about their relationship, and in this book, she also apparently gives some insight into why she and Andre sort of fell off the radar after the 1970s. It’s written in French, unfortunately for us.

KIM: I hope it’s eventually translated.

AMY: Me, too.

KIM: In 1973, Elle Magazine awarded The Bridge of Beyond its Grand Prix de Letrices award for “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” In 2006, Simone was awarded the rank of a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters which recognizes significant contributions to French arts and literature.

AMY: It appears that she still divides her time between Europe and Guadeloupe these days, and she’s actually done a few interviews in the past few years which you can find on YouTube. And that’s something we’re not normally able to see with most of the featured authors on Lost Ladies of Lit, because most of them lived long before video technology was a thing. So it’s really cool that we’re able to hear her in her own words. I was thankfully able to recruit my daughter’s best friend, Eva Lew, to translate one of the interviews, so thank you, Eva! Getting to hear Simone talk really helped us get a much better sense of her.) So Simone these days has a house with a huge veranda in the middle of what looks like this jungle paradise in Guadeloupe. This property is actually where her grandparents had lived when she was a little girl, and it feels very remote. She calls it her “island on an island.” It looks incredibly peaceful and beautiful there, and you really get such a beautiful vibe from her, as a person. We’ll share that link in our notes if you want to check out what Simone looks like and has to say. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOWSJ7cSYc

AMY: So let’s start talking about “The Bridge of Beyond.” It’s narrated by a woman named Telumee, a character that is inspired by a neighbor of Schwarz-Bart’s from when she was a little girl. So, there was a woman named Stephanie Priccin, whom the locals thought was a witch. Schwarz-Bart was fascinated by this woman, and wanted to tell her story, and the opening paragraph really gives us an overview of the book. It says:

“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, till death comes and takes me as I dream, me and all my joy.”

KIM: So this paragraph touches on pretty much every aspect of the plot: her ancestors — specifically three generations of mothers and daughters. It talks about the legacy of slavery and how it impacts the island’s inhabitants. And our narrator, Telumee, comes from a long line of strong, beautiful, Guadeloupe women, the Lougandours, whose lives are peaks and valleys of great love and great tragedy, and her life is a struggle to find meaning, and even moments of joy, in the shadow of it all. 

AMY: The English-language version of the is book is called The Bridge of Beyond, but the title of the book in French is actually Pluie et Vent Sur Telumee Miracle which translates to “Rain and Wind on Telumee Miracle” which, to me is a much better indication of what the book is really all about. 

KIM: Yes, it’s like she’s the “island” in the original title, and I think representing both the individual, herself, and the whole island and its people.

AMY: So speaking of the island, I felt fully immersed in this environment that she describes. It felt like taking a little journey. It wasn’t hard to imagine any of it.

KIM: I agree. I felt immediately transported. Her prose just pulls you straight into that world.

AMY: Now the first section of the novel gives the backstory of Telumee’s great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother, all of whom have really heartbreaking trials and mental anguish that they have to overcome. When Telumee is 10 years old, her mother rejects her and sends her to live with her grandmother, Toussine, who has been nicknamed “Queen With No Name” [ed. Queen Without a Name] by the villagers of Fond-Zombi, a remote village where Toussine lives a peaceful, but impoverished life.

KIM: So this is where Telumee’s story really begins: Toussine (or, as we’ve said, Queen Without a Name) escorts Telumee over this floating “Bridge of Beyond” to Fond-Zombi, and the grandmother and granddaughter have an instant bond. Telumee adores Queen Without a Name, and her grandmother feels that Telumee is something really special, basically, a blessing given to her in her old age. And so then we’re introduced to the villagers and their lives, and it’s miserable in its poverty, but it also had this really magical feel, and there’s a bit of magical realism about the whole description and then the book itself.

AMY: Yeah, it’s almost as though the bridge is a portal to some magical fantasy world. There’s Queen Without a Name with her fables and proverbs, there’s a character Ma Cia, the witch, who can transform into animals and conjure up spirits. There’s the lush beauty of the landscape, and then there’s also, of course, extreme poverty. But everything is described in this language of folklore and allegory. It’s very mystical with ritual and songs sprinkled throughout. And this is where Telumee begins to try and understand the legacy of slavery, searching for “some way of dealing with the life Negroes bear so as not to feel it pressing down on one’s shoulders day after day, hour after hour, second after second.” There’s also this recurring theme of the process by which women become women, (what makes someone a woman?) and whether it’s okay to ever allow oneself to feel happiness. The characters in this book seem to always feel ashamed when they have moments of joy or contentment, and that sort of feels like one of the legacies that slavery has left them with, this idea that joy is ephemeral and something that they should be cautious or wary about.

KIM: Queen Without a Name basically becomes Telumee’s guide. She’s passing on all this knowledge of how to become a woman and how to transcend the inescapable suffering that is their life on the island day-to-day. And as part of this, she takes her to meet her friend, Ma Cia, who foretells that Telumee  “will rise over the earth like a cathedral” one day. Telumee’s response is to deny this and hang her head in shame because she isn’t this and she doesn’t see how she can be this. Ma Cia and Queen Without a Name, they’re going to try to teach her that she is someone to be proud of, that she should respect herself as someone truly special. Telumee also learns from Ma Cia about the island’s history of slavery. She’s actually really curious and asks her about it. Ma Cia compares slaves to poultry tied up to cages in terror and she adds, “Long ago a nest of ants that bite peopled the earth, and called themselves men. That is all.” 

AMY: There was kind of a sad matter-of-factness associated with this history. The practice of slavery may have ceased for them, but these characters still live with its impact and they all have to continuely steel themselves against the hardships they see no path around. 

KIM: Ma Cia’s advice to Telumee is to be a drum with two sides. She says, “Let life bang and thump, but keep the underside always intact.” 

And after this meeting with Ma Cia comes a passage that really stood out to me. 

Telumee says: “For the first time in my life I realized that slavery was not some foreign country, some distant region from which a very few old people came, like the two or three who still survived in Fond-Zombi. It had all happened here, in our hills and valleys, perhaps near this clump of bamboo, perhaps in the air I was breathing.”

So this resonated with me because of the time period we’re in in the U.S. where we’re really seeming to be facing up to our own history of slavery and trying to find a path forward.

AMY: One hundred and fifty years after the fact, which seems amazing, you know, but we are still dealing with the trickle-down from that. And in the book, despite the suffering of the villagers who are constantly “juggling with sorrow,” as Schwarz-Bart explains, there is also beauty, and there are piercing moments of happiness, too, and that’s kind of the wonderful hopefulness at the heart of it. It’s all the more beautiful for the transcendent moments that are woven throughout the book, even throughout the hard times.  

KIM: I completely agree. I think “transcendent” is the perfect word for it. There are so many passages and lines that just give you a chill because they’re so beautiful. One of them, for me, was when Telumee falls in love for the first time. It’s with this boy named Elie. She describes it as when her “first star appeared in the east,” which I just think is an absolutely beautiful description of the moment of falling in love and that person just instantly becoming everything to her. So together they try to understand the pain in the world around them, and Queen Without a Name is there supporting the relationship, but always trying to prepare Telumee for her future, with parables and advice for living and surviving. There’s the story of the bird and the hunter. And the parable of the Man Who Tried to Live on Air. Those are just a couple that I can think of.

AMY: Yeah, there’s a ton of these throughout the book, and I have to admit, this magical realism element and the almost biblical language at times, initially it really did trip me up when I was first reading the book. Almost every page in this book is filled with this GORGEOUS prose that is steeped in meaning, but Ithink because of that, I kept getting hung up on trying to figure it all out and figure out, “what is Queen Without a Name really really trying to say?” I kept re-reading the lines, and at times, it almost felt like an obstacle that was preventing me from connecting with the characters. Kim, I know I mentioned to you while I was reading it that I was struggling a bit at first, but just about a third of the way through, I sort of changed my approach to the book and I just let myself surrender to the words and let it just wash over me and not have such a tight grip on the whole thing. That wound up being a turning point for me with this book. The pieces started kind of falling together for me and I was able to enjoy it a lot more. Now, Kim, you had previously read this book. I wonder what your reaction was both the first time you read it, and then what was your experience reading it a second time? Because I feel like this is one of those books you could probably constantly be finding new things in with subsequent readings. 

KIM: Yeah, I think I read it about three years ago. It was part of the New York Review of Books Book Club, so it was sent to me. I didn’t even choose it, so thank you, New York Review of Books, for that serendipity. I remember loving it the first time, which is why I brought it up again, but I think I found it even more beautiful this time because, I sort of knew how the “plot” is, and there’s not really much of a strong plot, it’s more about how to live in the world and how to survive the inevitable pain of life. There are all these parables and metaphors to explain that for the inhabitants of Fond-Zombi, but also for the overall human experience. So I really, really loved that aspect of it.

AMY: Right, even though we come from a completely different era and a completely different world, time and space, there are nuggets of wisdom that you can kind of take to heart for yourself and work into your own life even though I have no relationship with this island or this history of slavery necessarily.

KIM: Yep, I completely agree. So, Telumee is happy, but she’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things feel kind of too good to be true, and I felt that as a reader. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, too.

AMY: Right, and this goes back to what I said before about the characters always feeling like they’re not allowed to feel happy in some way. I mean, even Elie, her love interest, he kept thinking, “Something going to go wrong. I don’t deserve this.” It’s kind of sad, because you want to feel really happy for them, but they were never actually able to just fully relax and be like, “life is good,” because they knew, based on their history, that it wasn’t. So then when things do, inevitably, go terribly wrong, Telumee succumbs at first and goes through this period of grief bordering on insanity, basically. She has a breakdown in a major way, something her grandmother also had experienced. But she eventually comes back to herself again, and her grandmother tells her as she’s on her deathbed, she says: “Listen — people watch you, they always count on there being someone to show them how to live. If you are happy, everyone can be happy, and if you know how to suffer, the others will know too. Every day you must get up and say to your heart: ‘I’ve suffered enough and now I have to live, for the light of the sun must not be frittered away and lost without any eye to enjoy it.’ And if you don’t do that, you won’t have the right to say, ‘It’s not my fault,’ when someone seeks out a cliff and throws himself in the sea.” 

KIM: That’s amazing.

AMY: There’s also this push and pull among the community of women in this book, that I really thought was interesting, because on the one hand, they stand in solidarity with one another and they lift each other up at the lowest points in their lives, yet they can be vicious to one another. They tear each other down and are jealous of one another and they really cause each other a lot of heartache. At the same time, the men have their own major issues. There are some men in Fond-Zombie that are loving and gentle, and there are others that are toxic and broken to the point of being evil.

KIM: Yes, so the men seem to be battling their own demons, for sure. There’s the trickle-down effect of slavery, and the persecutions faced by the society that they live in, their employers, and even the very land they are working on. So it ends up resulting in abandonment, addiction, and domestic violence. Speaking of the harsh land, Telumee begins working in the cane fields (something she and Queen Without A Name never wanted her to do) but she eventually finds happiness with Amboise. He has a lot of insight and perspective about the ongoing plight of their people.

AMY: These are people that never stood a chance, and that’s what’s sad. “Everyone knows an empty sack cannot stand up. It falls, it cannot help but fall.” And that sort of goes back to the men in this society. You can’t depend on them. They’re broken men. But how can you expect people who have been completely depleted and unfairly treated to suddenly thrive and be successes? I mean, you can’t. There’s just too much that they’ve been through.

KIM: No, that’s true. And yet even with all that, Amboise tells Telumee at one point: “We have been beaten for a hundred years, but I tell you, girl, we have courage for a thousand.” And that’s what she basically comes to learn throughout the course of this book.

AMY: Be a drum with two sides, you know? You take a beating and a beating and a beating on the once side, but you let the underside stay strong.

KIM: Yeah, I love that imagery.

AMY: Can we just stop for a moment and discuss how, despite being really focused on grief and suffering, this book is also so beautiful? As we mentioned before, the writing is just insane. It’s so gorgeous. I don’t understand why this book wasn’t a staple in college literature courses because there’s so many things  to unpack when you think about the imagery and the symbolism here.

KIM: I agree. And what I did find here when I was researching this, that there are some instructors who use it in post-colonial literature courses, which completely  makes sense. It should be there.

AMY: It’s perfect.

KIM: Yeah, but it feels like it’s also marginalizing it, to just have it there. I think it speaks so strongly to the human experience for all of us, and the ending is so beautiful and life-affirming, even after all of the terrible things that have happened, all the things that we have told you about. She manages to come to terms with all the loss and pain and all the fleeting moments of joy, and she still realizes that in some ways, she can see her suffering as this sort of gift. 

AMY: All this really goes straight back to the “rain and wind” of the French title of this book. Tellumee tells us: “East winds and north winds have buffeted and soaked me; but I am still a woman standing on my own two legs, and I know a Negro is not a statue of salt to be dissolved by the rain.” By the end of her life, she comes to this understanding that she is indomitable, and she is happy, but she says: “As I struggled others will struggle, and for a long time yet people will know the same sun and moon; they will look at the same stars, and, like us, see in them the eyes of the dead.” Here we are reading the book 50 years after it was written, and you’re struck by the fact that we’re still having these same conversations over and over about race and oppression and what’s fair. The book does end on such a hopeful note, this idea that each new generation (like each generation of Lougandour women) offers a light to the previous generation.

KIM: So Amy, what sort of food for thought did this book leave you with?

AMY: I guess this idea of the long-lasting consequences. My experience reading this book also coincided with listening to the first three episodes of The New York Time’s podcast “Nice White Parents,” which is about racial inequality in America’s educational institutions and how well-intentioned white people can be so unaware of how our own decisions contribute to and perpetuate institutional racism. It really sort of illustrates white privilege in the most cut-and-dry, and frankly, sometimes shame-inducing of ways. Just because we think things are better, on the surface, doesn’t mean they’re any better, and I think that is part of what Simone Schwarz-Bart was getting at.

KIM: Oh yeah, absolutely. I can’t wait to listen to that podcast as well. It sounds really good and important for somebody who will eventually be thinking about sending their kid to school.

AMY: What about you, Kim? Did this book correlate at all to anything else that you’ve been looking at in life right now?

KIM: It’s so interesting, because completely unintentionally, I read another book about life on an island, but this island is the deserted one that goddess Circe is banished to for eternity by her father, Helios, after she offends Zeus. It’s the 2018 novel Circe, by Madeleine Miller, and in its own way, it’s also about witchcraft and a woman learning to find moments of joy amid suffering. A very different novel, but I highly recommend it as well. 

AMY: I remember reading about that one when it was released and thinking it sounded interesting, so i’m going to have to borrow that from you when you’re done. Are you done?

KIM: Yes, I’m done.

AMY: Okay, I’ll get it from you. So what did we learn in today’s episode? First off, we learned that a steady diet of Pablo Neruda can be a recipe for a happy marriage.

KIM: I’m going to make Eric start reading Pablo Neruda every night.

AMY: Oooh, girl!

KIM: I don’t think it’s gonna happen. We learned that sometimes, the books that challenge you can be among the most rewarding.

AMY: And we learned how to pronounce a few new words in French, at least semi-correctly? Sorry everybody.

KIM: Sorry about that. And that’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Simone Schwarz-Bart and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone. Special thanks, as well, to Harriet Grant for our logo design, and Eva Lew, who helped with translations and research for this week’s episode.