Simone Schwarz-Bart

Simone Schwarz-Bart (born Simone Brumant, 1938) is a French-language writer who lives in Guadeloupe.

Quotes

Ti Jean l'horizon (1979 novel)

translated from the French into English by Barbara Bray with the title Between Two Worlds (1992)

• The island on which our story takes place is not well known. It floats, forsaken, in the Gulf of Mexico, and only a few especially meticulous atlases show it. If you were to study a globe you could wear your eyes out peering, but you'd be hard put to it to find the island without a magnifying glass. It arose out of the sea quite recently, a mere couple of million years ago. And rumor has it that it may go as it came, suddenly sink without warning, taking with it its mountains and little sulphur volcano, its green hills where ramshackle huts perch as if hung in the void, and its thousand rivers, so sunny and capricious that the original inhabitants called it the Isle of Lovely Streams.
  Meanwhile it still floats on a sea that brings forth cyclones, on waters always changing from calmest blue to green or mauve. And it supports all kinds of strange creatures, men and beasts, devils, zombies, and the rest, all seeking something which has not yet come but which they dimly hope for without knowing its name or shape. It also serves as a stopover for birds that come down to lay their eggs in the sun.
  To tell the truth, it is a completely unimportant scrap of earth, and the experts have once and for all dismissed it as insignificant. And yet it has had its bad times, its past great upsurges, fine copious bloodlettings quite worthy of educated people's attention. But all that was forgotten long ago. The very trees have no memory of it, and as for the people, they believe nothing happens on the island, never has and never will until the day it goes to join its elder sisters at the bottom of the sea.
  They have adopted the habit of hiding the sky with the palms of their hands. They say that real life is somewhere else, and even that this speck of an island can reduce anything to nothing; so much so that if God were to descend there in person, he would end up like all the rest, up to his neck in rum and women.
  In this back of beyond there is a place yet further remote, and that is the hamlet of Fond-Zombi. If Guadeloupe itself is hardly more than a dot on the map, it may seem even more hopeless and futile to try to summon up an atom like Fond-Zombi. And yet the place does exist. Moreover, it has a long history, full of wonders, bloodshed, and frustrations, and of desires no less vast than those that filled the skies of Nineveh, Babylon, or Jerusalem.
  • beginning of Book 1 section 1

• the whole population was present at the metamorphosis, but it was our hero whose eyes were opened the widest. Ti Jean seemed to be contemplating at last the secret sought in vain under the earth and in the trunks of trees and in books brought back for one or two seasons from school. By the following day the little fellow was reconciled with the world, and returned to the river and games appropriate to his age. From his whole person there flowed a sort of happy magic, and when they saw him people said: "Well, well, Ma Eloise's boy is coming out of his cocoon. Is he making up his mind to take his place in the sun?" (Book 1 section 1)

• ...once fear had fled, the whole thing became just an affair of the tongue, just a flight of words floating up into the sky like bubbles. Gradually the younger generation forgot the once dreaded name, no longer to be heard except occasionally on some aged and moldy tongue. It was all ancient history, and people gave themselves over more than ever to the fury of the new times and the thousand tricks that appeared with the tarred road and the electricity posts. (book 2 section 1)

• ...when, one day out hunting, he met his own story, our hero didn't recognize it. (book 2)

• ...what would become of his memory of the old photograph he had once seen on [her] veranda? Would it fade from his mind, or would it still go on floating inside him, a piece of flotsam worn ever smoother and more transparent, no more than a breath[...]? (book 4)

• His first few weeks in the tribe were as smooth and full and mysterious as an egg. Beneath the appearances of a natural kind of life, with no cares but those of birth, illness and death, the Ba'Sonanke concealed depths which were too subtle for a Negro from Guadeloupe. For them the earth was like a woman's womb: they were very careful about opening it and taking anything from it. Before felling a tree they would sacrifice a cock to the earth, and then pour a drop of palm wine on the cock's soul. As for their own living bodies, they regarded them as a kind of immortal seed, endlessly coming up from the Shade and going down into it again, so that everyone was at once his own grandfather and his own grandson. Most disturbing of all was their sleep, for they made no distinction between dreaming and waking, and thought nothing of calling you to account for your nocturnal doings. Thus a young girl dreamed that Ti Jean had made advances to her, and the next day there was a painful scene which might have ended badly if he had not been the king's guest. But fortunately, with rare exceptions, these people seemed to behave with the same discretion, discernment and scrupulous honesty asleep as awake. (book 5)

• The Ancients had always said that the world below was an exact replica of the world above, except that it was wrapped in the mists of eternity. (Book 5)

• ...the cries of the living had touched and hurt him, like a new kind of stoning. So, shaking off the dust of this world, the hero set forth straight away for the cave of the dead. He arrived at early dawn, just before the flame of the sun. (Book 5)

Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972 novel)

translated from the French into English by Barbara Bray as The Bridge of Beyond (2013)

Part One: My People

• 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. (beginning of chapter 1)

• ...as the wave showed no sign of flagging, the time came when the other Negroes were no longer surprised, and talked about other things, other people, other pains and other wonders. (chapter 1)

Part Two: The Story of My Life

• “The fact is that a mere nothing, a thought, a whim, a particle of dust can change the course of a life. (chapter 1)

• ...she had known life for a long time, my amorous mother with her two bastards for earrings; and she knew that almost always you have to tear out your entrails and fill your belly with straw if you want to enjoy a little walk in the sun. (chapter 1)

• "Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn't ride you, you must ride it." (chapter 3)

• ...he would ask me a thousand little questions, just, he said, to sound out the future a little. (chapter 3)

• “It is always the same forest, always as dense as ever. And so, my son, put aside the branches as best you can, that's all." (chapter 3)

• “However tall trouble is, man must make himself taller still, even if it means making stilts. (chapter 3)

• ...we pondered a lot about the personal life of the grown-ups. We knew how they made love, and we knew too how they tore at and clawed and trampled on one another afterwards, following an unchanging course that led from the chase to weariness and downfall. But it seemed to me the balance was in favor of the men, and that even in their fall there was still something of victory. They broke bones and wombs, then they left their own flesh and blood and misery as a crab leaves his pincers between your fingers. (chapter 3)

• “...the goods of he earth remain the earth's, and man does not own even the skin he is wrapped in. All he owns are the feelings of his heart." (chapter 3)

• ...Some embodied their vice so perfectly they lost their human form and became avarice itself, malice itself, profiteering itself. Meanwhile the others continued the human line, wept, slaved, looked at a rosy sky and laughed. (chapter 3)

• By a mere word tossed into the air he had escaped doom. (chapter 4)

• The place had a kind of mystery, as if, in some long distant past, it had been inhabited by men who knew how to rejoice in rivers, trees, and sky. (chapter 7)

• “In the state he’s in, my child, your love is of no use to him—the whole world might love him and to him it would be of no use. Alas, if only men could love not with half their heart but with the whole heart God has given us, then no one would deserve to die. But as you see, no one is immortal, and that is how the world goes around." (chapter 8)

• ...the three crowns that can usually be hoped for only at the end of a long life. Love, the trust of others, and that kind of glory that accompanies every woman who is happy these were gifts too great not to become dangerous in God's sight. So sometimes, in the shade of my Chinese plum, I would tremble with fright, trying to make out the exact moment when the Almighty would take umbrage at my crowns. But then a little breeze would come and play with my skirt, my sleeves, my braids, and I'd feel I could go on like that until the end of time, and it was as if I was already embalmed, powdered, and laid out happy on my death-bed. (chapter 8)

• "...who says there is nothing for me in the world, who says such foolishness? At this very moment I have left my grief at the bottom of the river. It is going downstream, and will enshroud another heart than mine. Talk to me about life, Grandmother. Talk to me about that." (chapter 9)

• Thus did the days go by for me, growing heavy with new shames and unavowable fears, while my memories themselves gradually abandoned me and disappeared into the mist. All the beautiful words and all the things I'd thought I understood had happened to someone else, some living flesh, not this dead flesh indifferent to the knife - some woman with the heart to do her hair and dress and watch other living creatures.
  But man's mishaps have never made the sun shine any less bright, and at the year's end, the days vied with one another in splendour.
  • chapter 9

• ...I think of the Negro's life and of its mystery. We have no more marks to guide us than the bird in the air or the fish in the water, and in the midst of this uncertainty we live, and some laugh and others sing. (chapter 15)

• It may well be that all suffering, even the prickles in the canefields, are part of the glory of man, and it may well be that looking at it in a certain way, from a certain angle, I may one day be able to grant a certain beauty even to [him]. (chapter 15)

Quotes about

• The Bridge of Beyond provides an admirable example, rooted in the land of Guadeloupe, of woman's courage and self-reliance, an image of independent survival with great importance for the future.
  • Bridget Jones (academic), from her Introduction to the English translation of the book

• I claim Simone Schwarz-Bart and Toni Morrison... those are the two who have moved me the most, touched me the most...Even though Simone was a pioneer, it took almost another ten years for this kind of writing to be given recognition. Her text was a revelation for me, a diamond.
  • Gisèle Pineau, in interview published in Callaloo Vol. 30, No. 1 (2007)

External links

• GoodReads page