The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart

Guadelope fiction

Original title – Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle

Translator – Barbara Bray

Source – Personal copy

I had a search for books to read this month, and I picked this because I had read it before but hadn’t reviewed it, so I quickly reread it. I love the Caribbean literature as it is a rich mix of styles of writing and often focuses on families or villages like this book does. Simone Schwarz and her husband had always highlighted political issues, especially around black females. They wrote a six-volume encyclopedia of black heroines that had been missed from history. I loved this. I doubt we will ever see that book, but it reminds me of the recent exhibition I went to in Cambridge, which highlights the experiences of black slaves and leaders in the abolition movement. Rise up. It was a deeply touching exhibition.

It was the first time I’d been away from home, but I wasn’t at all upset. On the contrary, I felt a kind of excite-ment, going along the white chalky road bordered with filaos with a grandmother whose earthly existence I’d thought was over. We walked in silence, slowly, my grandmother so as to save her breath and I so as not to break the spell. Toward the middle of the day we left the little white road to its struggle against the sun, and turned off into a beaten track all red and cracked with drought. Then we came to a floating bridge over a strange river where huge locust trees grew along the banks, plunging everything into an eternal blue semidarkness.

My grandmother, bending over her small charge, breathed contentment: “Keep it up, my little poppet, we’re at the Bridge of Beyond.” And taking me by one hand and holding on with the other to the rusty cable, she led me slowly across that deathtrap of disintegrating planks with the river boiling below. And suddenly we were on the other bank, Beyond: the landscape of Fond-Zombi unfolded before my eyes, a fantastic plain with bluff after bluff, field after field stretching into the distance, up to the gash in the sky that was the mountain itself, Balata Bel Bois.

Little houses could be seen scattered about, either huddled

I picked this long qutoes as it captures the village

The book is narrated by the Elderly Telumée Lougandor as she recounts her life in Guadeloupe with her grandmother, Toussine, who raised her after she had been abandoned by her parents. Through her two marriages, first to Elie, where she experienced marital violence at his hands, and he is a volatile person, once they are married. It is only years later that she meets Ambroise, a man who is the complete opposite of her first husband, the sort of perfect man. Her life is a mix of everything from just getting by, to loss, to love, to being part of a community of strong women with the distant scars of slavery still running deep in the community. Add to this the village set in the remote mountains of the island and the island itself, with its lush nature and flora, which is almost a character in itself. A book complete with oral tradition in the way the story unfolds, and a slight touch of magical realism, A tale of a strong woman getting by in a harsh world over many generations.

I thought of lying there on the pebbles for Elie to stretch out at full length over me, but instead of that, lost Negress that I was, I took to my heels and ran away by the river while he called after me: “But what did I say? What did I say?” But I kept running, and his voice got fainter and fainter, and soon all I could hear was the breeze among the cassias beside the path, and, somewhere, people laugh-ing, people singing. I was back in Fond-Zombi.

In her first violent marriage to Elie

I loved this book. It is a rich telling of one woman’s life, spanning many generations of her family, from those who were enslaved during the slave days, the first to experience freedom, to the post-colonial years. As I said, the village of Fond-Zombi is in a backwater of the island, so is a place where time itself moves much more slowly, as the island moves forwar,d it seeps gradually into the village a place where just beyond is the mountains the flora and faun and as I said the town itself is almost a character in itself. Nearly touches of magical realism here and there, this is practically a female version of 100 Years of Solitude, both deal with post-colonial worlds and with multi-generational tales. I loved the style of this book as we follow Telumée from childhood into her adulthood to the present. Do you have a favourite book from the Caribbean?