I have not read a book this good in years. Strong women. Strong setting. Strong writing. This moved me. ( )

Thank you NYRB classics. I don't know how I would have found this marvel otherwise. It runs deep and rich. ( )

Petite-fille d'une négresse à la beauté légendaire, Télumée s'use les mains dans une plantation de canne à sucre.

Chassée par un mari alcoolique, elle se réfugie chez Ambroise le sage et le révolté. Malgré sa condition et son statut d'exploitée, Télumée possède un trésor inestimable : l'amour de la vie.

Son récit fait chanter la langue française au rythme de la musique noire.

« Si on m'en donnait le pouvoir, c'est ici même, en Guadeloupe, que je choisirais de renaître, souffrir et mourir. »

source : Points Seuil
1995 (1ère éd. 1980)

It's difficult to write about this book without sounding trite. At times it is delightful, at other times it is devastating. My fear of just about any adjective to describe it though is based in a terror of making it sound like those dreadful blurbs on the backs of the novels so loved by certain book clubs. That would be to make it what it definitely is not. I can see some careless blurber using "inspiring" or "multi generational" or even worse, "heartwarming". That would be an injustice.

The novel starts as the personal narrative of an old woman, looking back at her childhood. However, it quickly becomes clear that it is also a narrative of country, and beyond that, of slavery, a condition that has many forms.

At age ten, Telumée Lougandoor was sent from her village of L'Abandonée to live with her grandmother for the best and worst of reasons. Her grandmother, Queen Without a Name, took her far from the world, over the Bridge of Beyond.

Queen Without a Name's cabin was the last in the village; it marked the end of the world of human beings and looked as if it were leaning against the mountain. Queen Without a Name opened the door and ushered me into the one little room. As soon as I crossed the threshold I felt as if I were in a fortress, safe from everything known and unknown, under the protection of my grandmother's great full skirt.

This sounds like the entry to a magical world, but Queen Without a Name was one of the most realistic women ever. Her life was now to teach Telumée how to live so that she would always be the one in charge, spiritually and materially, but to accomplish this in a way that wouldn't scare the child. Thursdays were story night in the hut:

Above our heads the land wind made the rusty corrugated iron roof creak and groan. But the voice of Queen Without a Name was glowing, distant, and her eyes crinkled in a faint smile as she opened before us a world in which trees cry out, fishes fly, birds catch the fowler, and the Negro is the child of God.

The knowledge of what it is to be a people apart, scorned and abused, the descendants of slaves, permeates the writing. The cane fields were still out there, waiting for those who couldn't make it on their own. Abolition had done little to change things.

The Bridge of Beyond may have led to a world beyond the slavery of the fields, but there was still the slavery of entrapment, of loving unwisely. This was a lesson Queen Without a Name worked hard to impart. However it is a lesson every generation has to learn for itself; one Telumée pondered from different angles throughout her life.

Simone Schwarz-Bart grew up in Guadeloupe and moved to Paris in her teens. She married André Schwarz-Bart, author of [The Last of the Just]. The two felt compelled to tell the stories of their respective peoples, those they felt were the most oppressed: the Jews and the Africans, each in their own diaspora. Although they collaborated on several books, they wrote their peoples' stories separately. Queen Without a Name's message applies equally well to both:

Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn't ride you, you must ride it.

I really liked this story. It is simply and powerfully written. On the back cover, a reviewer from the Financial Times says, "There's magic, madness, glory, tenderness, above all abundant hope." I found all those descriptions true of the characters though the book left me feeling without hope. Or rather, solidified my own feelings of the futility of being human. To me, there is this strange and unconscious drive to live, at all costs, by all means. But why do we do that? What virtue in mere existence? I think that if I were in the shoes of some of those characters I would have happily thrown myself off a cliff earlier than later. ( )