Simone Schwarz-Bart, Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle
Our Reading Journey
The novel opens by tracing four generations of women before it lets its narrator speak in her own voice: Télumée, daughter of Victoire, granddaughter of Toussine, and great-granddaughter of Minerve, a woman freed by the 1848 abolition who settles in a Guadeloupean hamlet called L'Abandonnée. Toussine's own story, a love match with the fisherman Jérémie that the village reads through spirits and saints as much as through plain fact, becomes the legend Télumée grows up hearing before she has one of her own. By the time the narration catches up to her, she has worked in the house of a white colonial family, survived what that work cost her, and returned to Fond-Zombi to marry Élie and build a home she finally, if briefly, feels is her own.
Read as a whole, the book feels like a song passed mouth to mouth, four generations of women each learning who she is by listening to the one before her: Toussine's story handed to Victoire, Victoire's to Télumée. Schwarz-Bart writes in the rhythms of Guadeloupean orality, proverb, and refrain, so that a society's whole history under and after slavery arrives as a chant: repeated, communal, and carried in the body before it's understood in the head. The book hands the reader women who keep speaking, keep naming each other, and keep finding a way to say what happened in a world that was built, for a long time, to keep them from saying it. Even the names carry this: Toussine becomes Reine Sans Nom, a queen assigned by her village because no ordinary name could hold what she'd survived.
About the Author
Simone Schwarz-Bart was born Simone in 1938 in France to Guadeloupean parents, and she grew up in Guadeloupe after her mother brought her back there during the Second World War. At eighteen, in the Latin Quarter, she met André Schwarz-Bart, a Polish Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor then finishing The Last of the Just, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1959; he encouraged her to write, and the two went on to collaborate across decades on parallel Jewish and Antillean memory, beginning with Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes in 1967. Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, published under her name in 1972, remains her best-known book, alongside the novel Ti Jean L'horizon (1979) and the play Ton beau capitaine (1987). After André's death in 2006, she completed the manuscripts he left unfinished. She was made a Commandeur in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, and Télumée Miracle has since been translated into about a dozen languages, including English as The Bridge of Beyond. She still lives in Guadeloupe.
