Background
Schwarz-Bart was born on January 8, 1938, in Charent-Maritime, France, and moved to Guadeloupe with her mother when she was three.
(Buy La Mulatresse Solitude on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING ...)
Buy La Mulatresse Solitude on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2020301083/?tag=2022091-20
(Like his previous book Last of the Just, which traced the...)
Like his previous book Last of the Just, which traced the Jewish experience of martyrdom, this book recreates through fact and myth people's enslavement, humiliation and survival.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815607040/?tag=2022091-20
(This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers ...)
This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.” A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Guadeloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590176804/?tag=2022091-20
( In Praise of Black Women is a magnificent tribute to ...)
In Praise of Black Women is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African diaspora from the ancient past to the present. Lavishly illustrated, with text written and selected by the celebrated Guadeloupian novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history. Volume 1: Ancient African Queens weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and travelers’ tales from Egypt to southern Africa, from prehistory to the nineteenth century. These women rulers, warriors, and heroines include Amanirenas, the queen of Kush who battled Roman armies and defeated them at Aswan; Daurama, mother of the seven Hausa kingdoms; Amina Kulibali, founder of the Gabu dynasty in Senegal; Ana de Sousa Nzinga, who resisted the Portuguese conquest of Angola; Beatrice Kimpa Vita, a Kongo prophet burned at the stake by Christian missionaries; Nanda, mother of the famous warrior-king Shaka Zulu; and many others. These extraordinary women's stories, narrated in the style of African oral tradition, are absorbing, informative, and accessible. The abundant illustrations, many of them rare archival images, depict the diversity among Black women and make this volume a unique treasure for every art lover, every school, and every family.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299172503/?tag=2022091-20
( Heroines of the Slavery Era weaves oral tradition, fo...)
Heroines of the Slavery Era weaves oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and personal writings from North and South America and the Caribbean, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. These women of the slavery era include Aqualtune, a princess from Congo enslaved in Brazil and the Caribbean, who led an army of ten thousand warriors in the Battle of Mbwila; Anastasia, an African slave in Brazil, who today is considered the patron saint of Brazil’s blacks; Solitude, a slave in the French West Indies, the leader of the survivors of La Goyave and legendary in Guadeloupe to this day; Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, a child prodigy and brilliant woman whose poetry is among the finest from the early American era; Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad who helped hundreds of other slaves escape to freedom in the United States and Canada; Ellen Craft, a slave who successfully escaped to Philadelphia with her husband; Sojourner Truth, famed orator on behalf of the rights of women and the abolition of slavery; and many others.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299172600/?tag=2022091-20
Schwarz-Bart was born on January 8, 1938, in Charent-Maritime, France, and moved to Guadeloupe with her mother when she was three.
In 1958, having completed her primary studies in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, Schwarz-Bart returned to France for her baccalaureate and studied at the University of Paris. In addition, she spent time traveling in Africa and Europe and studied at the universities of Dakar in Senegal and Lausanne in Switzerland.
In France she met and married writer Andre Schwarz-Bart, with whom she has published two novels, Un Plat de pore aux bananas vertes (A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas; 1967) and La Mulatresse Solitude, translated in 1973 as A Woman Named Solitude. Both novels exemplify the suffering and spiritual struggle of black and mulatto peasant women in Guadeloupe.
Among her most recognized works is the first novel she wrote without the collaboration of her husband. Tire 1972 novel Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle has been translated to English as The Bridge Beyond and depicts its Guadeloupean women protagonists as courageous and self-reliant, surviving in the most extreme poverty and deprivation. It is believed that this work is a fictioiralized biography commemorating Stephanie Priccin, a woman who had fascinated Schwarz-Bart during her childhood in Guadeloupe. One critic touched on Schwartz-Bart's skill with French when he described the protagonist Telumee as speaking "a French that feels like the Creole of an illiterate but intelligent woman". Other reviews have hailed the work for the way it uplifts the human, spirit and have credited her use of magical realism for giving the narrative a dream-like structure. The magazine Elk awarded Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle its literary prize, Gran Prix 1973 de Lectrices.
Another of her well-known novels, Ti-Jean l'Horizon (1971), translated in 1981 as Between Two Worlds, is considered one of Schwarz-Bart's best examples of magical realism, with its narrative based on a popular oral story passed down over generations. Its main character, Ti-Jean, can change at will from one gender to the other in this account that weaves the history of Guadeloupe with the island's myths.
In 1987 she published the play Ton Beau Capitaine (Your Handsome Captain), taken from a real-life situation of Haitian men who leave their country looking for work. Its protagonist, Wilnor Baptiste, goes to Guadeloupe as an agricultural worker while his wife remains in Haiti. It has been hailed as analogous to the condition of migrant workers as well as a representation of the forced removal of African natives who were brought to the Caribbean and the American continent as slaves.
Between 2001 and 2003 she published three volumes of a four-part series, In Praise of Black Women. In the first volume, Ancient African Queens, she presents historical accounts of black women from the African Diaspora from prehistory to the nineteenth century whose contributions have not been acknowledged in written history. The second book, Heroines of the Slavery Era, covers historical data from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, and the third volume, Modern African Women, covers the nineteenth century to the present.
In 1973, Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle was awarded the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. In 2006, Schwarz-Bart was awarded the rank of a Commander in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2008, she received the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde (together with her husband, posthumously) for her lifetime of literary works.
( Heroines of the Slavery Era weaves oral tradition, fo...)
(The first truly continentally representative collection o...)
(Great-granddaughter of Minerve, first woman of the Guadel...)
(Like his previous book Last of the Just, which traced the...)
(This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers ...)
( In Praise of Black Women is a magnificent tribute to ...)
(Buy La Mulatresse Solitude on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING ...)
(Noté 4.0. Ti Jean l'horizon - Simone Schwarz-Bart et des ...)
At the age of 18, while studying in Paris, she met her future husband, André Schwarz-Bart, who encouraged her to take up writing as a career. They married in 1960 and lived at various times in Senegal, Switzerland, Paris, and Guadeloupe.
Her husband died in 2006. They have two sons, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, a noted jazz saxophonist, and Bernard Schwarz-Bart.
