Word: schwarz-bart
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...WRITING in A Woman Named Solitude is so surely tied to the psyches of its characters that this chronicle of slave revolt in 18th century Guadeloupe is nothing like a parade of piteous horrors. Andre Schwarz-Bart, a French Jew who survived Nazi camps and Resistance fighting and has already given us one masterpiece, gets into the mindscape of each French colonial and transplanted African tribesman. He dramatizes their religious and political tensions with precise evocations of war and ritual, and he compresses his narrative to unsentimental essentials. The book is both poem and protest; more than a simple howl...
...Schwarz-Bart sets the foundations for his novel far away from Guadeloupe, in the West Africa of the Diolas. They live "in a calm and intricate estuary landscape, where the clean water of a river, the green water of an ocean, and the black water of a delta channel mingled -- and where, so it is said, the soul was still immortal." Their culture is joined to the elements of nature which allow them to live, and their history follows a seasonal cycle. Ancestors are perpetually reborn, and the traditions they established are honored. The community is so constant...
...dignity of her native culture, she responds to the tortures of the French masters of Guadeloupe with mere surliness and escape. She realizes, as only a few of her fellow sufferers initially do, that there is no cause for her plight beyond the power of the slave-drivers. But Schwarz-Bart leaves to her daughter the ability to retaliate significantly...
...Schwarz-Bart begins his dramatic moral fable in a timeless, tribal Africa, where spirits inhabit the trees, tom-toms breathe lightly under agile fingers and the dead are buried in the fields so they can blow life into the roots of the crops. Ancestors who tire of the underground may slip into a passing pregnant woman and be reborn...
...historical woman called Solitude actually existed. Schwarz-Bart notes that she was captured and executed on Nov. 29, 1802, immediately after giving birth. His fictional Solitude has a more complex background. Married to a Guadeloupian woman, Schwarz-Bart, 44, set out some years ago to write a se ries of novels that would record the hardships of several generations of black women, both in Europe and the Americas. A Woman Named Solitude seems to be an attempt to get it all in - all the legend and history, the com passion and private sentiment, including a parting volley for the victims...