In her “Little Note of Introduction” to André Schwarz-Bart’s first posthumous novel, L’Étoile du matin (The Morning Star) (Seuil 2009) (EdM), the novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart describes her late husband thus: “He carried within him every imaginable form of human life, his head in the stars and his feet in the dust of origins.” And she quotes him: “I leap over all the frontiers, the walls of all the collective prisons, in time and in space.”

This handwritten note of André’s, included in Simone’s introduction, confirms the manifold nature of this man, of this writer with a singular voice who describes his character Haïm, an Auschwitz survivor, at the end of his life in these terms:

Haïm now felt himself in sympathy with all humans, since the caves, including those who spoke to flowers, indeed even with all living forms, down to the insects. Indeed even with the trees in the sky, of which he was a participant, stardust. All his life long, he had felt this manifold, dilated personality, which had led him to the disorder of his mind… (EdM p. 208).

In point of fact, the feeling of belonging to all of humanity, indeed to all “living forms” (fauna, flora, and even minerals and stars) from the dawn of time to the instant incarnate in his flesh, is one of the recurring themes in the work of André Schwarz-Bart, whom some believe, even today, to be the author of a single book — a book fundamentally “Jewish.”

Yet Le dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just) (DdJ), winner of the 1959 Prix Goncourt, a worldwide best-seller, the first masterpiece of fiction centered on the Shoah, is only the first link in a cycle that includes several volumes of a West Indian saga (La Mulâtresse Solitude, A Woman Named Solitude) before closing on a final Jewish novel. Already in the 1959 interviews, André Schwarz-Bart announced that his next novel would not be Jewish. And in a long text from his own hand, “Pourquoi j’ai écrit La Mulâtresse Solitude” (“Why I Wrote La Mulâtresse Solitude”)1, he sets out his overall project at the release of his second novel, Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas) (Seuil 1967), which threw more than one reader. The narrator is an old Martinican woman ending her life in Paris, in a home for the aged, and suffering the dehumanizing and humiliating effects of a threefold prejudice: Mariotte is Black, she is a woman, and she is old!

Interviewed by Jean-Pierre Gorin, Schwarz-Bart underscores the kinship between his two novels: “the concentrationary world is the greatest common denominator of everything I have written…” (Le Monde, February 1, 1967, p. VIII). He stresses that his novels are founded on an oblique approach — indirect, and therefore softened and bearable for the reader — to the extreme sufferings undergone by his heroes: not individuals whose lives would be interesting enough to justify placing them at the center of a book, but “exemplary” heroes, “bearers of time,” whose individual life, inserted into a long genealogy of ancestors and descendants who traverse the entire history of their people, illustrates that people’s dignity and spirituality, despite the prejudices that disfigure them.

In earlier studies, I have called this novelistic procedure “identity saga”2, in which, moreover, the heroes — while embodying their own people — also represent all of humanity:

I made use of an oblique approach by having my hero [Ernie] live, in his everyday life, experiences that, in germ, were already concentrationary. The problem comes down to similar terms for La Mulâtresse Solitude: the asylum seems to me a concentrationary bud of our world; slavery too offers analogies with that universe. There is nothing accidental in this: the concentrationary world is the greatest common denominator of everything I have written until now. (Le Monde, op. cit.)

The State of Israel was not mistaken about this when, on March 30, 1967 (shortly before the Six-Day War), it awarded him the Prize of the City of Jerusalem “for the freedom of man in society.” Not a “Jewish” prize, but a prize that celebrates his personal and literary struggle, so as to underscore:

[…] at once the ignominy of the condition imposed on the individual prey to the wickedness of oppressing groups, and the quasi-mythic grandeur of his destiny, which is to bear witness to human truth, to redeem man from his hell by assuming it entirely […] To the struggle for the vindication of his own people, André Schwarz-Bart adds a concern for the other oppressed races, for all those who suffer unjustly at the hands of their denatured brothers.3

In various interviews of the period, Schwarz-Bart recalls the paradox of the stork, which is called in Hebrew hassida, the generous one (from hessèd), because she feeds her own with love, but which figures among the impure animals in the Bible (Leviticus 11:19), because she cares only for her own.4 Already in Le dernier des Justes, the legend of the Thirty-Six Just Men is set forth as a gift to all of humanity: “According to it, the world would rest upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov. […] Into them all our sorrows are poured as into a receptacle […] Were even a single one of them to be lacking, the suffering of men would poison even the souls of little children, and humanity would smother in a single cry” (DdJ p. 12, emphasis mine). Moreover, not all the Lamed-Vov are Jewish, since among them one counts “Hecuba, howling at the death of her sons” (DdJ p. 13).

In the prologue of L’Étoile du matin, one finds again the expression of a manifold identity: the homage to his own people — the Jewish people — is justified because it embodies in itself and champions universal Man:

A little people that, through a single book, had made the whole Planet fruitful. This book said that all men issue from a single original couple, so that they might all have the same ancestors, and that no human could say to another: “I am superior to you by birth.” (EdM, p. 19)5

If André Schwarz-Bart devoted his literary life to denouncing racism, to bringing to light the soil, the germs, and the buds that allowed the materialization, in the Nazi era, of a concentrationary universe carried to its paroxysm, it is doubtless because his two parents, two of his brothers, and a great-aunt (murdered at Auschwitz in 1942–43) perished solely because they were Jews. A Resistance fighter from the age of fifteen and a half in the UJRE6 and the FTP-MOI, with whom he took part in the Liberation of Limoges, then a soldier in the French army (18th Infantry Regiment of the FFI, he fought at the Pointe de Grave), a convinced Communist until the first antisemitic and anti-Zionist trials of 1952–537, an active militant against the Algerian War (he was a signatory of the second list of the Manifesto of the 121 calling, during the winter of 1960, for the right to military disobedience and for the independence of Algeria), a defender of Israel even though in 1947 he opted for the socialist struggle “as the true solution to the Jewish problem” rather than for the Zionist struggle8, André Schwarz-Bart is a man of action and of conviction, profoundly Jewish and intrinsically open to the entire world.

He deliberately chose to “pay homage” to heroes who do not really resemble him, but whose inner beauty he wants to reveal. Neither valorous fighters, nor Communists, nor Zionists, the heroes of Le dernier des Justes are nonviolent, profoundly Jewish and human9, even if their lives and their outward appearance are “other” — and so strange, foreign, even off-putting to a Westerner. The same holds for his Black heroes. Interviewed at the release of Le Plat de porc by the UJRE magazine, Presse nouvelle, Schwarz-Bart declared to Jean Liberman:

Man is afraid of all that is different from himself. Henceforth one must arrange matters so that a given people or human group, which seems to him distant, foreign, becomes near to him, familiar, so that one may love the stranger for his difference, valued as an enrichment for all. […] Thus, to love others is, on the novelistic plane, my way of struggling against racism10.

When Ernie Lévy volunteers and enlists in a foreign regiment of the French army at the very declaration of war, it is not to seek some martial heroism dear to the West, but in the hope that the enlistment certificates he obtains will protect his family, both Jewish and German: “Above all, rest assured, grandfather, I shall remember that there are men on the other side; besides, it is as a stretcher-bearer that I serve, I carry no rifle, I carry only men” (DdJ, p. 257). In La Mulâtresse Solitude (MS), the heroine Rosalie, called “two souls” because of her differently colored eyes that reflect her dual origin — since she was born of the rape of her mother by a white sailor — appropriates for herself the first name “Solitude.” She is the heroine of André Schwarz-Bart’s third published novel (Seuil, 1972). If she fights in 1802 alongside Delgrès against the French forces come to restore slavery in Guadeloupe, it is almost in spite of herself, because she is already regarded as a heroine by her fellows, her rebel brothers, the hunted maroons with whom she fled from 1798 on; yet changed into a zombi-cornes11 at the age of eleven, after the sufferings undergone in her young life as a slave (MS p. 74)12, then disenchanted and choosing her Black identity alone (p. 96), it is in a half-fog that she later kills a plumed soldier who is shooting at her comrades (MS p. 105), before becoming a fearless fighter who, though pregnant, ends up guillotined on the cours Nivelos in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe.

In Le Plat de porc, Solitude’s granddaughter struggles by other weapons: “her writings.” But she is born too soon to be heard, to be recognized in France as a sister in humanity. In a handwritten working note (an undated loose sheet) that I found in André’s study in Goyave, Guadeloupe, he writes:

My negress is absence, at the start, like the human group in which she appears. And her whole life expresses the heartrending and impossible will to a presence in the world. […] At the end of the book, she will voice her regret at being too old for this world being born before her eyes as it closes again.

It is to offer these foreign voices a presence in the world that Schwarz-Bart writes. After a journey through Israel, Africa, and the West Indies, he drafts this note in Lausanne, dated January 20, 1961:

An old woman speaks. Death flows in her veins. An old negress. Black humiliation. A poor woman: solitude. Hers is one of those voices the world is not in the habit of hearing, for words fail them and they swell their throats in vain, like those [crossed out: cries of the executed] tortured ones to whom the Germans applied a gag of plaster. To break the immemorial plaster.

The parallelism between Jewish solitude and Black solitude is clearly expressed. For André Schwarz-Bart, the Other par excellence — the Black man whose ancestors knew, as his own did, slavery and persecution — is but an inverted double of himself. Still in 1961, but in Dakar13, he writes in another note: “The old woman is me, and I am her. What holds for one holds for the other. My philosophy is hers, and in seeking out what she thinks, I discover the depths of my own heart.”

When the Jewish Writer Makes Himself “Other”

In throwing himself into the writing of the Black cycle, André Schwarz-Bart was gnawed by the concern for “legitimacy.” At the release of Le dernier des Justes, certain Jews had reproached him for presenting a distorted and “suffering” image of the Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe, an image that did not resemble them and from which they were keen to dissociate themselves. Moreover, they accused him of errors, of partial plagiarisms, of illegitimacy because he had not been interned in the camps14. Before leaving for Africa to do research on site so as to nourish the writing of his second novel, André asked himself:

Did I have the right, I, a white man, to speak of people of color without their express agreement; or at least, without the consent of representative figures of the Black world? […] From the start, several people gave me to understand that a white man could not honestly write about Black people15.

Aware that, in order to write a “Black” work, what was at stake for him was “to make himself other in order to be able to write it,” and to obtain encouragement, if not agreement, from his brothers in suffering, he went, in the month following the Goncourt (as early as January 1960), to the offices of the Présence africaine publishing house in Paris, hoping “to meet, if possible, the great West Indian poet Aimé Césaire”16. The latter was in Martinique (where he received Schwarz-Bart a few months later). But that day he met other bards of Négritude: the Senegalese Alioune Diop and the Malagasy Jacques Rabemananjara, who welcomed his project with such “generosity” that he came “almost, for a moment, to doubt himself no longer” (ibid.).

In his revealing interview granted to J.-P. Gorin of Le Monde, at the time of the release of Le Plat de porc in February 1967, Schwarz-Bart conveyed the feeling of brotherhood, of profound affinity, that he had long maintained with the West Indians and that nourished his enterprise (op. cit., p. VIII). Far more, beyond his Jewish, Black, or other heroes drawn from oppressed minorities (exploited women and rejected elders of the hospice), he wanted to pay homage to the dignity of all the cast-asides, of all the persecuted. He aspired to restore their pride to their descendants while making them known and loved by readers belonging to the civilization of the persecutors, the one that had invented “the concentrationary universe” (ibid.). He was profoundly convinced that, united by the extreme experience of slavery, which founds their respective identities, Jews and Blacks “neighbor” one another despite certain radical differences. It is, nevertheless, in the very respect for their differences that they can meet and recognize their common humanity:

My relation with the West Indians was profoundly Jewish. I felt a sense of brotherhood, that is to say, the possibility of a communication with this people. Identity of the Jewish condition and the West Indian condition? No. The enterprise of genocide of which the Jews had been the object instituted, historically, a radical difference. Contiguity, rather, of two extreme experiences that authorized a dialogue. (op. cit. Gorin p. VIII, emphasis mine)

Much later, in other handwritten notes that I sorted through at Goyave, Schwarz-Bart would describe his Jewish and Black works as “reversible.” Thus on April 30, 1994, he specifies that La Mulâtresse Solitude (Seuil 1972) is a “Jewish novel under a Black cover.” But he then deplores that his readers had not noticed it. And he grieves over the compartmentalized reception of the reversible work, limited to a sectarian identification — not to mention the distressing problem of the competition of memories: Solitude is not found in the Pletzel17, and Le dernier des Justes does not appear in the West Indian bookshops. And then there is the Shoah, which the Blacks do not forgive us18.

The Era of Doubt

Little by little, Schwarz-Bart seems to reconsider his position. He has a presentiment that his universal aim, in his life as in his work, can be expressed only through his particular identity, the Jewish identity which, though “deliquescent” (the term he uses in a late, undated note), remains preeminent. In a note inscribed in a book printed in 1992, he observes, in describing Haïm, his character from L’Étoile du Matin who becomes the central character of his last Jewish book, unfinished:

Haïm had two ears: a Jewish ear and a human ear. Often the two ears heard the same sound; but sometimes it was a different sound and one had to guess which of the two was the true sound. It did not go without conflicts: there were periods when he believed his Jewish ear rather, and others when he believed his human ear rather. But he had noticed this: when he chose his human ear, it often happened that it turned out, finally, to be the true Jewish ear. It was as if there were within him two Jewish ears. An immediate, visible Jewish ear, and a Jewish ear hidden deep within the human ear. It was a little, within him, the conflict that reigns in the Bible, between the tribal Judaism of some and the universal Judaism of others. But the Judaism of the prophets had the absolute warrant of God. It was not a choice, but an obligation. Whereas he, an unbeliever, on what could he lean in order to choose the universal in himself, the Good in himself, the human in himself, against the animal, and so on? It is quite simple: on an act of faith19.

Over time, then, André Schwarz-Bart begins to call his enterprise into question. In aiming at the universal, did he not repress his own identity to the point of no longer knowing who he is? Did he not, moreover, wrongly believe in his legitimacy as a writer in borrowing, in order to write, the voice of a Black woman? In taking up again in its entirety the already-cited note of April 30, 1994, I hope to make palpable the inner debates of the writer who had believed he could make himself “other” in order to speak in the name of “another people.”

The bird sings well only in its genealogical tree: this formula, which used to make my hackles rise, today resounds with an infinitely modest truth. If only in the light of T. Nathan20; the meaning of this “amniotic” tree appears to me as self-evident. I had not, in the past, been conscious of the presumptuousness of my universalist positions where literary creation is concerned: I refused what I then called ethnic literature, I believed in a point equidistant from all cultures, which gave me the right to write about Black people. I did not want to see how much the “reversible” conception of La Mulâtresse Solitude limited the reach of that relative success; in truth it is a Jewish novel under a Black cover, and it is the Jewish “amniotic” milieu that gives it its human truth. These thoughts come to me just as I have known some exhilarating minutes dreaming of C.D.V.21. Last night I believed this book impossible. Yet as soon as I abandoned myself to my deep source, bathing once more in the emotions of my Jewish childhood, ideas came to me in floods like so many gifts fallen from the sky, or rather like so many waves born of the great flood of life and which suddenly traversed me after having abandoned me for so many years. I became once more an instrument that lets life pass through it — on the condition, naturally, of becoming once more a modestly Jewish instrument. (T. Nathan)

A few months later, Schwarz-Bart is more categorical still in what he henceforth considers an acknowledgment of the failure of his Black work:

12.25.94. A whole life in error. There is no universal. There is only a dream of the universal. Each (collective) psychic structure is unique, transitory, total. There is only the particular. “Human nature” passes through the particular. It is therefore a theoretical figure22.

This late observation was confirmed to me orally during my last meeting with André Schwarz-Bart, in a café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, in May 2003. He was convinced of having taken a wrong path in borrowing the voice of a Black narrator. It is true that his West Indian readers and critics had reproached him for it, sometimes vehemently, in the wake of Black nationalism and the postcolonial movement. This second “Schwarz-Bart affair” had definitively convinced him not to publish the continuation of his West Indian cycle, though it was already written, if not finalized. He had henceforth cloistered himself within the walls of his room in Goyave to write a play and a great Jewish novel, both entitled Kaddich (Kaddish).

And yet, in dictating in 2003 the page that figures at the end of L’Étoile du matin, he convinces himself that civilizations issue from a “universal mixing” (p. 217) and that the Jews of Israel, “come from all the continents, witnesses of all the races and traditions […] a planetary tribe” (p. 222–223), condense within themselves “the totality of the human past” (p. 223). The study of his library and his notes is under way. The publication of three posthumous novels by Simone Schwarz-Bart should make it possible to go further in the knowledge of this exceptional writer who pursued to the end his task as a combatant against racism23, his quest for a Judaism to be redefined after the Shoah.

Notes

  1. “Pourquoi j’ai écrit La Mulâtresse Solitude. André Schwarz-Bart s’explique sur huit ans de silence,” Le Figaro littéraire, January 26, 1967, p. 8–9.↩︎

  2. See: Francine Kaufmann, “Les Sagas identitaires d’André Schwarz-Bart : faire aimer l’étranger pour la dignité de sa différence,” in NEF/Nouvelles Études Francophones, Vol. 26, no. 1 (Spring 2011), p. 16–33; special issue on the Schwarz-Barts, edited by Kathleen Gyssels.↩︎

  3. Findings of the jury of the Jerusalem Prize, doubtless drafted by the writer Claude Vigée, but signed by the mayor of the city, Teddy Kollek. See the full text and the laureate’s reply in my doctoral thesis (1976) and in my article in the French edition of the Jerusalem Post (no. 817, November 21–27, 2006, p. 16–17), accessible online on the site of the Judaism of Alsace and Lorraine: http://judaisme.sdv.fr/perso/schwbart/schwbart.htm↩︎

  4. See in particular Le Figaro, January 31, 1967, and Le Nouvel Observateur, February 8, 1967. Schwarz-Bart must have read this apologue in the book by Martin Buber that often serves him as a source: Les récits hassidiques (Hasidic Tales) (1963): “The question was put to Yaakov Yitzhak [of Pshyzha]: ‘The Talmud explains that the stork is called (in Hebrew) Hassida, the pious or affectionate one, for the reason that she loves her own. Why, then, does she fall into the category of impure birds? Because she dispenses her love only to her own,’ replied the Rabbi.” Pocket edition, Seuil, Points Sagesses, 1996 (2 vols.), Vol. 2, p. 207. Talmudic source: BT Hulin 63a.↩︎

  5. Italics in the original. André Schwarz-Bart refers here to the Mishnah, tractate Sanhedrin IV, 5: “Adam was created (man) unique […] so that no man could say to another: my father was greater than yours.”↩︎

  6. UJRE, Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide (Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid). Extending the action of the Solidarité combat groups, the U.J.R.E. was born in clandestinity in 1943. It united the Jewish Resistance, issued in particular from the M.O.I. (Main d’Œuvre Immigrée, Immigrant Labor), from the U.J.J. (Union de la Jeunesse Juive, Union of Jewish Youth), and from the Solidarité movement, and was constituted after the Liberation of Paris, on November 13, 1944, as an association governed by the law of 1901.↩︎

  7. In the Slánský trial, or Prague Trial (1952), the Jewish origin of eleven of the fourteen accused is clearly underscored. Shortly afterward broke out the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” (January 1953), which accused Soviet Jewish doctors of being Zionist spies in the pay of America and of having received from the American Jewish organization JOINT the order to exterminate the leaders of the USSR. Several hundred were arrested.↩︎

  8. He would declare in 1967 to J.-F. Held that this decision was one of the greatest regrets of his life (Le Nouvel Observateur, February 8, 1967).↩︎

  9. Read André Schwarz-Bart’s introduction to “La biographie d’Ernie Lévy” (“The Biography of Ernie Lévy”), a chapter published in La revue du FSJU of December 1956, p. 26, and reprinted in full in L’Express of 12/10/59.↩︎

  10. In Jean Liberman, “Entretien avec André Schwarz-Bart : Auschwitz et Hiroshima, nouvelles coordonnées de l’esprit,” in Presse nouvelle, no. 81, 1967, p. 6; bold type in the original.↩︎

  11. The Zombi-cornes is a character of West Indian folklore, a kind of living-dead whose soul has “departed.”↩︎

  12. This episode is equivalent to the transformation of Hecuba into a dog at the death of her children, as well as to the chapter “The Dog” in DdJ: at the death of his parents, Ernie “makes himself a dog” and answers only to the name Ernest Bâtard (DdJ p. 264). (Ernie is a diminutive of Ernest.)↩︎

  13. André married Simone in Paris on March 21, 1961. They settled in Lausanne, then, in the autumn of ’61, went to live in Dakar for a year.↩︎

  14. I devoted a long study to what has been called “the Schwarz-Bart affair.” See F. Kaufmann, “Les enjeux de la polémique autour du premier best-seller français de la littérature de la Shoah,” Myriam Ruszniewski-Dahan and Georges Bensoussan, eds., Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah no. 176, Sept.–December 2002, issue on “La Shoah dans la littérature française,” p. 68–96. Accessible online: http://judaisme.sdv.fr/perso/schwbart/revue.pdf.↩︎

  15. Op. cit. “Pourquoi j’ai écrit La Mulâtresse Solitude,” p. VIII.↩︎

  16. Ibid.↩︎

  17. The Pletzel (literally “little place, spot” in Yiddish) is the name given to the Jewish quarter of the rue des Rosiers in Paris, where one finds a few Jewish bookshops.↩︎

  18. Undated handwritten note.↩︎

  19. This pencil note appears on the page “Note de l’éditeur” (“Publisher’s Note”) in the book by Ana Novac, Les beaux jours de ma jeunesse, Journal, Balland, 1992 (first edition in 1968).↩︎

  20. T. Nathan = Tobie Nathan (born 1948, in Cairo): an eminent representative of ethnopsychiatry. See L’Influence qui guérit, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1994.↩︎

  21. C.D.V = Le Chant de vie (The Song of Life). The name of a work devoted to André Schwarz-Bart’s mother and doubtless destroyed in its entirety (according to another handwritten note). This title is also that of the second part of L’Étoile du Matin.↩︎

  22. Handwritten note on the recto of the back cover of Clément Rosset’s book La Force majeure, Éditions de Minuit, Collection “Critique,” 102 pages, 1983.↩︎

  23. In the notes that attest to the framework and episodes of the last Jewish novel, “the other” is often a Jewish or Black minority: Ethiopians (Falashas) and Palestinians in Israel, the African diaspora. For the study of “the other” in Adieu Bogota, read the study by Agnès Lhermitte, “Parler de l’autre, parler pour l’autre : Adieu Bogota (2017), roman posthume d’André Schwarz-Bart,” Caietele Echinox no. 37, 2019. Imaginaires de l’altérité II. Approches littéraires et artistiques, Phantasma, Centre de Recherches sur l’Imaginaire, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, p. 55–65. I am currently working on the writing of a literary biography of André Schwarz-Bart. To this end, I am sorting through the notes and sheets that I classified during several stays in Guadeloupe, between 2009 and 2016, in André’s study, with the agreement of Simone Schwarz-Bart. I hope to be able to deepen and substantiate in this biography several points raised in this article. ↩︎

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