Mariama Bâ : So long a letter

I’ve been wondering why some novels make more impact on us than others. The clues are: the author’s talent, the building of their work , the topic, the way we identity with the characters, the context of the reading, sincerity, rage, humor, the capability to look positively to the future…fill in the blanks.

The Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ’s So long a letter makes me identify with a character very close to one in my own life, though the Congolese context (mine) is different. What also strikes me about this novel is the quality of the writing, Mariama Bâ’s courage and lucidity when analyzing the urban society of her country. She has a very good understanding of the unheard pain of the many African women bending under the burden of patriarchal traditions. In 1979 she questions polygamy, caste systems. She calls for what can be qualified a reasoned emancipation of Senegalese women. Leaving aside an occidental-flavored feminism, she tells the story of two women through the letters Ramatoulaye and her childhood friend Aïssatou share. During the period of mourning following her husband Modou Fall’s death, Ramatoulaye recalls the beginning and evolution of their couples, the influence of the families, cast matters, betrayal or men’s cowardice, the choices when confronted with an imposed polygamy despite the original ideal they’ve imagined.

She also paints many other women from Aïssatou’s mother-in-law, keeper of the family’s noble lineage, to the mother of her own co-wife who brings her young daughter into marriage with the old Modou Fall.

This novel is all about women, sometimes persecutors, most of the time, victims of history and present. It’s a story of friendship, like the one bonding the two main characters of Toni Morrison’s Sula.

It’s way too hard for a woman to make a man understand the weight, the violence, the abandon that polygamy is in african big cities under the yoke of a rampant materialism and a triumphant masculine egoism.

So here is a woman speaking openly to another woman. A very beautiful african letter.

Article original traduit du français par Titilayo Agbahey

Mariama Bâ, So long a letter

Edition Heinemann, Translator Modupe-Bode-Thomas, 96 pages