Mariamâ Ba’s

So long a Letter

ENG 115
 Introduction
In order for you to better comprehend all you have learnt so far, there are primary
texts chosen to exemplify what you have been learning.

ILLUSTRATIVE TEXTS
1. Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter
2. Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando
3. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
4. Tess Onwueme’s The Reign of Wazobia
5. Remi Raji’s Sea of My Mind
6. A Few Poetic Works (To be anthologized)
 In analysing a novel….

BACKGROUND
Consider the other elements of Prose
fiction, such as
You need to be
character/characterisation, the plot, point
conversant with the 01 02 of view, setting, etc.
history or background to
the novelist/novel.

THEMES NARRATIVE DEVICES

Read the novel closely and
decipher the thematic
preoccupation of the
03
novel.
Ask youself “what are the
styles, the narrative devices
04 employed by the novelist and
to what end?
In 1959, one year before Senegal’s independence, Leopold Seldar Senghor made the following
claim: that ‘contrary to what is often thought today, the African woman does not need to be liberated.
She has been free for many thousands of years’ (45). Mariama Bâ in response spoke in an interview
about the role of the African woman writer:

The woman writer in Africa has a special task. She has to present the position of women in Africa in
all its aspects. There is still so much injustice…. In the family, in the institutions, in society, in the
street, in political organizations, discrimination reigns supreme…. As women, we must work for our
own future, we must overthrow the status quo which harms us and we must no longer submit to it.
Like men, we must use literature as a non-violent but effective weapon. We no longer accept the
nostalgic praise to the African Mother who, in his anxiety, man confuses with Mother Africa. Within
African literature, room must be made for women…, room we will fight for with all our might. (From
Florence Stratton’s Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender)
 Mariama Bâ’s So long a Letter
What do we know about Mariama Ba?

 Mariama Ba was born on April 17, 1929 and she died on August 17, 1981 at the age
of 52. Mariama Ba was born in Dakar, Senegal. She lost her mum early in life and she
had to be taken care of by her grandmother. From her grandmother, she learnt the
importance of women and the crucial role women play in humanity. Of her
grandmother, Mariama Ba wrote: “by her voice, [she] taught me that women are
precious beings”.

 At her father’s instance, Mariama Ba attended the prestigious École normale des
jeunes filles de Rufisque: an teacher training College located just outside Dakar.

 Mariama Ba’s other works besides So long a Letter are La fonction politique des
littératures Africaines écrites (The Political Function of African Written Literatures) (1981)
and Scarlet Songs (1986).
 Mariama Bâ’s So long a Letter

 So long a letter was published in 1979 as Une si longue letter. So long a Letter was published in 1981.
 So long a Letter is a semi-autobiographical novella.
 So Long a Letter was awarded the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.

 So Long a Letter that presents the reminiscences of a Muslim, French-educated, middle-aged

Senegalese school teacher, Ramatoulaye, during her iddat, the mourning period of four months
and 10 days prescribed for Muslim widows. In this long “letter” written to her best friend,
Aissatou, Ramatoulaye looks back on her life with Modou Fall, her husband of 30 years, providing
readers with a specific insight into her own experiences, as well as those of other women. Her
memories are sometimes bitter, as she had been forced to survive on her own during the last five
years of his life, when Modou contracted a polygynous marriage with their daughter Daba's
young schoolfriend, Binetou. Ramatoulaye's experiences span the colonial and post-colonial
periods, and she says: It was the privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in
history, one of domination, the other of independence (Ba, 1980:25). (From Rizwana Habib
Latha’s Feminisms in an African Context: Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter)

 Mariama Bâ said in an interview that So Long a Letter is a cry from the heart of all women,
although first and foremost from that of Muslim Senegalese women (cited in Stringer’s The
Senegalese Novel by Women, 1996)
 Characters

- Ramatoulaye Fall - Aissatou

Mariama Bâ pairs the two friends Ramatoulaye and Aissatou. ‘We walked the same paths from adolescence to
maturity’, Ramatoulaye writes at the beginning of her letter (1), and later, ‘Our lives developed in parallel’ (19).
Friends from childhood, they attend the same schools, graduate from the same college, choose the same
profession, and even marry and Mawdo, two men who are friends. She writes that ‘We were true sisters,
destined for the same mission of emancipation’, (15). But confronted with the same dilemma, they opt for
different solutions, Aissatou to resist the imposition of patriarchal standards and Ramatoulaye to submit and
reap the rewards of conformity.

- Modou: The husband of Ramatoulaye and of Binetou.

- Mawdo: Ex-husband of Aïssatou.
- Binetou: A young girl around Daba's age who marries her Modou.
- Aïssatou: Ramatoulaye's best friend, to whom the letters are addressed.
- Aïssatou: Ramatoulaye and Modou's daughter, who is named after her best friend.
- Daouda Dieng: A suitor of Ramatoulaye prior to her marriage with Modou who Proposes to Ramatoulaye
after her husband dies.
- Daba: Ramatoulaye's and Modou's daughter.
 Setting

 So Long a Letter is set in Dakar about twenty years after Senegal’s independence from France. Its world is
that of Dakar’s professional middle class, the members of which, in their student days, were in the
vanguard of the nationalist and feminist movements of the 1950s. Bâ evaluates the outcome of these
movements from a contemporary perspective, revealing the betrayal of the hopes and aspirations of
both by this same privileged elite: the undermining of the nationalists’ socialist ideals by bourgeois
materialism, and the compromising of the feminist ideal of gender equality through adherence to
imported western and indigenous Islamic patriarchal values and practices.
 Themes in Mariama Ba’s So long a Letter
Marriage

 The narrative presents the stories of four marriages (Ramatoulaye’s marriage to Modou,
Binetou’s marriage to Modou, Aissatou’s marriage to Mawdo and Jacqueline’s marriage).

 Ramatoulaye relates the experiences of wives in marriage. Ramatoulaye tells of her own
experiences as a wife, abandoned wife, and then a widow.

 She also presents Aissatou’s experiences in marriage, how her husband’s sister seeks to
frsustrate her by all means. She tells of her experience of divorce and emigration.

 Ramatoulaye also presents Jacqueline’s experiences, how she becomes a victim of marital
neglect and deceit, a nervous breakdown.

 She also presents Binetou’s experiences, how she succumbs to her mother’s pressure to leave
school and marry the affluent Modou. Ramatoulaye presents Binetou as ‘a victim’ (48), ‘a lamb
slaughtered on the alter of affluence’ (39).
 Themes
Polygamy

 The novella also depicts the reality of polygamy and its effects on women, especially. Polygamy brings the
lives of both Ramatoulaye and Aissatou to a crisis and it wrecks their happiness.

Ramatoulaye’s world does not fall apart at the death of Modou, the crisis began with Modou’s his
acquisition five years earlier, of a second wife, a teenage friend of one of their twelve children, after
twenty-five years of marriage to Ramatoulaye. The second wife is his teenage daughter’s friend and study
partner. Instead of dividing his time and financial resources between his wives as stated in Koranic law,
he abandons Ramatoulaye and their children entirely. Five years later, he is dead, and she is obliged to
follow all the rituals of new widowhood with her co-wife.

 Ramatoulaye chooses to remain married to Modou, in spite his betrayal, ‘a choice that [her] reason
rejected’ and one made against the wishes of her children: to remain within the marriage and live
‘according to the precepts of Islam concerning polygamic life’ (45–6).

 In Aissatou’s case, she rejects polygamy outright.

 Themes
Divorce

 Aissatou is divorced. While Ramatoulaye considers divorce as an option, she does not take it.

I knew a few whose remaining beauty had been able to capture a worthy man, a man who added fine
bearing to a good situation and who was considered ‘better, a hundred times better than his predecessor’….
I knew others who had lost all hope of renewal and whom loneliness had very quickly laid underground. (40)

The reason Ramatoulaye advances for not choosing ‘the right’ and ‘dignified solution’ of obtaining a divorce is
‘the immense tenderness I felt towards Modou Fall’ (45). She relives the thrilling moment of thirty years past
when she first saw the ‘tall and athletically built’ Modou, full of ‘virility’ and with fine features ‘harmoniously
blended’, she bursts forth in ecstatic apostrophe: ‘Modou Fall, the very moment you bowed before me,
asking me to dance, I knew you were the one I was waiting for’ (13)

 Ramatoulaye is unable to face the consequence of divorcing Modou: the loss of marital security. When, by
severing all ties with her and the children, Modou in effect thrusts this fate upon her, Ramatoulaye is
plunged into emotional turmoil. Believing, on the one hand, that her heart remains ‘faithful to the love of
[her] youth’ (56), she at the same time calls out ‘eagerly to “another man” to replace Modou’ (53). After
Modou’s death, a number of men answer this call, only one of whom, Daouda Dieng, a doctor and a deputy
at the National Assembly, she considers at all suitable. She however rejects his proposal just as she has all of
 Themes

The importance of education in Women’s liberation

The narrative emphasizes the importance of education in the liberation of women. Through her portrayal of
Ramatoulaye, Mariama Bâ takes up the issue of women’s education, a theme which, like polygamy, has
been suppressed in the dominant tradition. Ramatoulaye believes that she has been lifted ‘out of the bog
of tradition, superstition and custom’ by her l education (15). She is, in fact, genuinely opposed to any
Islamic practice, including polygamy, that denies dignity to women.

Education affords Ramatoulaye the right to speak and the right to write, and thereby right the wrongs in her
patriarchal society. She appropriates, disrupts and transcends the culturally designated Islamic space of
silence and exclusion in order to “speak” or write.

Mariama Bâ hold a firm belief in books as the key to women’s liberation. “The power of books,” muses
Ramatoulaye, “this marvelous invention of astute human intelligence … Sole instrument of
interrelationships and of culture, unparalleled means of giving and receiving. Books knit generations
together in the same continuing effort that leads to progress.” Bâ said to an interviewer the year before
she died: “Books are a weapon, a peaceful weapon perhaps, but they are a weapon.”
 
 Themes

Friendship, companionship, female solidarity

 Through the bond of friendship between Ramatoulaye and Aissatou, a bond that is
expressed through the form as well as the content of the novel, Bâ celebrates female
solidarity. Ramatoulaye, herself, valorizes friendship over romantic love in her letter:
‘Friendship has splendours that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas
obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has
heights unknown to love’ (54).

 Like Adaku in Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Aissatou both literally and figuratively
storms the walls that confine her. Having ‘rented a house’ and ‘set up home there’ for
herself and her children, in this case boys, she proceeds, again like Adaku, to find a means
of becoming economically independent and, though warned that ‘boys cannot succeed
without their father’ (31), to raise her sons successfully ‘contrary to all predictions’ (34).
Returning to college, Aissatou upgrades her qualifications which eventually leads to her
appointment at a Senegalese embassy. And from her salary, Aissatou is able to supply
Ramatoulaye with precisely what Ramatoulaye knows she ought to be able to provide for
herself: she replaces with a brand-new model the car Modou has deprived Ramatoulaye
of by handing it over to his second wife.
 Narrative Techniques in Mariama Ba’s So long a Letter

Epistolary
Ramatoulaye writes her letter during the four months and ten days of secluded mourning
prescribed by Islam for widows. As we shall see, her physical confinement during this
period of
mourning in the house she once shared with Modou replicates her psychological
confinement in debilitating stereotypical definitions of womanhood.

In “Senegalese Women Writers,” a brilliant analysis of the “organization and generic status” of
Bâ’s novel, Christopher L.Miller observes that So Long a Letter slides from “the format of an
epistolary novel” to that of a journal. The reason for this slide, he explains, is that “there is
no exchange of correspondence.”

First Person Point of View: The story is told in the first person by Ramatoulaye in the form of
a letter/diary that she addresses to her friend Aissatou, after Modou’s death. Ramatoulaye
here is a character in the story and so there is the use of first person pronouns like “I, me,
We, etc.”
 Mariama Ba as a Feminist Writer

 As common with other African women writers, Ba publicly rejected the term 'feminist‘
(Ogundipe-Leslie, 1987:11)

According to Florence Stratton, literature is a weapon in Mariama Ba’s hands, as So Long a

Letter has two main ideological functions: to foreground polygyny and women’s
education as issues in contemporary African society and to refute the orthodoxies of
male literary representation.

Do you think that Mariama Ba was a feminist writer?