EXTENSIVE READING

Semester 3

Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter

(1979)
Professor Lahoucine Aammari
FLDM, Fez
So Long a Letter is a novel of personal triumph.
Taking the form of a long letter, it tells the story of
two well-educated, progressive-thinking African
women who had been socially and politically active
with their husbands in post-independent Senegal.
After years of secure marriages, both women,
Ramatoulaye and Aîssatou, discover after the fact that
their husbands have each taken another wife.
 In her letter to Aîssatou, occasioned by the sudden
death of Ramatoulaye's husband, Modou Fall,
Ramatoulaye recounts the reactions of each woman to
the polygamous situations in which they find
themselves and focuses on the decisions each woman
makes in order to achieve a sense of inner well-being
and to enjoy the liberty of expressing that about
which they care deeply.
So Long a Letter introduces us to the predicament of
three heroines: Ramatoulaye, Aissatou, and Jacqueline.
In each case, the husband is an active, totally willing
participant and instigator of the dilemma. In
Ramatoulaye's case, after giving 30 of her life to her
husband, Modou, he dumps her for a woman young
enough to be his daughter. During Modou and
Ramatoulaye's nuptial, Ramatoulaye endures all kinds
of pain, including:
“the moment dreaded by every Senegalese woman, the moment
when she sacrifices her possessions as gifts to her family-in-law;
and, worse still, beyond her possessions she gives up her
personality, her dignity, becoming a thing in the service of the
man who has married her, his grandfather, his grandmother, his
father, his mother, his brother, his sister, his uncle, his aunt, his
male and female cousins, his friends. Her behavior is conditioned;
no sister-in-law will touch the head of any wife who has been
stingy, unfaithful or inhospitable.” (p. 4)
Rama and Aissatou appear predictable, flat, and
stereotypical. Nevertheless, each of them later
undergoes a change or changes that not only warrant
our respect and admiration but demand admiration
respect and emulation. In a sense, then, Ramatoulaye
and Aissatou are dynamic, revolving, and
unpredictable. Their backgrounds help them to
become even better persons.
Throughout its lengthy epistolary form, So Long a
Letter reflects Ramatoulaye's developing
consciousness. In many ways letter-writing appears to
provide her with the therapeutic tools needed for self-
realization. Memories of her upbringing, her
friendships, her teacher-training, her courtship and
marriage with Modou Fall serve to confirm within her
the choices she makes - choices based on both reason
and emotion.
 The pain caused her by Modou's disaffection from the family
unit, the initial bitterness she experiences in acknowledging
the young, superficial Binetou as her co-wife, the resignation
she expresses in actively rejecting offers of remarriage, and the
responsibility she feels in guiding her children to adulthood -
all demonstrate a conscious weaving together of the rational
and the emotive.
 Despite ingrained societal patterns of behavior and religious
customs antithetical to personal choice, Ramatoulaye and
Aîssatou surmount opression and forge for themselves lives of
meaning. ( see the ending)
 On the other hand, Ba presents male characters with question
able moral traits and uncontrollably high sex drives, especially
in the case of such major characters as Ramatoulaye's Modou
and Aissatou's Mawdo. Like their female counterparts, these
male characters indeed undergo changes. But unlike the
females whose changes demonstrate growth, the changes of
the males are of decline.
 Essentially, in her literary character portrayal, Ba sees men as
being morally bankrupt, cold-hearted, selfish, deplorably
ungrateful, and sexually exploitative.
 Ramatoulaye's letter writing to another woman
removes her from the "suffering epistolary victim"
status and posits a new discourse that refutes the
male representation of women in African literature.
 Ba's manipulation of the Western epistolary genre
offers a vehicle through which African women can tell
their own stories, stories that have been mistold for
so long. Mariama Ba expresses this need for a new
female discourse:
. .. [T] he [African] woman writer has a special mission.
More than her male counterparts, she has to present
the position of women in Africa in all its aspects. As
women, we must take the future in our own hands in
order to overthrow the status quo which harms us and
to which we must no longer submit.... 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. ("La fonction" 6-7; trans. mine).
 In this text where women speak to women, where
men's voices are inscribed through the female prism,
Ba challenges the status quo. The epistolary novel,
through its inherent dialogic form, presents not only
rich dialogue within the text but also engages in
dialogue with other texts and traditions.
 Ba's creative manipulation of this genre posits this
text in contestation with tradition and generates a
distinctly female and African discourse that challenges
Western and African male representation of women in
literature.
Ba's novel (an English translation of the French
original, Une si longue lettre) is indeed a long letter
written by Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese school teacher
whose husband has just died, to her childhood friend
Aissatou. The novel might roughly be divided into
three sections.
1. In the first, Ramatoulaye relays to Aissatou the
news of her husband Modou’s recent death and uses
"Mirasse," (a four-month and ten-day period of
mourning and seclusion) dictated by Islamic custom
to reflect on the circumstances of her life. Specifically,
Ramatoulaye recounts her husband's decision to take
a second wife and the hardships she and her family
endured as a result of this decision.
During the course of her recollections,
Ramatoulaye also recounts the story of Aissatou's
own polygamous husband Mawdo. Both women
are treated in the novel as victims of polygamy;
however, their responses are contrasted. Against
the advice of her children, Ramatoulaye remains
with Modou.
Aissatou, however, leaves Mawdo, and, through what
Ramatoulaye terms "the power of books" (32), goes
to France to study at the School for Interpreters and is
subsequently appointed to the Senegalese Embassy in
the United States. In this first section of the book,
then, Aissatou acts as a kind of "ego-ideal" for
Ramatoulaye, providing her with a mirror through
which to review her life, as well as a possible
role model.
2. The second section of the book details Ramatoulaye's
rejection of a number of suitors, including a brother-in-law. In
this section, Ramatoulaye makes clear her refusal to marry any
man with whom she is not romantically in love. The section
constitutes a kind of turning point for Ramatoulaye.
 As she insists, "My voice has known thirty years of silence,
thirty years of harassment. It bursts out, violent, sometimes
sarcastic, sometimes contemptuous" (57-58).
Unselfconsciously parroting Western pseudo-sociological
notions, some critics term this Ramatoulaye's period of "self-
realization" (d'Almeida; Fetzer).
3. The third and final section of the novel details
Ramatoulaye's new life as an independent woman. In
this section of the novel, Ramatoulaye must deal with
a number of travails, including a racist philosophy
teacher who treats one of her sons unfairly, three
daughters whom she catches smoking, a son who
breaks his arm in a football game, and an unmarried
pregnant daughter.
UNIVERSALISM AND FEMINISM IN So LONG A LETTER

Universalism is the ideology whereby indigenous

cultural practices and beliefs have been discredited
and devalued by those who wield economic and
political power in the capitalist world-system. In the
name of supposedly universal truths shored up by
such ideological creations as scientific progress and
the brotherhood of man, universalism urges the
rejection of indigenous cultures as pre-scientific,
mystical, or primitive.
Ramatoulaye is a teacher, Aissatou an interpreter,
Modou a bureaucrat ("technical adviser in the
Ministry of Public Works" [9]), and Mawdo a doctor.
The novel makes explicit the role these characters
play in what Gayatri Spivak characterizes as the
carving out of national identities in the period of
decolonization.
As Ramatoulaye herself suggests, "It was the privilege
of our generation to be the link be tween two periods
in our history, one of domination, the other of
independence. We remained young and efficient, for
we were the messengers of a new design. With
independence achieved, we witnessed the birth of a
republic, the birth of an anthem and the implantation
of a flag" (25).
Cleanliness is "one of the essential qualities of a woman“ (63),
Ramatoulaye suggests. Books, the "marvelous invention of astute
human in telligence," are for Ramatoulaye the "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" (32); about movies, she
writes, "I learned from them lessons of greatness, courage and
perseverance. They deepened and widened my vision of the
world, thanks to their cultural value. The cinema, an inexpensive
means of recreation, can thus give healthy pleasure" (52).
For example, early in the novel, Ramatoulaye lovingly describes
to Aissatou "the white woman who was the first to desire for us
an 'uncommon' destiny," the principal of their high school: "To
lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to
make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without
renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate
our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our
inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us:
these were the aims of our admirable headmistress” (15-16)
 Ramatoulaye's understanding of feminism is
particularly indebted to universalist ideology. As
Ramatoulaye says, in summing up her long letter, "I
am not indifferent to the irreversible currents of
women's liberation that are lashing the world" (88)
This global feminism convinces Ramatoulaye that
"all women have almost the same fate, which
religions or unjust legislation have sealed,"
although she "remain[s] persuaded of the
inevitable and necessary complementarity of man
and woman," with heterosexual love remaining
"the natural link between these two beings" (88).
Afrocentricity encourages "gender complementarily"
especially on matters of principles, such as the
question of feminism. In the case when the question of
principle affects the community, the community as a
whole becomes the subject of concern, not the
individual or a group of individuals within that
community.
To Sum up:
 The stories Ramatoulaye recounts in her letter to
Aîssatou are stories of abandonment and isolation
of different women by a patriarchal society most
often represented by the figure of the husband. The
most obvious usurpation of the woman's rightful
place is seen in the institution of polygamy.
Ramatoulaye and Aîssatou suffer abandonment as
their spouses choose a second wife to purportedly
share, not usurp, their place in the home.
 The framework of Bâ's text is larger: it is the
patriarchal society that serves as a backdrop.
Women in this society, and female charac ters in the
novel, are often strong proponents of this
patriarchal polity. Educated in the "old" way,
women are made an accessory in their repression.
In preparing a second wife for her son, Mawdo's
mother instills in the young girl the traditional
image of the woman.
 The act of writing has become the means
to finding one's own place. It is through
writing about herself and her past that
Ramatoulaye is able to reconstruct her
self, to distance herself from disabling
stereotype
Whereas women from past generations, the mothers
and grandmothers of Ramatoulaye and Aîssatou,
communicated only through oral me ), this generation
claims the written form as its own. In the same way
that a West ern education separated these women
from a sometimes stifling tradition, it also gave them
a powerful instrument that sets them off from the
"femme noire" image.
The claiming of writing, traditionally an exclusively
masculine form of communication, as their own
enables the women to dispossess themselves of the
images imposed on them by the traditional male
writer. The woman is no longer created through the
man's text; she creates herself in her own text. Within
the context of the story, writing oneself literally be
comes a refusal to compromise.
 Aîssatou's rejection of a polygamous marriage is in
the form of a letter to her husband. Through the
experience of writing her story, Ramatoulaye
progresses from a victim unable to reject polygamy in
her marriage with Modou to a woman capable of
using the written word in her letter refusing Daouda's
proposal of a second polygamous marriage.
 Interestingly, there is no closure to the novel.
Ramatoulaye's conclusion: “Too bad for me if once
again I have to write you so long a letter….” refuses
to conclude. The act of responding through writing,
a woman's deliberate displacement of herself as she
frees herself from the shallow grave, will continue.
The social order has been challenged; there will be
no more silence; there will be no closure.