SENEGAL

SO LONG A LETTER

by MARIAMA BÂ

As the title suggests, SO LONG A LETTER by Mariama Bâ is written in the form of a letter, bringing news and reminiscences from recently widowed school teacher, Ramatoulaye, to her friend, Aissatou.

Translated from French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas, the book is a relatively short read set over the forty days of mourning observed by the family of the deceased in the Islam tradition. Ramatoulaye’s husband, Modou Fall, has died, but more significantly, in the last years of his life he has taken a second wife and effectively abandoned Ramatoulaye and their 12 children. Ramatoulaye writes to her old friend, Aissatou, recounting the humiliation and pain, and everyday struggle of having her long, committed union abruptly disrupted.

“And to think I loved this man passionately, to think that I gave him thirty years of my life, to think that twelve times over I carried his child. The addition of a rival to my life was not enough for him. In loving someone else, he burned his past, both morally and materially.”

Ramatoulaye’s pain is made worse by the fact that Modou Fall has chosen the young school friend of their eldest daughter for his second wife—“Madness or weakness? Heartlessness or irresistible love? What inner torment led Modou Fall to marry Binetou?”—and that Ramatoulaye is simply informed of the marriage when it has already taken place. The news is delivered to her after the wedding on an otherwise average afternoon by her brother-in-law, a friend, and the local Imam. Presented to her as a fait accompli and a reason for celebration. Her husband never returns to their home, but when he dies unexpectedly of a heart attack, she is expected to mourn him as his wife, with his second wife—her co-wife—sitting alongside her.

Ramatoulaye writes to Aissatou, because her friend suffered a similar brutal rejection—abandonment by her husband in favor of a younger wife. However, unlike Ramatoulaye, Aissatou did not stay. She wrote to her husband and told him: “I am stripping myself of your love, your name. Clothed in my dignity, the only worthy garment, I go my way.” Ramatoulaye admires her friend’s courage to leave, to become educated, to learn a new language, move country, build a career, and create a successful life for herself.

Mariama Bâ was born in 1929 and was very well educated for a woman of her generation, attending the École Normale for girls in Rufisque and studying the Koran during school holidays. She applied her work and much of her life to confronting inequalities between men and women in African society, and it’s clear that SO LONG A LETTER, is a thinly-veiled opportunity for Bâ to address how patriarchal ideas, disguised as tradition, unfairly impact women. How wives are simply discarded in a society that approves polygamy, even celebrates it, and how these traditions are often upheld by other women—in this case, ambitious mother-in-laws—who stand to earn status and improve their own position through a good marriage for a daughter or a niece. Bâ juxtaposes her character’s experiences, Ramatoulaye who stays and Aissatou who leaves, to reveal the few options available to women, and how hard it is to break from tradition.

SO LONG A LETTER almost reads as a treatise, with long passages of thoughtful interrogation of women in society and how powerless they are made by tradition, religion, and social expectation. It did make me wonder if a non-fiction version confronting these issues was just not as possible at the time Bâ was writing the book? That maybe this was the most effective way for the author to get her voice heard on these issues, through the illusion of fiction that reveals a very real truth.