A Review of Mariama Bâ’s ‘Une si longue lettre’

Henry Weighill

Scholars have never been quite sure as to whether Mariama Bâ qualifies as a feminist. But then, why should she? She herself openly rejected the term. Although her most famous novel, Une Si Longue Lettre, focuses on a female protagonist who struggles within the Senegalese patriarchy, Ramatoulaye’s character is both nuanced and realistic. She is a woman who misses her husband whom she loves dearly, and she is severely angered by his decision to marry a second wife. Her story is also paralleled by her friend Aissatou who has formerly ‘escaped’ Senegalese society to become an ambassador in America, seemingly leaving for greener pastures.

Credit: Edouard Joubeaud, https://en.unesco.org/womeninafrica/mariama-ba-0/biography

Portrait of Mariama Ba kept at the Maison d’éducation Mariama Ba.

In Une Si Longue Lettre, the protagonist, Ramatoulaye, writes a lengthy missive to her friend, Aissatou, in which she describes the recent events in her life; prompted to do so by the recent death of her husband, Moudou. The whole book is supposedly written during the period of Ramatoulaye’s Iddah, a traditional mourning period for Muslim Senegalese women. We learn that, during the course of their marriage, Moudou had decided to take on another, younger wife, Binetou, who was also (rather awkwardly) a friend of his daughter. Ramatoulaye struggles with feelings of replacement and takes the brave decision to leave her husband whilst still married, and strikes out on her own, taking her children with her. In the work, Bâ illustrates the cruel system of normalised polygamy in Senegal which demonstrates women's impotence within their own marriages, leading the novel to being described by Rizwana Habib Latha as the process of ‘the construction and re-construction of Ramatoulaye’s identity as an individual’ in her article Feminisms in an African Context.

Mariama Bâ was born in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, in 1929 into a family headed by her father, an open-minded politician. She attended a French-medium school and graduated in 1947 as a schoolteacher from the École Normale for girls in Rufisque, a suburb of Dakar. Her father encouraged her to receive what he saw as a European-style education, and this clash between African and European culture is one which is evident in Bâ’s work. After her mother died soon after Mariama’s birth, she was given over to her maternal grandparents who were steeped in the cultural tradition of Islam and Senegal. She married and subsequently divorced Senegalese politician Obeye Diop, leaving her as the single parent of nine children, an event represented in Ramatoulaye’s fictional life.

Source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mariama_B%C3%A2_(stripes).jpg

Mariama Bâ

Through Une Si Longue Lettre, we are given an insight into mid-twentieth century Senegalese society, one exacerbated by the tensions of Senegalese independence achieved in 1960, twenty years before the book was first published. Bâ herself discusses the straddling of these two societies, pre- and post-colonial, and the result is a concoction of Western-inspired feminism limited by a profound admiration for Senegalese Islamic tradition. This contradiction is further complicated by Bâ’s own position as part of Dakar’s urban bourgeoisie, with her French education setting her apart from the Wolof-speaking majority in the country. This class tension is portrayed by the challenge that Binetou poses as the socially inferior rival to Ramatoulaye.

As well as class, the novel’s other key theme pertains to women and the sexism they face, particularly through the practice of polygamy, and how the system both manipulates woman and denies them the choice their husbands are afforded. After many years of happy marriage, it is understandable that Ramatoulaye is horrified to think that her husband wants a younger wife and she faces financial anxieties about how her husband's assets are now to be shared between the two halves of his family. However, Bâ aims to depict Binetou as a victim of circumstance, her poorer family pushing her to improve her standing through marriage despite only being sixteen years old and having to leave school early to do so. Further evidence of Bâ’s dim view on polygamy is laid out fairly clearly in chapter twenty-one where Ramatoulaye rejects the suitor Daouda’s marriage proposal, stating that her good will and conscience prevent her from ever taking part in a polygamous marriage.

Credit: Archives photographiques de Sira Diop. Tirée de l’ouvrage de Pascale Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale (1918-1957), Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010.

Promotions 1939 et 1940 de l'École normale de Rufisque

So far, so feminist, but Bâ’s criticism of the word may come from her rejection of what she understood from the term’s Western connotations. Ramatoulaye, despite her railings against the patriarchy, is not quite the radical that we may have seen in North America or Europe at this time in the aftermath of the second wave of feminism. Bâ is both critical and a staunch defender of Senegalese society, simultaneously valuing and criticising the traditions in which she has been brought up. She puts herself through the agony of the month-long funeral proceedings as well as the torture of a polygamous marriage because she has been brought up that way and holds her cultural traditions in high esteem.

As Bâ has stated, ‘In all cultures, the woman who formulates her own claims or who protests against her own situation is given the cold shoulder’, a statement which forms the crux of Une si Longue Lettre. However, the novel’s ending gives some form of hope through the presence of Ramatoulaye’s children. When her daughter becomes pregnant, Ramatoulaye can see history repeating itself before her eyes, yet her relaxed, maternal approach shows that hopefully the next generation will be better off than her own. Yet in the end, Ramatoulaye does not wish to leave Senegal like Aissatou, nor does she seem to regret not having divorced Moudou. Ramatoulaye’s literary dilemma stems from the choice between her culture and her beliefs, to either flee like Aissatou or remain subservient like so many before her. The novel’s denouement is therefore uncoincidentally similar to Bâ’s own life as both her, and the fictional Ramatoulaye, face their demons straight on as they head into the uncertain future.