So long a letter by Mariama Bâ – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Ramatoulaye Fall, a recently widowed Senegalese teacher, writes a letter to a lifelong friend recounting her struggle for survival after her husband took a second wife.’

Note: The novel is in French, and I read the original in French. Cliquez ici afin de lire mon avis en français

So Long a Letter is a classic from Senegalese literature, written by Mariama Bâ. It is also classified under feminist literature – originating from Africa. The main character is Ramatoulaye, who is in her mourning period after the death of her husband, with whom she had not been living for a long time. She expresses the struggles of her life to her best friend, Aissatou in this ‘long letter’.

Ramatoulaye chose to separate from her husband after he married for a second time, and she rejected polygamy. However, she is in a very conservative Senegalese society, who do not understand why would anyone be angry at their husband for this. Even Aissatou, a divorcée for the same reason, is an outlier in the same society during that era.

Our main character had to go through several difficulties emanating from her separation, having to raise all her 12 children alone. Each of them had different needs and were at different stages of their lives, some very young children and some of them being adults. She expresses all these difficulties and also the changes in Senegalese society through her letter, that she has observed, such as her daughters being increasingly westernised.

There was also a lot of pressure on Ramatoulaye to remarry after the death of her husband, which she had refused. It needs to be taken into account that this novel was written in 1979, and considering their era, both Aissatou and Ramatoulaye took revolutionary steps – thus being considered a feminist novel in Senegal.

As I am not that well versed with Senegalese culture, I felt that there were way too many important characters in such a short novel. It took me some time to get used to the setting – and for example, two important characters, Ramatoulaye’s deceased husband ‘Madou’ and Aissatou’s ex-husband ‘Modow’ have very similar sounding names. While the lack of familiarity with the names is a problem with me, the reader, I do not think it would have been any different even if these names were familiar.

To conclude, I had an occasion to discover a new country through my reading and was also happy to notice that there were such movements started by people like Mariama Bâ, to challenge the ‘traditions’ of her society. I award the novel a rating of seven on ten.

Rating – 7/10

Have a nice day,
Andy