So Long A Letter by Mariama Ba

I read this novel as another part of my required reading for my Gender in 20th Century Africa class, and, like God's Bits of Wood, I really liked this book. It's a super-fast read, only about 90 pages or so, and I'm interested to see what we're going to do with it during class discussion.

The novel is set up as a letter between the main character, Ramatoulaye, and her friend Aissatou; both are women who went to school to become teachers in a time when African women's limits in professions were limited largely to being either midwives or teachers (rather reminiscent of an article I read recently that discussed Saudi women's limitations in education to teaching or medicine...makes you kinda rethink the pervasive stereotype that Africa is far behind any place else in the world). The novel begins as Ramatoulaye finds out that she has been widowed by a husband that she married for love soon after school and who had recently broken the trust in the marriage by taking a second wife and beginning to ignore her and their children together for the sake of a younger girl, who was forced to marry by her mother in hopes of increasing that family's material standing.

Although the story is fantastic, I was much more fascinated by the underlying theme that I saw in the story: a discussion of the place that marriage should have in a "modern" African society. The story ends happily, with two of Ramatoulaye's daughters marrying/planning to marry for love (one completely by choice; the other's marriage is accelerated due to an unplanned pregnancy), rather than material wealth. None of the main characters at the end of the book were taking social expectations for granted. Very early in the novel Aissatou leaves her husband for taking a second wife and takes her sons to the U.S., where she works as a translator. Ramatoulaye has forsaken expectations, turning down marriage proposals from her husband's brother and another well-to-do man to begin courting. The novel contains ample amounts of heartache throughout the story, but, by the end, I think that it presents a realistic hope for improvement for the lot of women in Africa.

My rating: 9/10