So Long a Letter
Mariama Ba (1979)
“A Senegalese widow writes a letter that becomes the first great African feminist novel -- composed during the forty days she is forbidden to leave her house.”
Character Analysis
Schoolteacher, mother of twelve, and the letter-writer whose voice structures the entire novel. Ramatoulaye is not a rebel in the dramatic sense -- she does not leave her husband, does not flee the country, does not burn the house down. Her rebellion is in the writing: she narrates her own experience on her own terms, refuses the roles offered to her (widow-as-property, widow-as-charity-case), and emerges from mourning as a self-determined woman. Ba's achievement is making endurance as compelling as revolution.
Educated formal French with Wolof inflections. Analytical, composed, capable of sustained argument. Her prose is a teacher's prose -- she explains even when she grieves.