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.”
Short Summary
Ramatoulaye Fall, a Senegalese schoolteacher, writes a long letter to her best friend Aissatou during the iddah -- the forty-day Islamic mourning period following her husband Modou's sudden death. The letter recounts how Modou took a second wife, Binetou, a girl young enough to be his daughter and a student of Ramatoulaye's own. Rather than divorce him as Aissatou did when her husband Mawdo took a second wife, Ramatoulaye chose to stay -- and now reckons with the cost. Through the frame of mourning, Ba dissects polygamy, patriarchy, female friendship, education as liberation, and the collision between tradition and modernity in post-independence Senegal.
Detailed Summary
Ramatoulaye Fall sits alone in her house in Dakar, Senegal. Her husband Modou Fall is dead of a heart attack, and Islamic custom dictates that she observe the iddah -- forty days of seclusion and mourning. She picks up a pen and begins writing to Aissatou Ba, her oldest friend, now living in the Uni...