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Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
Fatima Conteh is not a very common author. I stumbled upon her story, as I was perusing heaps of novels that deal with religion as a stumbling block for women’s emancipation.

Until I chanced upon “A Letter to My Sister”, stories to do with women emancipation had become so sterile to me.

What is striking about “A Letter to My Sister” is its simplicity, its humour as the author picks and describes her character as she deals with daily chores.

The foreboding tone of someone saying her last words is unsettling as it is reassuring as her impeding suicide is itself an act of liberation, some kind of martyrdom.

This is a powerfully woven story that brings to fore issues of education, international exposure, religious or cultural rigidity, forced marriages, feminism, patriarch and life after death.

What makes this story uniquely powerful is that it is written in the form of a letter, which makes it more compelling in that it is personal, direct, conversational and has a sense of finality of definitiveness in its tone.

This more than just a letter, it is a story of Dr Dao that also broadly reflect on the generality of women striving against a male-dominated society.

One of the issues that come out from the onset is that this is a story about the lamentations of a woman, who in his cauldron of life has struggled against a male-dominated society, particularly the stifling cultural norms articulated and executed by his own Muslim father, who is so much steeped in the dogmas of his faith’s expectations.

Against the odds, the narrator, who is the first born of girls attains some education probably thinking that this may be a conduit to escape the clutches of his family’s dogmatic and rigid religious control.

She soon realises that becoming a medical doctor, a rare feat in the family and the community was no panacea to her aspirations for a more liberal life.

While education by its nature must be able to open doors of liberation and awareness, Dr Dao realises that her life has become more complicated and strangled as she is never free to exercise any freedom. Her international exposure obtained through her education exposed her to more liberal societies which she admires and hopes to also input in her life when she goes back to her home country.

Her achievement as a medical doctor is in normal circumstances supposed to be a source of celebration and an inspiration to her family and community but alas it becomes the cause of a lot of anxiety and friction between herself and her father’s expectations.

Dr Dao feels very much in prison both physically and emotionally as she is immobilised in terms of being able to foster, nurture or relate or establish a relationship with males or have a boyfriend of her choice.

This is clearly exemplified when the narrator says: “Have I not lamented many times that we are not allowed out of the house except when accompanied by several of our younger brothers and sisters? . . . You all remember the incident when Baba threatened to disown me. I am referring to the day I wore trousers. I had just come from England and thought I had grown out of family for a girl, his daughter to put on trousers.”

The above quotation clearly shows that the narrator is in some kind of quandary or prison and even as an adult is unable to make her own independent decision about dress and the choice of her a partner.

Her father’s abhorrence of Western education is apparent when he says: “This was why I said Western education breeds immorality.”

The narrator testifies to this kind of prison when she says, “My world then became a prison, a closed world. Sometimes I feel guilty even talking to men. I feel my father’s curse will affect me.”

Besides stifling her physical freedom, her father’s regimented and rigid control has serious psychological effect on the narrator.

In order to have a better appreciation of the author’s predicament, one must also have a better understanding of the Muslim religion that she grows under and how it perceives women’s status in society.