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Elliot Ziwira At the Bookstore
In “So Long a Letter” (1981), Senegalese author, Mariama Ba, highlights the claustrophobic and oppressive nature of culture on women, as they futilely struggle to follow their hearts’ desires in a society fraught with suspicion and male chauvinism.

Ba adeptly explores the sad, poignant, touching, revealing; yet sizzling and engrossing story of neglect, betrayal and frustrated hope using characterisation and setting. Through modernistic traits of realism, the epistolary and autobiographical modes complemented by rich, yet captivating language, the writer conveys the story of a yearning people who seek solutions from the past at the same time purporting to be on a forward trajectory.

The book chronicles the tale of cultural and religious inadequacies which place a burden on the individual as he/she struggles to find his/her bearings in the misty environs of existence.

Though men are also weighed down by cultural and religious expectations, they seem to skirt around them and benefit from the loopholes therein.

Women are the ones who bear the brunt of it all as everything appears to be skewed in their disfavour. Ba tells the story through a first person singular narrator, Ramatoulaye, who opens the window into her tormented world of malnourished hope through a sequence of reminiscences captured in one very long letter to Aissatou, her friend who now resides in the United States of America.

As the story opens Ramatoulaye is in mourning, as her husband, Modou Fall has just passed on. The fragmented plot is then stitched together through flashbacks as the protagonist retraces her footprints on the endless fabric of life.

Using tropes of surprise and suspense, Ba hoists the reader on a boisterous journey of intrigue as he/she cannot help wondering how his/her story can be so vividly reflected and intertwined with the protagonist’s.

Interestingly, Ramatoulaye and Aissatou are close friends whose destinies are linked to the same men, Modou Fall and Mawdo, who are also friends.

After secondary school the two women train as teachers, Modou studies Law and becomes a prominent trade unionist, and Mawdo; a doctor.

Because love is such a strange and blind animal, the narrator marries the affable and intelligent Modou against her mother’s advice that he was too handsome and too perfect to be honest.

Her friend, on the other hand, falls head over heels for Mawdo, whose mother Aunty Nabou believes that “the only man” in her life is of royal blood, and should not marry a goldsmith’s daughter.

A close analysis of the circumstances surrounding the two women’s marriages articulates doom as the family unit, a major component in the cultural apparatus, frowns at them, exposing their vulnerability.

Unfortunately, and rather inevitably, Aissatou becomes the first victim as her vindictive mother-in-law allows a malignant tumour to grow in her heart which prompts her to scheme her daughter-in-law’s downfall.

Aunty Nabou, having lost her husband to death so early into their marriage, could not take lightly to the loss of her son through unsanctioned matrimony; therefore, she remains resolute in her resolve.

Like a schemer she is, she convinces her younger brother to give her his little daughter Nabou, her namesake, to raise. She manages to raise her in accordance with her expectations, and says to her son: “My brother Farba has given you young Nabou to be your wife, to thank me for the worthy way in which I have brought her up.

“I will never get over it if you don’t take her as your wife. Shame kills faster than disease.”

Mawdo accepts the beautiful and young Nabou as his wife, much to the chagrin of the love of his youth, with the excuse: “My mother is old. The knocks and disappointments of life have weakened her heart. If I spurn this child, she will die.”

Unable to swallow this bitter bile of betrayal, Aissatou decides to take the leap of faith into the dreaded murky waters of single motherhood taking her four sons along: shunned by their kin because of their mother’s lowly upbringing.

As an emancipated and liberated woman, she does not allow the cultural brouhaha to eat into her resolve, which eventually takes her to America.

Ba juxtaposes Aissatou’s experience with that of Ramatoulaye, her friend, who meets the same fate three years later.

Unlike Mawdo, who finds himself at the mercy of a culturally caged mother who hangs to the royalty of yore, Modou finds himself at the centre of a vicious circle of deceit because of his male ego.

He believes that a man, as outlined by culture and his religion; Islam, can have as many wives as he wishes.

Thus, spurred on by insatiable carnal desires; many a man’s Achilles’ heel, his betrayal is profound as he falls for his daughter Daba’s friend, Binetou, whose beauty, in spite of her poverty, dazzles him.

Put under pressure by her vacuous, poor and opportunistic mother, the malleable Binetou is taken hook, line and sinker into the irresistible allure of affluence, and decides to abandon her baccalaureate studies only a few months from completion.

True to his word, Modou provides her with a villa, a monthly allowance of 50 000 francs and an array of Alfa Romeos at the drop of her hat; and exotic furniture imported from France, her parents well provided for, and their promise to Mecca fulfilled.

As all this is happening, Modou turns his back on his wife of 25 years and 12 children.

Unlike Aissatou, however, Ramatoulaye finds herself unable to untie the strings that attach her to the love of her youth.

Although she admires the nerve of the liberated women that she advocates, she remains a prisoner to her heart, spending nights on end brooding over her loss and her husband’s betrayal.

For the five years that her husband was on honeymoon with his beautiful Binetou, Ramatoulaye raises her 12 children single-handedly as Modou, under his new wife’s spell, abandons them.

Upon the death of her husband, she finds courage, however, to tell off Modou’s elder brother who wants to take her in as his fourth wife as per custom, the venerable doctor and politician Daouda Dieng and a horde of other men; old and young who want her hand in marriage for one reason or the other.

To her, marriage has to be premised on love regardless of religious or cultural intonations which reduce the woman to a perpetual victim married to the entire family and not only to her husband.

She scoffs at her mother’s belief that: “a woman must marry the man who loves her, but never the one she loves; that is the secret of lasting happiness.”

As she withers inside, she wonders: “Madness or weakness? Heartless or irresistible love? What inner torment led Modou Fall to marry Binetou?”

She fails to find answers to these questions as she realises that a woman’s worst enemy is another woman, and that love, unlike friendship, fades with time.

Inasmuch as a woman is burdened by culture which dictates how she toes the line of existence, she finds herself under the snare of another woman.

Aunty Nabou, Nabou, Binetou and her mother, Lady Mother-in-Law are not only victims of a patriarchal society, but they also abet a system that destroys their lot. In their deceit, they do not only prey on the men who conceitedly think that they are in control, but they also reduce other women to quarry.

The narrator’s tale resonates and merges with all the other stories that capture the essence of womanhood, motherhood and widowhood; Aissatou’s, Binetou’s, Jacqueline’s and Aunty Nabou’s.

Binetou, an exponent of the young women who seek easy access to the top rungs of affluence through marriage to older men of means, and sacrificing their youth and education for ephemeral material gains, betray the female species as they use their predatory instincts to hoodwink the men to forget their families, yet at the same time remaining victims.

It is their vulnerability that prompts them to become monster-victims as they try to outsmart man at his own game.

Binetou loses everything at Modou’s death as the villa she takes so much pride in is under mortgage which is paid off in full by Daba and her husband; thus she and her mother find themselves trapped in the same poverty which they thought they had escaped from.

Motherhood burdens the heroine as she discovers that bringing up children in an ever changing world is no stroll in the park as she chances on her three teenage girls smoking in their bedroom.

As Ramatoulaye struggles to come to terms with the discovery, her two last boys are injured while playing soccer in the street; and to compound it all, her sweet and supportive daughter Aissatou, who is also in secondary school, falls pregnant.

Such is the nature of womanhood that Ba compellingly explores in “So Long a Letter” (1981), as Ramatoulaye stitches on the shreds of the fabric of her existence in a world that pays scant regard to the wailing of the feeble and vulnerable.