Une si longue lettre Reading Order

Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter, 1979) by Mariama Bâ is the foundational novel of African feminist literature — a slim, devastating masterpiece in the form of a letter written by Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher, to her childhood friend Aissatou in the first months of her widowhood. Ramatoulaye's husband Modou has just died; during the forty-day mourning period, in the isolation and ritual seclusion prescribed by Wolof tradition, she writes to Aissatou the letter that is the novel. The letter contains the story of their parallel lives: both educated women who believed in companionate marriage, both abandoned by their husbands for younger second wives — Aissatou's husband took a wife from his own social class after years of marriage; Modou took Binetou, the friend of his own daughter. Mariama Bâ, who was a schoolteacher and feminist activist in Senegal before publishing this novel, wrote with precise anger and grief about the collusion between Islam (which permits polygamy) and the economic and social systems that trap women. But the novel is not merely polemical — it is a work of psychological depth and formal elegance, and Bâ's rendering of Ramatoulaye's grief, her oscillation between tradition and modernity, her love for her children and her gradual reclamation of her own life, gives the novel a human completeness that transcends its political context. The novel won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980.