My copy of So Long a Letter is dated September 1986. That year, I was feeding my imagination on what we then quaintly referred to as Third World Literature: works translated from many languages, that brought together writers from diverse international backgrounds to navigate their cultural differences and to discuss their anti-imperial agendas at conferences and seminars, rather than within the parameters of Commonwealth Literature, restricted only to the erstwhile dominions of the British Empire.

Even when I read in English, I was leaving the hegemony of that language behind to discover the influential novelists and poets of Arabic — Mahfouz, Darwish, Adonis, El-Saadawi — and of Chinese and Japanese, in translation. However, because of my knowledge of French, I was also drawn to Francophone African literature, which addressed the dilemmas of presenting real lives in borrowed tongues and adopted languages: urgent issues for the young Anglophone writer I was.

And during that year of ardent discovery, I came upon So Long a Letter on a shelf in a second-hand bookstore. It was a Virago edition, published in 1982, the year after Mariama Ba, its Senegalese author, died at the age of 52.

Though I soon became familiar with the works of Sembene Ousmane, another far more famous and prolific Senegalese writer, So Long a Letter was probably the first Senegalese novel I ever read. I read it — a short work of merely 89 pages — in one sitting, and have re-read it regularly every few years, both in its English version and in the original French.

Framed in the form of a series of letters to one recipient, the novel covers the days of the narrator Ramatoulaye’s period of seclusion according to the Islamic tradition for widows, in which she has the space to reflect on the various stages of her life: her family background and Francophone education, her love-marriage and motherhood, and, most important to the early part of the novel, her decision not to divorce her husband when he takes a second wife.

In contrast, Aissatou, to whom Ramatoulaye’s epistles are addressed, has divorced her polygamous husband and left her native land with her children for a new life abroad. The end of Ramatoulaye’s period of mourning signals her return to the everyday and the hectic mundane; proposals of (polygamous) marriage from her coevals, her children’s involvements and affairs, and her determination to “refashion my life. Despite everything — disappointments and humiliations — hope still lives on in me. It is from the dirty and nauseating humus that the green plant sprouts into life, and I can feel new buds springing up in me.”

In its brief 89 pages, Ba’s long letter covers a multitude of themes besides polygyny: Senegalese and Muslim mourning rituals, attitudes to gender and sexuality, post-independence politics in West Africa and the divided legacy of colonialism.

Ba’s use of first person narrative, and her digressive interventions on society and politics, are characteric of the genre of memoir; they can lead a naïve reader to exaggerate the autobiographical content of the novel and attribute a largely anthropological importance to this work, over 40 years after its first publication.

Ba does, indeed, seem to be informing her Western reader about Senegalese Muslim society in the occasionally explanatory passages around funerals, marriages etc. However, the novel briskly moves on from these ‘thick’, quasi-anthropological descriptions to evocations of daily life, which appear to be autobiographical but are actually drawn from the author’s deep sensitivity to her society and her surroundings; lived experience rather than memoir.

We soon see that Ba has purloined the constraints and conventions of life-writing to craft an utterly convincing fictional portrait of an exceptional woman’s life and rootedness in her own times. From the outset, the reader is captivated by Ba’s lyrical descriptions of childhood’s landscapes, her rapturous reflections on life, love, motherhood and friendship, and the deep underlying Muslim spirituality of her narrative voice.

We also learn of the destinies of Aissatou, to whom the long letter is addressed, and the co-wives Nabou and Binetou, one unassuming and naïve, the other unscrupulous and greedy. Ba’s deepest critique is reserved for misogyny and patriarchy, of which the matriarchs of her society are also victims.

Echoing the great Islamic philosophers, she reflects: “… (M)an is one: greatness and animal fused together. None of his acts is pure charity. None is pure bestiality.”

Each re-reading offers a fresh perspective. The translation is fluid and lyrical, but reading the book in the original also points to certain discrepancies in vocabulary, as French and English occasionally produce false friends.

Ba wrote only one more novel, Scarlet Song, which is longer, more intricately narrative-driven. The style of the two novels is entirely different: the latter work is written in the third person and employs the double perspectives of a Senegalese man and his French wife. Here Ba delves even more deeply into racial and post-national politics, cultural imperialism, and contrasting notions of femininity.

But Ba’s preoccupation with polygyny emerges here too, when her protagonist marries a local wife at his mother’s persuasion, to escape the shackles of social opprobrium and culture clash. Similarities with her first novel are discernible here. But what most critics have failed to note are the striking resemblance to the ancient Greek story of Medea and Jason. Ba strips the Greek tragedy to its barest essentials, to present a complex story deeply rooted in her Senegalese experience; the novel can be read, however, with no reference to the core text.

I admire Scarlet Song. But in the final analysis, I prefer So Long a Letter, for its focus on resilience and optimism in the aftermath of grief and mourning, and its belief in the power of faith and human relationships. Above all, it is a paean to friendship:

“Friendship has splendours that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love.”

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 23rd, 2025