So Long a Letter: an epistolary portrayal of social conflict in post-colonial Africa - Essay Example

So Long a Letter: an epistolary portrayal of social conflict in post-colonial Africa So Long a Letter, by Marianne Ba is rightfully regarded as one of the seminal works in the new African literature that developed after most of the region won independence from their former colonial masters. This novel is epistolary in form, that is, it is written in the form of a letter. Normally epistolary novels are structured as an exchange of letters between two or more people, but Ba has created a novel in which there is, as the title suggests, just one “long letter” from one woman to another. The letter is from a recently widowed African woman, Ramatoulaye, giving details of her betrayal by her now dead husband, who left her for a teenager when she became middle-aged. This personal story is used to explore many divisive conflicts within Africa: the male-female, the colonial identity vs. African identity, modern vs. traditional. In recalling her own experience at school, the narrator of the novel claims that “books knit generations together”1, and this book attempts to explore the dilemma of people with a divided and conflicted identity. Ramatoulaye is not an ordinary African woman. She has been highly educated at a French college; she has succeeded within the education system that supported the culture that dominated her own for more than two hundred years. The fact that Africa was involved in an often bloody period of unrest, rebellion against colonial powers and eventual civil war throws this education into a problematic context. One question that Ramatoulaye must face is whether she has been essentially westernized, and thus “spoilt” from the traditional Africanist points of view, by this education. Is this an African woman writing about polygamy or a black European woman writing about a failed marriage? It is a question that is never fully answered in the novel. The fact that it is not answered is not a weakness, but rather a strength. It illustrates that some dilemmas for those people raised in two cultures can never be solved, and that the acceptance that they can’t be solved at least brings about a level of equanimity towards them, if not contentment with their existence. Part of her bitterness towards her husband for leaving her stems from the Western traditions of equality, fairness and justice between men and women that she has learned at school in France. His causes an identity conflict within the character that is perhaps reflected by the literary form that Ba chose to use for her book. She chooses a very European form: the novel, to explore her experience. She also, ironically, chooses a very traditional form of the novel to write about her abandonment. The epistolary technique was used by the first novelists during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 Ramatoulaye is choosing a literary form borrowed from the culture that has made her so acutely aware of the injustice of what has occurred to her. In the same way as she is perhaps doubly disadvantaged within her society :– being both a black African and a woman, so she chooses a most European framework for to record her experience; a novel and an epistolary novel. The importance of the fact that the novel is written from a woman’s point of view would be difficult to overstate. In his influential book on African literature, Christopher Miller has said that women are traditionally seen as a “femme noire”3, a kind of mysterious and dangerous figure that can nevertheless be defined from the point of view of men. He continues by arguing that “francophone literature constantly talks about women and depends on women for allegorical fuel but excludes women from the process of literate creation.”4 Essentially African literature has constantly shown women as symbols, allegories, catalysts and mirrors for male behavior, but not as actual human beings who are interesting and worth exploring in their own right. For an African woman to write about the plight of African women from the point of view of an African woman was triply revolutionary, and caused much of the controversy surrounding her damning condemnation of polygamy and its effects. The interesting aspect of choosing the epistolary form for a single point of view is that it brings the immediacy and passion inherent to the form, without the varying points of view that it is known for when more than one letter-writer exists within the novel. So Long a Letter is indeed a long letter, relentlessly non-objective, yet it makes for a very short novel: 90 pages. Ba succeeds in producing an intense and contained experience for the reader, who can quite easily read the novel in a single session, much as she would read an actual letter. This puts the reader in the place of the woman to whom the novel is written: the character’s lifelong friend Aissatou. Ba may have chosen this literary form in part because she wanted to show how valuable and important a friendship between two women can be. The letter represents an intimate opening of one person to another, representing the trust that can exist between two lifelong friends. Part of this trust stems from the fact that the two women have similar histories. Both Ramatoulaye and Aissatou are highly educated women who have managed to rise above both the institution of polygamy, and the sense of abandonment that it brings, through having successful independent lives. The narrator of the novel chose not to leave her husband, while her friend chose the opposite route by divorcing him and making a new life for herself. But while the two women take different courses, those courses imply the same thing: successful independence in the face of polygamy. The tradition of polygamy in Western Africa stems from two distinct traditions that help to support it through to the present day. First, the Muslim tradition of polygamy that has been quite ‘recent’ in origin (i.e. over the last one thousand years or so) and then a far older tradition of polygamy that stretches to pre-literate times.5 This was based upon the supposed economic necessities of a harsh landscape: a man would need many children (and thus more than one wife), to have enough free labor to work the land. The family unit within this vision would essentially be a mini-village, with the man at its head.6 The need to have so many children was also related to the very high infant mortality rate that ensured that only a minority of them would ever make it to a working age. These two strands of polygamy have led, particularly in African countries that are Muslim in nature, to the survival of the custom long after it no longer fits its economic origins. As Joyce Hackel puts it, “polygamy remains the lot of many African women . . . but the practice is under pressure . . . mores are changing . . . even middle-class men can’t support several wives and large families.”7 So the old system has been reversed: more wives and children now cost the man a lot of money rather than providing him with cheap labor. He becomes poorer with more wives and children, not richer. But the practice still continues. One of the reasons that polygamy is so persistent is that it has been valorized as a form of “African identity” that sets the people apart from their former colonial rulers. Ramatoulaye feels this dichotomy within the course of the book. She recognizes that the standards that she believes a husband should uphold: fidelity, keeping a single wife even as she ages, romantic love – all belong to the European tradition within which she has been educated. This tradition casts doubt upon the purely economic basis of marriage that polygamy pre-supposes. Polygamy versus a single husband-wife marriage also brings up the sensitive subject of the conflict between different kinds of religion. Part of the European excuse for invading and controlling so much of Africa was the supposed need to civilize the inhabitants by converting them from their former religions (among them Islam) to the ‘true’ religion of Christianity. A rejection of polygamy may thus be extended to a rejection of Islam, and in turn an acceptance of the colonialist’s religion: Christianity. The dilemma that Ramatoulaye, and her friend, face is whether rejecting polygamy is a form of rejecting the idea of an independent African culture. Is wanting a European-style marriage somehow a betrayal an African heritage? Ramatoulaye claims that it is not, as what it means to be ‘African’ can be defined as much by an educated, modern African woman as it can be by an uneducated, traditional African man. But as she writes of her relationship with the white woman who initially set her on the course of education, it seems as though she has more in common with this white, educated woman than with her fellow Africans. As with many people brought up within two conflicting cultures, she understands both to a certain extent, but does not agree with all the customs that characterizes them. It was she who “first wanted for them a destiny ‘out of the ordinary’”8, and further, Ramatoulaye makes a remarkable admission: We were real sisters destined for the same emancipatory mission. To free us . . 9. It is statements such as the one above that has given a “Feminist” moniker to this novel, but one that is once again problematized by the fact that the author does not neatly package her heroine within an easily-definable ideological box. Along with her feelings of being a “sister” to the white woman, Ramatoulaye also has some very traditional feelings towards her prettier, more attractive and more desirable rival in love. She exhibits the jealousy that any person would in this situation. Some parts of the novel are so vitriolic towards the younger women that they are almost reminiscent of many popular novels and films in which men are portrayed as beasts who essentially “trade-in” women for younger models like cars. This is perhaps no accident, as Ramatoulaye admits that she has been influenced by the less esoteric forms of Western culture while studying in France. So she does like “intellectual films, those with a message”, but also appreciates “sentimental films, detective films, comedies, thrillers . . . “10 It is these that seem to inform her view of the young girls that took her and her friend’s husbands away from them. The fact that there is conflict and hatred illustrated between different generations of women has caused some to say that So Long a Letter is not really a feminist novel. Perhaps this is correct: the novel portrays a believable human being, with all the contradictions and paradoxes that such a figure inevitably possesses. Ramatoulaye refuses to be pigeon-holed within a particular viewpoint that has been, in an ironically patriarchal manner, chosen for her by mostly white, Western female academics. While the novel is in many ways a diatribe from a single person’s point of view, there are other elements that give at least some voice to other characters. One technique that Ba has used is to include transcriptions of other character’s letters within her own. Thus the reader is introduced to her betraying husband Moudou, through brief but telling snippets of letters that he wrote to her. While these are apparently chosen to show him in the worst possible light, they are at least a glimpse of the multi-dimensional nature that any story needs to have if it is to be both effective and believable. But in general the novel can be seen as a kind of revenge art against a now dead villain. She suggests that the novel is full of “confidential information that drowns distress”11 and this drowning constitutes a form a vengeance against a husband who can no longer answer back through word or action because he is caught in the vulnerable silence of death. It is perhaps a shame that Modou dies before he can fully explain himself to Ramatoulaye. She is more thoughtful than her more action-orientated friend, and needs to know why her husband of twenty-five years decides to run away with one his teenage daughter’s friends. She decides to stay in the family house rather than divorcing him and making a clean break for a number of reasons. First, she wants as little trauma as possible to come to her children, even though the oldest, Daba, wants her to divorce him. Second, she has not totally rejected (at least immediately after her husband has left) the polygamist tradition in which a wife does stay in the original home after the husband leaves. Third, and perhaps most important, this is her home, and she does not want to be forced out of it through the selfish actions of her husband. Part of her reluctance to make a clean break is the fact that he analyses the situation she is in and cannot come up with a rational reason for her husband’s departure. While she stays in the house she undertakes the self-analysis that will culminate in the writing of the letter. Here Ba illustrates the naïveté of the character, or perhaps rather her ability to fool herself. The attractions of a new teenage wife with a mother who can provide for him should be all too obvious to Ramatoulaye, but she seems locked in an intellectual’s curse of looking for complex, emblematic reasons when the simple, crude ones will probably suffice. Modou leaves her for the young Binetou because he lusts after her and sees her as an escape from the tedium of a decades-old marriage. If this interpretation is correct then it is not the institution of polygamy that is at fault but rather the tendency of men to seek new conquests once the current mate is starting to age. The polygamy tradition is just a convenient cover for the man to follow his desires. It is perhaps ironic that the French culture that has made Ramatoulaye seek for fidelity from her husband actually gives a man free license to have a mistress, as long as he is discrete about it.12 She seems unaware or uncaring of this fact, caught as she is within the passions of a woman who has been left. Ultimately So Long a Letter tells a sadly common story, one that has been repeated numerous times in the annals of literature from all over the world. It expresses the sadness and the rage of a woman left for a young girl. In this sense it is oddly traditional, perhaps stemming from the very conventional, mass-market films that the heroine liked to watch when in France. But the novel is of course much more than this as well. The novel is also a damning indictment of a marital system that condones such actions through making the idea of marriage include as many wives as a man needs or, in the modern world, can afford. The novel suggests that being “African” does not necessarily imply the need to accept all African customs and practices that existed before Europeans invaded. Being “African” to Ramatoulaye is perhaps secondary to being a “woman” in the fullest and most independent sense of the word. It is her identity as an educated woman that is central to her sense of self-worth. She might not admit this wholly to herself, but this seems a fair enough assessment. Her daughter Daba, who suggests that she divorce Modou and move on with her life (advice which she rejects) is perhaps an image for the kind of woman that Ramatoulaye, and through her voice, the author Ba, would like to be. Daba has an energy and an assumption of the right to equality that Ramatoulaye, caught between two worlds, cannot possess. Daba’s confidence stems from the fact that she has been raised by her mother to believe in her absolute right to self-autonomy She represents, as perhaps any child should to a parent, the opportunity for a happier life that the parent could not possess. Hope for the future in the fact of a dark present is one of the hallmarks of effective literature. The fact that the ideas of emancipation started in Europe, and indeed have spread form there to the rest of the world, is not a fact that worries Daba. Where an idea originates is of much less importance than its righteousness and efficacy. Siga Jagne has argued that Ba “gets Ramatoulaye to write herself not only into existence, but into a growth of self-consciousness,”13 It is this move from mere existence to self-consciousness that makes So Long a Letter as effective a book as it is. Mariama Ba died soon after So Long a Letter was published. Her premature death (at least by European standards) robbed the world of a fine novelist who might have contributed much to the growing sense of African identity in the decades to come. So Long a Letter is an unforgettable book, one that raises more questions that answers, and which should cause any fair person to look long and hard at the practice of polygamy and the related domination of women in African countries. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Works Cited Ba, Mariama. So Long a Letter. Heinemann, New York: 1989. Encyclopedia Britannica, vol 5, 1991 Hackel, Joyce. “African Tradition of Polygamy Faces Economic, Legal Challenges”. Christian Science Monitor, June 12, 1996. Jagne, Siga. “Djotaayi Dieguenye: The Gathering of Women in Mariama Ba’s Fictional World”. The Journal of Women’s and Transgender Studies. Vol 1, Spring 2004. Miller, Christoper. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1998. Steele, Ross. The French Way: Aspects of Behavior, Attitudes, and Customs of the French. McGraw-Hill, New York: 1995. Overall, I think that paper is okay, but it is need of a re-write. Please note my comments throughout the paper, the pink comments are questioning word choice and/or the message is unclear and needs to be worded differently. The blue comments are areas that need to be re-looked at completely. I thought that I provided succinct instructions, but just in case I didn’t provide you with the necessary information, please read below. Note: Ramatoulaye is viewed by most as being somewhat of a heroine…why? The main focus of the paper needs to be centered on the following question: How do West African women cope, or how have they coped with Muslim tradition and marital obstacles, such as polygamy, domination, oppression, and how do they deal with problems such as these. How does Ba present these problems in the novel? Read More