Une si longue letter by Mariama Bâ So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ

Author(s): Barbara Celarent

Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 116, No. 4 (January 2011), pp. 1391-1396
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659876 .
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 Book Reviews

Une si longue letter. By Mariama Bâ. Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions

Africaines, 1980. Pp. 131.

So Long a Letter. By Mariama Bâ. Translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas.

London: Heinemann, 1981. Pp. 90.

Barbara Celarent*
University of Atlantis

French colonialism opened some important doors to African men. A Léo-

pold Sédar Senghor might end up in the Académie Française. And not
only did Senghor write beautiful French poetry, his theories of negritude
and African socialism set forth a sophisticated anticolonial politics. But
forces both colonial and indigenous closed such avenues to women. And
so women in French Africa turned to different media, like other women
in other times.
In particular, they turned to fiction. In her short, poetic novel So Long
a Letter, Senghor’s countrywoman Mariama Bâ concentrates the social
insights that the more fortunate Senghor could spread over the essays and
volumes and reports that were his outlets as a brilliant Senegalese man.
Yet to write a novel is to reflect about social life just as if one had written
a theoretical thesis or an empirical monograph. Only the format is dif-
ferent. One sees the social from the point of view of the individual. And
is not that the basic experience of all humans?
A sizable literature has debated the relation between Ramatoulaye, Bâ’s
protagonist, and Bâ herself. In fact, Bâ experienced nearly all the vicis-
situdes she assigns to her alter ego, with the crucial exception of polygamy
(although Bâ’s cherished elder sister was one of four wives). But the novel
reorders these experiences and reduces them to more common dimension.
For Bâ’s own life was extraordinary beyond fiction.
Mariama Bâ was born in Dakar in 1929. Her father had served with
distinction at Verdun and the Marne and returned to an administrative
career that saw him eventually become minister of public health in the
Senegalese transitional government. Her mother died young, and—her
father being busy with his career—Mariama was raised in the household
of her maternal grandmother, who in her widowhood had married a
devout Tijani Muslim with three other wives and a mosque within the
family compound. Nonetheless Bâ’s father overcame his mother-in-law’s
objections to a Western education for the young girl. So Bâ was headed
for a secretarial career when her school director insisted that, for her own
good and the honor of the school, she must sit the exam for the Normal
School in Rufisque, an exam taken by girls all across French West Africa.
Bâ took first place on this exam, and her indomitable headmistress per-
suaded the reluctant grandmother to allow Mariama to go on. Bâ loved

*Another review from 2049 to share with AJS readers.—Ed.

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American Journal of Sociology

her new school and especially its feminist and pro-African headmistress
Germaine Le Goff. (Bâ’s first published work was actually a school piece,
on the writer Chateaubriand.)
Once graduated, Bâ became a schoolteacher and eventually an in-
spector of schools. In the late 1960s she turned to active feminism, and
at some point in the 1970s, with the strong encouragement of woman
friends, she took up fiction. So Long a Letter grew directly out of Bâ’s
feminist commitments, as its dedication makes clear: “To all women and
to men of good will.”
Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many other early feminist militants,
however, Bâ was also essentiellement mère, in her daughter’s words. Im-
mediately after graduation from school, Bâ married a flamboyant older
man with three children. But he wanted an old-style relationship, and
after four years and three more children, Bâ divorced him. She quickly
remarried (a quiet physician, with whom she had another child) and then
divorced again. In the 1950s, she met Obèye Diop, a brilliant young
socialist intellectual and journalist, who became her third husband and
the father of another nine children. Diop’s career in the 1950s was spec-
tacular, taking him to the Colonial Council, the secretaryship of state for
technical and professional education, and a position as minister of infor-
mation, before he fell from power in a 1962 Senghorian housecleaning
that followed a coup scare.
As Bâ’s daughter (Mame Coumba Ndiaye) made clear in her 2007
memoir, the Diop/Bâ menage was wildly exciting: intellectual, committed,
passionate, and loving, if often argumentative. Both partners were pre-
occupied with work and family, but the one was very public while the
other was very private. Diop’s work kept him on the move, while Bâ’s
kept her near home. Diop had little concern for worldly things, while Bâ
loved clothes, jewelry, and style (all African, for she gave up Western
clothing after the 1950s), not to mention that there were 13 children of
varying ages and paternity. This extraordinary household eventually
broke up over differences between its passionate principals, and Bâ es-
tablished herself independently in Dakar. She was almost immediately
taken ill and died August 17, 1981, at 52, with a second novel (Scarlet
Song) virtually finished and a third in design.
All these complexities are sea-changed into a rich, jewel-like novel. So
Long a Letter details the reflections of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese widow,
from the day of her husband’s death until the time when her mourning
has ended and she can receive the visit of her oldest friend, Aissatou.
Because Islamic mourning customs require seclusion, the novel takes the
form of a diary/letter written for that friend. In this text are reviewed all
the possible vagaries of a middle-class, middle-aged West African
woman’s life: motherhood, polygamy, betrayal, triumph, duty, religion,
friendship, and, occasionally, happiness.
The full story emerges not as a narrative but in complex and overlap-
ping flashbacks. It starts with betrayal revealed: Ramatoulaye almost

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immediately discovers the depth of her husband’s theft of common re-

sources for his new wife. Then gradually we hear that the new wife is in
fact a daughter’s school friend—one who has been joking with the daugh-
ter about her absurd “sugar daddy.”
In parallel emerges the betrayal and divorce of Aissatou by her husband.
(Unlike Ramatoulaye, Aissatou chooses to leave Africa via a job as a
translator—another circumstance that calls for the epistolary format.)
Again and again, we see the richness of Ramatoulaye’s consciousness, the
threads of religion, hope, duty, doggedness, even grandeur that weave
through her reinterpretation of her past. (Bâ once remarked “I have neither
the greatness of soul nor the qualities of Ramatoulaye, and my life is much
more complicated, more dramatic in its incidents, than that of my her-
oine.”)
Like many wonderful first-person novels, So Long a Letter has the ironic
problem that its protagonist’s voice is almost too lovely. Even in English
translation, the writing is beautiful, and the French original is exquisite:
its vocabulary at once rich and economical, its syntax elegant, and its
insights symphonically timed. An average Senegalese widow does not
write such language, we may think, nor has she the concentrated self-
insight here shown. Yet social restrictions steered many talented women
into the silent roles of the everyday, where they made their lives, and
those of their households, into a species of poetry. Here, too, Bâ makes
a profound point about everyday social action—that it has a profound
beauty, here expressed as the beauty of the text.
As social scientists, we usually forgo that beauty, for we eschew writing
rooted in personal vision. We pursue abstractions and generalization, and
in that pursuit we ignore the daily flow of glancing insights, of little
irrevocabilities, of everyday emotions, that make up the content of human
life. These real life details are mere noise in our models beside the sterner
stuff of gender, race, class, age, region—the serried ranks of variables
assembled. So also with networks. Where Ramatoulaye’s subtle connec-
tions ebb and flow through the incidents of life, our network models have
simple links, often without content or even direction. We forget that the
threads we weave were once thousands of little interactional fibers. Only
the spinning of life made them the long filaments we weave so carelessly
into our abstractions.
More specifically, there seem to be three qualities that make So Long
a Letter questionable as social science: first its presentation as fiction,
second its first-person viewpoint, and third its narrative character. Each
of these “disabilities” needs to be questioned.
There is no inherent problem, first, in fiction as social science. One can
imagine a genre of fictional inquiry into social life (as opposed to individual
life), and such a genre in fact exists. On the theoretical end of this spectrum
we have the utopias of More, Bellamy, Gilman, and so on, as well as the
dystopias of Orwell, Huxley, and any number of others. On the empirical
end, we have self-consciously sociological fiction, like that of Trollope and

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Zola or the more dramatic Dickens and Balzac. For many years, none of
this was felt to be appropriate for social science readers except as amuse-
ment. Eventually, we saw that Trollope was every bit the sociologist that
Goffman was; his dissection of upper-class life in mid-19th-century Britain
cannot be surpassed, however fictional it might be. Perhaps, we saw,
fiction is not really a bar to social science, at least in the right hands.
As for a focus on individual lives and the first-person standpoint, non-
fictional biography/autobiography has served as a method from time to
time in social science, but has never been fully legitimized. First emerging
in the Progressive Era casework literature, biographical documents were
widely used in early studies of crime and immigration; the “life course”
tradition continued them fitfully throughout the 20th century. But even
then the “life course” did not really succeed as social science until it
translated itself into the language of generalization and variables. Only
in ethnography did the first-person voice stabilize as social science, and
the epistemological hypochondrias of the later 20th century questioned
even that. It was well after 2000 that a serious sociology of the individual
began.
That sociology of the individual has reflected a theoretical unification,
at last, of explanation and narrative, for the final—and most vexing—
question raised by So Long a Letter is the question of narration, and in
particular first-person narration. A long and distinguished literature has
pitted history against sociology as modes of apprehending the social. But
that literature has focused on grand questions of explanation. It has too
little theorized the microscopic interweaving of social experience. The
phenomenologists attempted that theory, to be sure, but their sociological
followers grew unadventurous, illustrating their masters’ ideas rather than
extending them. It was therefore rather the “individual turn” in the social
sciences after 2010 that provided the impetus to and data for the theo-
retical interweaving of explanation and narrative. And a surprisingly large
amount of that theory came from the profound contemplation of the great
sociologists who happened to write narrative fiction, writers like Trollope,
Balzac, and, of course, Bâ. It is not only refreshing to read a book that
grasps in 90 pages the narrative experience of social living; it is also an
important theoretical challenge.
What exactly was it about reading works like So Long a Letter that
led to the new theories? Most important, we learned something about
objectification. First-person, experiential social science, whether fictional
or not, resists objectification. Bâ does not construct theoretical arguments.
She coins no terms. One cannot, for example, cite her book to support
the theory that “religious commitment trumps gender commitment,” even
though Ramatoulaye—like Bâ herself—through all her gender tribula-
tions never lets go of her unshakable commitment to Islam. For within
the one commitment, the other reappears and disciplines the one as if
they were dancing together. Ramatoulaye obeys all the rules of Muslim
mourning, but the contempt with which she rejects her brother-in-law’s

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proposal of leviratic (and polygamous) marriage is forthrightly feminist.

Or again, she detests Aissatou’s mother-in-law Nabou, who is driven by
religious, class, and tribal conservatism stealthily to create the second
bride who will destroy Aissatou’s marriage, yet she entirely grants the
logic of Nabou’s experience as woman.
Religion and feminism cannot then be distinguished as separated ob-
jects here. And what cannot be separated in a living person cannot be
redeployed elsewhere as variables. Therefore narratives always lack con-
ceptual portability, whether they are fictional or not. Generalization of
such narratives requires generalization of experiences or trajectories of
experience, not of qualities of persons or experiences. That was the chal-
lenge set by fiction like Bâ’s.
But this challenge is not merely negative—a requirement that we avoid
the objectification of feminism and Islam. It at the same time requires us
to theorize directly the dance of feminism and Islam within the myriads
of interacting selves that inhabit a social world. One Ramatoulaye is not
enough. And even within Ramatoulaye, the dance is unclear, as we see
from the two quite different readings of the book. The first and historically
dominant reading is feminist. In this view, the center of Ramatoulaye’s
self is her gender. Like Isabel Archer, Ramatoulaye refuses the easy ways
out of a bad situation, and, by so doing, enacts herself as both a woman
and a full human being. This reading certainly accords with Bâ’s public
pronouncements as a feminist.
But later readings have taken the novel as a study of Islam, to which
Bâ was similarly dedicated. The Ramatoulaye of the book’s early sections
goes through the religious motions, but remains inwardly uncommitted.
She begrudges her co-wife’s mother the hajj with which her husband has
won the woman’s complaisance, trivializing it by comparing it with the
Alfa-Romeos that have won the daughter. She admires Aissatou’s secular-
feminist refusal to remain in Dakar as one of two wives. She hears the
news of her husband’s new marriage with grace and aplomb not because
this is what becomes a Muslim, but rather because she “must not give
my visitors the pleasures of relating [to her husband] her distress.”
These are all the old Ramatoulaye. For at the crucial moment, she
decides to remain in Dakar and accept her new situation, and to “prepare
myself for equal sharing according to the precepts of Islam concerning
polygamic life.” It is rather her husband who violates the law of Islam,
failing to give her equal time with the new wife. In recounting this story
to her friend, Ramatoulaye grows in faith, seeking her own failures in
the marriage and remaining true to her love of her husband. At the fortieth
day, she can truly say “I have forgiven him.” On the rock of this forgiveness
breaks her brother-in-law’s marriage proposal, as well as a much more
welcome proposal from an old and admirable suitor. Whom she rejects
because she doesn’t love him and because the Quran gives her the right
to suit herself. Seeking to build a new social world, she offers him friends-
hip—she has said throughout the book that friendship is better than

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marriage. But he refuses, still trapped in an earlier Islam that places love
within duty. And when, finally, Ramatoulaye is tested by a daughter’s
unplanned, unannounced pregnancy, she “sought refuge in God, as at
every moment of crisis.” But the new self is quickly forgiving; “One is a
mother in order to love without beginning or end.”
In the new readings, the novel concerns the rediscovery of Islam, of
surrender to God’s will. They move from feminist politics of a somewhat
traditional sort—how to advance the interests of women—to the different
question of how humans live religious lives that are simultaneously social
and personally fulfilling. The privatization of religion in the Christian
West surrendered to Islam the lead in imagining such patterns for religious
living in social worlds. Little surprise then that the Muslim Bâ captures
this performative quality of religion. Ramatoulaye has always “been re-
ligious.” But to “be” a Muslim (or any other religion) is not to be something,
but to be aware that one is in the process of becoming something. Religion
is thus a particular form of performative articulation between the becom-
ing person, the social process, and the natural world in which both person
and process find themselves. It is from novels and other such biographical
works that this insight has come—the rooting of what we used to call
“institutions” in particular kinds of articulations of selves and groups.
But one need not know the detailed turns of sociological theory to know
the greatness of this book. One needs only an open mind and an inquiring
heart. So short a novel. So long a message.

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