Culture, marriage, love and the burden of womanhood
Because love is such a strange and blind animal, the narrator marries the affable and intelligent Modou against her mother’s advice that he is too handsome and too perfect to be honest . . .
IN THE book “So Long a Letter” (1981), Senegalese writer Mariama Ba exposes the claustrophobic and oppressive nature of culture on women, as they vainly strive to follow their hearts’ desires in a society fraught with suspicion and male chauvinism. It is a sad, poignant, touching, revealing; yet sizzling and engrossing story of neglect, betrayal and frustrated hope.
Using modernistic traits of realism, the epistolary and autobiographical modes complemented by rich yet captivating language, the writer tells the story of a yearning race that seeks solutions from the past at the same time purporting to be moving forward.
She chronicles the tale of cultural and religious shortcomings which place a burden on the individual as he/she struggles to find his/her bearings in the misty environs of existence. Though man is also weighed down by cultural and religious expectations, he seems to skirt around them and benefit from the loopholes therein. It is the woman who bears the brunt of it all as everything seems to be skewed to her disfavour.
The story is told through a first person singular narrator, Ramatoulaye, who opens the window into her tormented world of hopeless hope through a sequence of reminiscences captured in one very long letter to Aissatou, her friend who now lives in the United States.
As the story opens she 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.
Through adept use of surprise and suspense, Ba hoists the reader on a whirlwind voyage of intrigue as he/ she cannot help wondering how his/ her story can be so vividly reflected and intertwined with the narrator’s.
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 is 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’s marriages points to doom as the family unit, a major cog in the cultural machinery, frowns at them, exposing the vulnerability of women. Aissatou becomes the first victim as her vindictive mother-in-law allows a malignant tumor to grow in her heart which prompts her to scheme her daughter-in-law’s downfall.
Having lost her husband through death so early into their marriage, Aunty Nabou 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 with her four sons; 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.
Mariama Ba juxtaposes Aissatou’s experience with that of Ramatoulaye, her friend, who meets the same fate three years on. Unlike Mawdo, who finds himself at the mercy of a culturally imprisoned 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 in 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, the protagonist 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.
At the demise 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”.
And yet as she wilts 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 their 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.