{"id":136318,"date":"2019-05-13T09:00:57","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T13:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136318"},"modified":"2019-05-13T10:06:25","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T14:06:25","slug":"feminize-your-canon-mariama-ba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/13\/feminize-your-canon-mariama-ba\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Mariama B\u00e2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As a Muslim schoolgirl in Senegal in the forties, Mariama B\u00e2 had to choose her life\u2019s direction at the age of fourteen. When girls graduated from primary education in the French colonial system, the main options were enrollment in either typing or midwifery courses. Only the most academic students at B\u00e2\u2019s school progressed to the \u00c9cole normale des jeunes filles de Rufisque: an elite teacher training college just outside Dakar, whose intake included the surrounding Francophone territories. B\u00e2 had decided to become a secretary, but her dynamic headmistress, ambitious on her behalf, wouldn\u2019t hear of it. \u201cYou are intelligent,\u201d she told her pupil. \u201cYou have gifts.\u201d So B\u00e2 took the entrance exam for the \u00c9cole normale and received the highest mark in French West Africa.<\/p>\n

The headmistress\u2019s discernment of exceptional talent was again strikingly vindicated when B\u00e2, on publishing her debut novel at age fifty, became one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author. So Long a Letter<\/em>, an incandescent critique of Islamic polygyny from the point of view of a middle-aged Senegalese widow, won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa and was translated into many languages. B\u00e2, who had been a women\u2019s rights activist since the sixties, was suddenly hailed as the pioneering feminist voice of a continent. Sadly, she had little time to enjoy her success. Less than a year after accepting the Noma prize and giving a speech at the 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair, B\u00e2 died of cancer. According to those who knew her, she didn\u2019t rail against her fate. She accepted premature death as the price of her startling literary glory.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Posthumously, the plaudits continued to come in for So Long a Letter<\/em>. A Guardian<\/em> review of the 1982 Virago edition, translated by Modup\u00e9 Bod\u00e9-Thomas, described B\u00e2 as \u201cin a class of her own, conveying with real power and poetry a subtle, changing world of female experience which men do not see and cannot write about.\u201d The London Review of Books <\/em>declared: \u201cOne could not wish for a more politically alert and more passionately involved account of what life is like for educated Muslim women.\u201d There was censure, too. The Nigerian poet and scholar Femi Ojo-Ade accused B\u00e2 (along with her fellow Senegalese author Nafissatou Diallo and the Nigerian-British novelist Buchi Emecheta) of espousing a creed of \u201csocial and psychological alienation\u201d and \u201ccultural bastardization.\u201d Feminism, he scolded, is intrinsically \u201can occidental phenomenon.\u201d As B\u00e2 said in her Frankfurt speech: \u201cIn all cultures the woman who makes demands or protests is devalued.\u201d<\/p>\n

Growing up in a conservative, affluent community in Dakar, B\u00e2 was conscious of women\u2019s rights from an early age. After her mother died, B\u00e2 was raised by maternal relatives in an extended family network that included her grandmother\u2019s three co-wives. Religious rituals were closely observed: there was a mosque in the courtyard of the family\u2019s compound, and during school holidays B\u00e2 studied the Koran under the supervision of an imam. Countervailing the traditional tenor of B\u00e2\u2019s home life, however, was the influence of her progressive and liberal father, a civil servant who became the deputy mayor of Dakar and the first Senegalese health minister. Amadou B\u00e2 made sure to foster his precocious daughter\u2019s intellect by bringing her books, conversing with her in scrupulously grammatical French instead of Wolof, the local language, and ensuring\u2014against the wishes of her grandparents and uncle\u2014that she remain in school after age fourteen. B\u00e2\u2019s grandmother, meanwhile, prepared her for the conventional role of a Senegalese Muslim wife, as B\u00e2 explained in a magazine interview:<\/p>\n

I had to know how to cook, do dishes, pound millet, make flour into couscous. I had to know how to wash clothes, iron ceremonial boubous [the colorful wide-sleeved robe worn by both sexes in West Africa], and when the right time came, with or without my consent, fall into another family\u2014that of a husband.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

B\u00e2 went on to have three husbands, all chosen (and relinquished) of her own free will, and nine children. Her third and longest marriage was to Ob\u00e8ye Diop, a left-wing journalist turned politician who held the post of Senegalese minister of information. They had five children but eventually divorced. Looking back on their twenty-five-year relationship, Diop said, \u201cThe meeting of two opposing temperaments, two sets of roiling opinions, two voracious intellectual appetites, two different philosophies, is not easy to manage.\u201d And both had demanding careers. After twelve years as a teacher, B\u00e2 was appointed to the Regional Inspectorate of Education of Senegal; she also held positions in several women\u2019s empowerment associations, including Soroptimist International. Around the time her marriage ended, she was encouraged by friends to write a novel. Annette Mbaye D\u2019Erneville, the journalist and children\u2019s author, told Nouvelles \u00c9ditions Africaines to expect a manuscript from B\u00e2, even though nothing had been written yet. The ploy worked: as soon as B\u00e2 imagined the men at the publishing house mocking her for not following through, she began So Long a Letter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Set in post-1960 independent Senegal, So Long a Letter<\/em> is an elegiac, intimate series of confidences and reminiscences from Ramatoulaye, a widowed teacher and mother, to Aissatou, a childhood friend now living in the U.S. From the first page, with its nostalgic sketch of the women\u2019s shared history, it is plain that a literary virtuoso is at work. Ramatoulaye tells Aissatou:<\/p>\n

I conjure you up. The past is reborn, along with its procession of emotions. I close my eyes. Ebb and tide of feeling: heat and dazzlement, the woodfires, the sharp green mango, bitten into in turns, a delicacy in our greedy mouths. I close my eyes. Ebb and tide of images: drops of sweat beading your mother\u2019s ochre-colored face as she emerges from the kitchen; the procession of young wet girls chattering on their way back from the springs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Following her husband\u2019s fatal heart attack, Ramatoulaye has begun her imposed period of mourning and seclusion. Over multiple days she receives an endless stream of visitors\u2014friends, family, and strangers\u2014paying their respects. Yet though she deeply loved her husband, Modou Fall, there is nothing straightforward about her grief, or about the ceremonies surrounding her. Modou, after twenty-five years of happy marriage and twelve children, took a second wife: his teenage daughter\u2019s friend and\u00a0study partner. Then, instead of dividing his time and financial resources between his wives as per Koranic law, he abandoned Ramatoulaye and their children entirely, draining a joint bank account as he did so. Five years later, he is dead, and she is obliged to follow all the rituals of new widowhood with her co-wife in her house and by her side. Among various torments Ramatoulaye suffers through gritted teeth, Modou\u2019s sisters \u201cgive equal consideration to thirty years and five years of married life. With the same ease and the same words, they celebrate twelve maternities and three.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taking refuge in the past, Ramatoulaye also relives the dramatic events of Aissatou\u2019s life. As a young woman, she married Modou\u2019s friend Mawdo. But Mawdo\u2019s aristocratic mother, Aunty Nabou, disapproved: Aissatou, who belonged to a lower ethnic caste and whose father was a goldsmith, wasn\u2019t good enough for her son. Eventually, Aunty Nabou punished her unacceptable daughter-in-law by offering Mawdo in marriage to his young cousin. He consented, he said, lest his mother \u201cdie of shame and chagrin,\u201d and he promised Aissatou he wouldn\u2019t live with his new bride. But Aissatou refused to participate in polygamy. \u201cI am stripping myself of your love, your name,\u201d she wrote to him. \u201cClothed in my dignity, the only worthy garment, I go my way.\u201d While raising her small children, she trained as an interpreter and went to work at the Senegalese embassy in New York. \u201cHow much greater you proved to be,\u201d Ramatoulaye marvels, \u201cthan those who sapped your happiness!\u201d In seeking a different kind of dignity for herself when she was betrayed, Ramatoulaye called on all her reserves of emotional endurance:<\/p>\n

To overcome distress when it sits upon you demands strong will. When one thinks that with each passing second one\u2019s life is shortened, one must profit intensely from this second; it is the sum of all the lost or harvested seconds that makes for a wasted or a successful life. Brace oneself to check despair and get it into proportion! A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness. Little by little, it takes over your whole being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Long a Letter<\/em> has often been read as autobiographical. B\u00e2 called it \u201cfirst a cry from the heart of the Senegalese women \u2026 But it is also a cry which can symbolize the cry of women everywhere.\u201d Her heroine, she claimed, had a \u201cgreatness of soul\u201d that she herself lacked. Whereas B\u00e2 chose divorce and independence over cultural fidelity, like Aissatou (who also shares her surname), Ramatoulaye stoically contains her heartbreak and outrage while behaving\u2014mostly\u2014impeccably in the eyes of society.<\/p>\n

After her official forty days of mourning, Ramatoulaye receives many offers of marriage in quick succession. First in line is Tamsir, Modou\u2019s thrice-married brother. \u201cI shall marry you,\u201d her announces with a farcical show of magnanimity. \u201cI prefer you to the other one, too frivolous, too young.\u201d Ramatoulaye doesn\u2019t care that the brother-in-law \u201cinherits\u201d her by tradition: she\u2019s incensed by the idea that she\u2019d agree to be Tamsir\u2019s fourth wife, especially as she knows he\u2019s just after her inheritance. Eloquent in her rage, she reminds him that he cannot even financially support his existing wives. \u201cI am not an object to be passed from hand to hand \u2026 I shall never be the one to complete your collection,\u201d she blazes. The reader, whose emotional investment in Ramatoulaye\u2019s plight B\u00e2 has effortlessly engaged, wants to cheer out loud.<\/p>\n

It was B\u00e2\u2019s view that polygamy is never good for women, who are forced into it \u201cby men, by society, by tradition.\u201d But she saw the underlying issue as universal\u2014in her view, polygamy merely legalized and legitimized men\u2019s inevitable behavior. She once remarked on seeing two houses in France with a connecting internal door, purpose-built to enable a man to go between his wife and his lover without stepping outside. \u201cAll men are basically polygamous,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a general man\/woman problem \u2026 frankly I do not think that men can<\/em> be sexually faithful.\u201d Polygamy also features in the plot of B\u00e2\u2019s second novel, Scarlet Song<\/em>, published posthumously in 1981 and in an English translation by Dorothy S. Blair in 1986. A tragedy of doomed love between a black Senegalese Muslim man and a white French Christian woman, it is also a lamentation on patriarchally sanctioned male egocentrism and on the near impossibility of transcending one\u2019s culture and upbringing.<\/p>\n

When Ousmane, a young philosophy graduate from a humble background, marries Mireille, a wealthy diplomat\u2019s daughter, the odds are stacked against them. But with their intelligence, idealism, and mutual devotion\u2014and the birth of a son\u2014they expect their relationship to survive conflicting worldviews and the widespread disapproval they incur. Ousmane, who romantically compares himself to the hero of a Corneille drama, reflects: \u201cTo choose a wife outside the community was an act of treason, and he had been taught, \u2018God punishes traitors.\u2019\u2009\u201d Yet in B\u00e2\u2019s scathing portrayal of a stubbornly sexist society, it is Mireille who suffers the worst punishment in the wake of her marriage collapsing. More structurally conventional and melodramatic than So Long a Letter<\/em>, Scarlet Song<\/em> is nevertheless a gripping and fascinating portrait of the complex, evolving social mores of post-independence Senegal.<\/p>\n

Since Scarlet Song<\/em>\u2019s publication, B\u00e2\u2019s work has gradually faded from international prominence. In the anglophone world, her deserved reputation as a grande dame of African literature doesn\u2019t extend far beyond the occasional postcolonial literature college course. Not that she\u2019d necessarily have cared too much: her priority was to blaze a trail for African women writers, and that she did magnificently. B\u00e2\u2019s other primary goal was for girls to benefit from the kind of education she\u2019d enjoyed. While she rejected the French assimilationist project in West Africa, she valued the colonial school system for its narrowing of the opportunity gap between the sexes. \u201cWe were true sisters,\u201d recalls Ramatoulaye of her class at teacher training college, \u201cdestined for the same mission of emancipation.\u201d B\u00e2\u2019s name still graces one of the most prestigious public schools in Senegal: La Maison d\u2019\u00c9ducation Mariama B\u00e2, on the small carless island of Gor\u00e9e, where around two hundred girls are prepared for the baccalaureate.<\/p>\n

Above all, B\u00e2 believed in books as the key to women\u2019s liberation. \u201cThe power of books,\u201d muses Ramatoulaye, \u201cthis marvelous invention of astute human intelligence \u2026 Sole instrument of interrelationships and of culture, unparalleled means of giving and receiving. Books knit generations together in the same continuing effort that leads to progress.\u201d Or, as B\u00e2 said to an interviewer the year before she died: \u201cBooks are a weapon, a peaceful weapon perhaps, but they are a weapon.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Feminize Your Canon here.\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words without Borders, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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