So Long a Letter

In this section, Rama faces her life’s greatest crisis: her abandonment by Modou. In short order, her husband takes a mistress young enough to be his daughter, marries the girl in secret, has other men break the news to Rama, and proceeds to never speak to her again. This course of events is understandably devastating for Rama, though we get a clear insight into her personality in her reaction to the surprise marriage. Rather than scream, rage, or break down in tears, she receives the news impassively. “I must not give my visitors the pleasure of relating my distress” (39), she says. This quote is key to understanding both Rama and the world she lives in. Rama views herself as dignified and serene in the face of pain—she will not lower herself by reacting emotionally. This is doubly important because of the insular nature of her community. Any outburst she has will be gossiped about by her friends and neighbors. There is no truly private space for Rama; because everything is shared, everything is a performance.

The physical and emotional loss of her husband spurs Rama to undergo a kind of transformation. Though she is well into middle age at this point, it is at this point that Rama becomes the woman we know as our narrator. With no man to pay bills or fix broken lights for her, Rama learns to do these things herself. She learns to drive. She goes to the movies by herself and enjoys the experience, as the films “deepened and widened [her] vision of the world” (54). For the first time in her adult life, Rama is being challenged to navigate the world as herself, rather than Modou’s wife. While another person might find this terrifying, Rama is surprised to find herself blossom, to enjoy her new freedoms. “My sadness dissolved” (55), she says.

After Modou’s death, Rama is visited by the same men who told her of Modou’s second marriage. Ba deliberately sets the scene up to mirror their previous interaction: the same men, in the same house, with the same paternalistic arrogance. For the men, nothing has changed. But for Rama, everything is different. When they propose she marry Modou’s brother, she reacts not, as she did previously, with quiet dignity, but with clearly articulated anger. “My voice has known thirty years of silence,” she thinks, before calling out their sexism and cruelty. She spent twenty-five years as Modou’s wife, and only five without him. In those five years, Rama has become a different person—she is brave and outspoken, unafraid to do what has been traditionally left to men, whether it be changing lightbulbs or speaking one’s mind. And as Rama has changed, so have her feelings towards her community. Where she was once quiet and outwardly serene to avoid gossip, she now refuses to be held hostage by the opinions of others. She remarks with amusement to Aissatou that her neighbors now call her “a ‘lioness’ or ‘mad woman’” (73). This section of the novel sees Rama at both her weakest point and her strongest, separated by five years of growth and self-discovery.