55 pages • 1 hour read
Mariama BaSo Long a Letter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Feminism
Feminism is a strong theme throughout the novel. Much of Rama’s character development over the course of the book involves her growing ability to see women, including herself, as fully autonomous humans deserving of equality. Aissatou’s decision to leave her husband after he takes a second wife is a clearly feminist act. She is counseled by women and men alike to accept the new marriage, as she and her sons “belong” with Mawdo and “cannot succeed” (32) without him. Despite this, she leaves the marriage with a strongly-worded letter making clear that both she and her sons are separate, equal humans. She writes, “I am stripping myself of your love, your name” [...]. Clothed in my dignity, the only worthy garment, I go my way” (33). Rama praises her friend for her “courage” in taking her “life into [her] own hands” (33). Years later, when Rama finds herself in an identical situation, she struggles with whether to leave her husband, as Aissatou did: “Leave? Start again at zero…?” (41), she wonders. She laments the fact that, in a patriarchal society, as women age their worth diminishes, but men become distinguished. Rama does not leave Modou, but manages to separate herself from him nonetheless. She makes new choices and becomes an individual rather than simply someone’s wife. She learns to drive, to pay bills, to fix up the house. Her neighbors react with shock, and Rama sees “the slender liberty granted to women” (54).
Rama and Aissatou's friendship shows just how varied feminism can be through their different actions. Aissatou’s is strident and obvious, as she rejects her husband, immigrates to America, and lands a high-powered job. Rama’s is quiet and subtle, as she navigates a life with herself and her children at the center, rather than her absent husband. She takes on new roles and chores and finds them exhilarating. The next time she is placed in a position where men intend to make choices for her, she fights back. She rejects Tamsir’s declaration of marriage, noting that he didn’t even bother to ask. She vows, “I shall never be the one to complete your collection” (60). She argues with Daouda about feminism and the need for female representation in Senegalese government. Rama has grown in leaps and bounds since her quiet acceptance of her sister-wife, and in the novel’s final chapters, goes even farther. After her daughter becomes pregnant outside marriage, she not only accepts the situation with love and grace, but rails against a system that punishes women for enjoying sex, but lets the father off scot-free. She teaches her younger daughters about sex and birth control, in defiance of traditional Senegalese morality and norms: “Each woman,” she says, “makes of her life what she wants” (92).
Education
Throughout the novel, education is presented as the key to success and happiness, and the only way to move beyond the “old” Senegal into a newer, more equitable world. Women are raised up by their educations, while uneducated women suffer. Rama and Aissatou begin their deep, life-long friendship while at school, and eventually become teachers themselves. They consider their profession almost sacred, an army that “plants the flag of knowledge and morality” (24). When Aissatou finds herself in an unhappy, polygamous marriage, her education allows her to escape. “[Books] enabled you to better yourself…took you also to France…led to your appointment in the Senegalese Embassy in the United States” (33). Without her education, Aissatou’s choices would have been severely limited, and her ability to leave Mawdo hampered. Her journey is inversely mirrored by Binetou, Rama’s sister-wife. Binetou is forced into a marriage with Modou just months before graduating from university. When Modou dies, Binetou has no education to fall back on, and her future looks grim. “A diploma is not a myth” (76), Rama tells her children. “It is not everything, true. But it crowns knowledge, work” (76).
Polygamy
A third major theme within So Long A Letter is polygamy as a cultural institution and specifically, the harm is does to the women involved. Both Aissatou and Rama find themselves in polygamous relationships against their will. In Aissatou’s case, her husband is pressured and manipulated into taking a second wife by his mother, whereas Rama’s husband makes the choice of his own free will. But in both cases, Ba makes it clear that all women involved are victimized by polygamy, both first and second wives alike. When Mawdo chooses Young Nabou as his second wife, it is as if all of Aissatou’s accomplishments are washed away: “From then on” (31), Rama says to her friend, “you no longer counted” (31). Just as suddenly as Aissatou is demoted by Mawdo, so are her sons, showing that polygamy affects children just as it affects women. Rama’s children, similarly, are abandoned by their father when he takes a second wife, and their social standing is diminished by his new marriage.
The second wives are also harmed by polygamy, though in more subtle ways. They are deprived of age-appropriate courtship and sold like cattle by their mothers and guardians for personal gain. Binetou is forced into her marriage to secure her family’s economic prosperity. Young Nabou is raised to be Mawdo’s wife by his deranged mother in order to take revenge against Aissatou.
The men, for their part, choose not to understand their first wives’ sense of betrayal. Mawdo, angered by Aissatou’s departure, tries to justify polygamy to Rama. Women must understand and accept men’s desire for “variety” (35), which Rama says reduces “young Nabou to a plate a food” (35). She is unmoved by Mawdo’s arguments: “But to understand what” (35), she asks, “The right to betray” (35)? When her own husband decides to take a second wife, Rama is again implored to “understand” that this is God’s will, but she knows it is only human greed, not divine inspiration. When she rejects Daouda’s offer of marriage, she tells him that polygamy in unacceptable in the modern world, that only the women forced into “know the constraints, the lies, the injustices” (72) inherent in the practice.
