Awarded with “Noma Award for Publishing in Africa” in 1980 for her epistolary novel “Si longue lettre – So long letter”, written in 1979, Mariama Bâ engraved her name in the African literary feminist arena very early. In this novel she expressed the anguish and misery of a woman who was to mourn her husband with his second younger wife.
Born on the 17th of April 1929, in Dakar, Senegal, to a Muslim family, Mariama Bâ echoed the frustration of an African woman beleaguered by masculine tradition in her novels. She was lucky to be born to an educated family, as her grandfather was a translator during the French occupation and her father was a civil servant and later a health minister in the newborn liberated state in 1956. Her maternal grandmother took the responsibility of rearing her after her mother’s death. She was raised according to dual cultural education as she received her secular education in French, meanwhile, attending Quran lessons.
Her well-cultured father supported his brilliant daughter when her ambition to pursue university education was hindered by her conservative grandparents. At that time, i.e. during and after the French occupation, women were not widely allowed to carry on their education and the rare ones were only permitted to join the teacher training institution; a profession which was considered the only appropriate job for women as it is the extension of motherhood, women’s connate career – as they thought. Hence, Bâ had the sole chance to be trained as a teacher; she excelled in the entrance exam and she was accepted in École Normale.[1] Bâ enrolled a respectable career as a teacher supported by the principal of the school she was graduated from. The principal admired her intellect and teaching skills. She worked as a teacher from 1947 to 1959 and progressed in her career, taking the post of an educational inspector.
During her career, Bâ got married three times, raising nine children and working hard. The last and longest marriage was with the Parliament Member Obeye Diop, nevertheless, after many years they were divorced.
In the seventies of the 20th century, after terminating her mission as a mother and a teacher, Bâ, lastly, had the free time to invest her energy in political activism. She was an advocate for women’s rights and an ardent adversary against neocolonial system.[2] Her political and human activism led her to discern her new literary passion. She started with writing essays to express her views and serve her cause, criticizing exploiting and mistreating women, fighting against female circumcision, polygamy, physical and mental violence against women.
Developing her literary sense throughout her struggle, Mariama Bâ, in 1979 wrote her first novel in French “Si Longue Lettre” which was translated into English language in 1980; “So Long Letter”. In this work, Mariama Bâ wrote a semi-biographical epistolary work in a form of a letter written by a widow to her childhood friend, expressing her agony and narrating the steps of her development and strife against a society that is dominated by masculinity. The protagonist of the novel, similar to Mariama Bâ, is a mother to 12 children, widowed from her husband who was married to another young woman. The brother of her husband, according to tradition, proposes to the protagonist to keep her under the control of the man’s family, yet she refuses his proposal. The novel, at that time, was an audacious feminist manifestation, questioning the Islamic law and social heritage in a conservative society which received the novel with bewilderment.[3]
After translating the novel, it was prized with Noma award.
Encouraged by the success and controversy aroused by her first novel, Mariama wrote her second novel, while she was dying, “Un chant éclarate” in 1981, translated under the title “Scarlet Song”. The novel also was received warmly on the international level and with suspicious on the local level.
Again, the second novel tackles the polygamy system, which is etched in the back of the mind of every Muslim woman, assorted with negative emotions like sense of anxiety, degradation and sullenness. Here Mariama puts the whole world in the shoes of a Muslim woman, as she depicts a French woman who got married to a Senegalese. She went to live with him in Senegal and all of a sudden the whole love story turned into a nightmare when her husband got married to another woman, using his “lawful right” guaranteed by law and “Sharia”. The French woman could not tolerate what Senegalese women used to endure as a normal life style, and finally she deserted her husband and returned back to her country.[4]
Resenting the term “feminist” as a description of her struggle, Mariama explains that the term “Feminism” is burdened by westernization. Mariama was a zealous advocate for the African culture revival; hence, in her long essay “The Political Function of Written African Literature”, Mariama stipulates her beliefs in the essentiality for African woman to be an active participant in the emancipation of her society both from colonization and tyranny of obsolete tradition.[5]
Before her death, after a long struggle with cancer, Mariama wrote: “The woman writer in Africa has a special task. She has to present the position of women in Africa in all its aspects. There is still so much injustice…. In the family, in the institutions, in society, in the street, in political organizations, discrimination reigns supreme…. As women, we must work for our own future, we must overthrow the status quo which harms us and we must no longer submit to it. Like men, we must use literature as a non-violent but effective weapon.”[6]
On the 17th of August 1981, promptly after finishing her last novel, Mariama Bâ died at the age of 52.
[1] https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/ba-mariama-1929-1981/
[2] https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/english-literature-20th-cent-present-biographies/mariama-ba
[3] https://www.amazon.com/So-Long-Letter-Mariama-Ba/dp/1577668065
[4] http://www.puneresearch.com/media/data/issues/5734768252488.pdf#:~:text=%28Bond%2C%202003%3A%20214%29%20Mariama%20Ba%2C%20a%20prestigious%20Noma,inculcate%20in%20them%20the%20hidden%20potentials%20and%20strength.
[5] https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-470
