So Long a Letter

Newly widowed, the Senegalese schoolteacher Ramatoulaye writes a long letter to her lifelong friend Aissatou, taking stock of her marriage, her husband's taking of a young second wife, and the choices open to educated women in post-independence Senegal. Mariama Bâ's landmark of African women's writing is set in the real Dakar: the widow's house through the confinement of mourning, the mosque and the rites, the schools where the two women trained as pioneers, and the wider world Aissatou escapes to.

Ramatoulaye

The widow's house

The mourning

Confined to her house in Dakar for the traditional widow's mourning, Ramatoulaye begins the long letter that is the book, addressed to Aissatou far away. The domestic space of grief, with her twelve children and the memories crowding in, is where she at last weighs her thirty-year marriage and speaks the truth she has kept silent.

The opening chapters

explicit Ramatoulaye writes from her house in Dakar, the real Senegalese capital, through the four months and ten days of a widow's confinement; sited in the city.

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