Mariama Ba's Une si longue lettre and Subverting a Mythology of Sex-Based Oppression

C'est à nous, femmes, de prendre notre destin en mains pour bouleverser l'ordre établi à notre détriment et ne point le subir. Nous devons user comme les hommes de cette arme, pacifique certes mais sûre, qu'est l'écriture.

It is up to us women to take our fate in our hands in order to overthrow the order established to our detriment instead of submitting to it. We must, like men, use this weapon, peaceful, of course, but effective, which is writing.

Mariama Bâ, "La fonction politique" (7)

Many studies focus on the division between oppressor and oppressed to conclude that Une si longue lettre (1979) by the Senegalese female author Mariama Bâ simply discusses the mistreatment of Senegalese women by their men and society. ¹ This novel is particularly important because it won the first Noma Prize (1980) for the most outstanding work published in Africa (Blair, "Preface"). Marie Grésillon states that the principal theme of Lettre is the indictment of men who, in order to fulfill their own desires, victimize women (67, 69, 88). Alain Rouch and Gérard Clavreuil similarly summarize the book as the story of women who are abandoned by their husbands (396). Obioma Nnaemeka, Deborah G. Plant, and Mbye Baboucar Cham come closer to nuancing Bâ's thoughts concerning society, power, and the sexes. As Nnaemeka maintains, Lettre subverts and destabilizes certain dichotomies rooted in race, age, and culture and demonstrates that each woman experiences her environment differently and in a complex way (13-27). For Plant, Lettre depicts the African women's economic and sociopolitical contributions to society and asks how they lost their power. Cham introduces the reasons that African men and women get caught in a dynamic that encourages husbands to abandon their wives.

Over twenty years before the appearance of Lettre, Barthes, who was interested in the dynamics between differing ideologies, developed a terminology to dissect the myth-making mechanisms of the French bourgeoisie, which, as an Occidental colonizer of Senegal, had a lasting influence on Senegal's vision of itself. His classifications for the principal figures of social and discursive structures of domination in the bourgeois France of 1957 (inoculation, the quantification of quality, the privation of History, identification, ninisme, and the statement of facts) serve as useful tools to target the underlying causes of hierarchies and their relationship to gender construction. ² These categories have a particular relevance to an analysis of Senegalese society because of French colonialism, but they can also be used universally and particularly in terms of gender and social expectations of the sexes: in Mythologies, Barthes includes essays, such as "Novels and Children," "Striptease," and "Conjugales," that deconstruct the discourses and practices perpetuating societally dictated gender roles. ³ Read in light of Barthes's categories and these essays, Lettre reveals the underpinnings of conditions that might normally be accepted as irrevocable givens.

My analysis explores the implications of the myths involved for both sexes: Lettre illustrates that old and new ideologies often function to maintain a status quo that is ultimately unjust for men and women. I use ideology as defined by Althusser to mean "a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (162). ⁴ For my study, myth is a subset of ideology; as such, any idea or representation of an individual in a society could be considered a myth. As Laurie Edson shows without explicitly involving Althusser, African philosophers and critics increasingly point to the importance of identifying the real conditions of daily life and the conflict between tradition and modernity (13-15). Bâ herself stresses the importance of the imaginary in her promotion of African literature which shows men and women working together: "Il faut donner dans la littérature africaine à la femme noire une dimension à la mesure de son engagement prouvé à côté de l...