So Long a Letter

“To lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us: these were the aims of our admirable headmistress.”

This quote introduces the importance of education in the lives of Senegalese women, a theme that will color Rama and Aissatou’s lives. Their headmistress, one of the novel’s few white characters, challenges the girls to look critically at the culture they’ve been raised in and compare and contrast their experiences with other, far-away worlds. This instills in both girls a sense that their own culture is valuable as long as it helps and benefits them—if it harms them, there are other worlds worth exploring. Both women do eventually explore new ways of living, such as when Aissatou leaves her husband and Rama supports her pregnant, unmarried daughter. 

“To warp a soul is as much a sacrilege as murder.” 

This simple quote tells the reader much about Rama’s personal philosophy. Murder and explicit violence are abhorrent to Rama, but she is thoughtful and sees what lies beyond the obvious. To hurt someone emotionally, she knows from personal experience, is just as harmful as physical violence. 

“The dizzying speed of the vehicle, carrying her towards the place of her childhood, did not prevent her from recognizing the familiar countryside.” 

Here, Rama describes Aunty Nabou’s journey to her ancestral home. She contrasts the car, a symbol of modernization and a new Senegal, with the familiar, unchanging countryside. Aunty Nabou, unlike Rama and Aissatou is planted firmly in the past. Despite benefiting from new technologies and ideas, like cars, her world is only what she has known since childhood. Her deep longing for the comfortable, familiar past is one of the reasons she despises Aissatou, a woman of “inferior” birth, so much. 

“Shame kills faster than disease.” 

Shame afflicts several characters in this novel. Rama presents it as an emotion that has disastrous consequences, and indeed, the events of the novel bear this out. Rama feels shamed by her husband’s decision to take another wife, and the societal pressure to remain a faithful wife, along with this deep shame, prevents her from leaving Modou, despite her children’s pleas. Young Aissatou’s shame over her unplanned pregnancy prevents her from seeking out her mother’s help, just as Rama’s shame over sexual matters prevented her from educating her daughter on how to avoid pregnancy. 

“I am stripping myself of your love, your name. Clothed in my dignity, the only worthy garment, I go my way.” 

This powerful line is part of Aissatou forceful, stirring letter to her husband after he takes a second wife against Aissatou’s wishes. In her traditional culture, a wife is provided for by her husband, and has nothing but what he chooses to give her. Aissatou knows this and uses this idea to make clear her reasons for leaving. Though Mawdo owns the home they live in, has ownership over their belongings and finances, and has ultimate authority over his family, this will not stop Aissatou from leaving. Mawdo does not own her spirit or her dignity. She will take what is hers—what is most important—and move on without him. 

“Yes, there you were, the past crushed beneath your heel. There you were, an innocent victim of an unjust cause and the courageous pioneer of a new life.” 

Rama marvels at Aissatou’s courage in leaving her husband, and at how well things go for her, despite the pessimistic views of their neighbors, who urged Aissatou to stay. Aissatou defies all expectations and creates a new identity for herself, something that Rama will struggle to do when abandoned by her husband. Her words here are explicitly mirrored later on in the novel, as Rama learns to drive and do household chores. She becomes the very thing she marveled at, an innocent victim and the creator of a new life.

“Leave? Start again at zero, after living twenty-five years with one man, having borne twelve children?” 

Here, Rama considers leaving her unfaithful husband, just as Aissatou did. She wrestles internally with the difficult decision, boiling the relationship down to sheer numbers: 25 years, 12 children, and the consequences beginning at zero, as if none of it ever occurred. Rama is different to Aissatou. Though hurt, she still loves her husband, and has no desire to move from her home and leave her life behind. In the end, she chooses to remain in a holding pattern: still technically married, but emotionally and physically abandoned by her husband. 

“Whereas a woman draws from the passing years the force of her devotion, despite the ageing of her complaint, a man, on the other hand, restricts his field of tenderness. His egoistic eye looks over his partner’s shoulder. He compares what he had with what he no longer has, what he has with what he could have.”

Rama touches on the differences between men and women in her particular world at several points. In this section, she remarks on how women, bound forever to one man, deepen their love and care. Men, on the other hand, constantly search out new experiences and desire other women, an issue that is further complicated by the institution of polygamy. Women may never stray, but men are encouraged to go in constant search of a newer, better wife. 

“I survived.” 

Rama is nothing if not a survivor. Where a husband’s abandonment might have wrecked a weaker woman, Rama steels herself against public gossip and makes a new, unconventional life for herself. She is not necessarily happy, but she is alive and functioning. This, she seems to say, is the most important thing. 

“Friendship has splendours that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love” 

This quote highlights the importance of female friendship within So Long A Letter. In traditional Senegalese culture, Rama and Aissatou are measured by their relationships to men and to the children they bear. But Rama knows just how valuable her relationship with her best friend is. Whereas both women experience love as fleeting and painful, their friendship is a continual source of strength and comfort despite the distance between them.

“I look Tamsir straight in the eye. Look at Mawdo. I look at the Imam. I draw my black shawl closer. I tell my beads. This time I shall speak out.”

This moment is a turning point within the novel. Rama, who has quietly endured the indignities of a polygamous marriage, is informed by her dead husband’s brother, Tamsir, that he intends to take her as one of his wives. Surrounded by three men who represent the patriarchy’s control over her life, Rama decides that she will not submit. She rails against them all and casts them from her house. Though they call her crazy and blasphemous, she refuses to relent, finally taking a public stand for her own rights and desires. Afterwards, she feels as though she has finally gotten revenge for their dismissive cruelty in telling her of Modou’s second marriage. 

“To be a woman! To live the life of a woman! Ah, Aissatou!”

Here, Rama both laments the challenges that come with womanhood—unfaithful men, societal inequality—as well as the joys—seeing children grow into adults, maintaining a beautiful home, and cultivating friendships with other women.

“You who have loved me, who love me still—I don’t doubt it—try to understand me.” (p.71)

Rama has experienced love in her life with Modou, but he never understood her or even tried to. He took another wife without concern for her feelings. So here, Rama begs Daouda Dieng to understand her, not simply love her. She wants someone to acknowledge her lived experiences, not simply desire her. 

“All or nothing. Adieu.”

Daouda Dieng writes this in response to Rama’s apologetic letter stating that she will not marry him. She wishes to remain friends and see him platonically. But Daouda, like the other men of this novel, sees women only in terms of their sexual or relational value to him, as mothers, daughters, and spouses. If he cannot have Rama for his wife, she serves no purpose in his life.

“My successive refusals gave me in town the reputation of a lioness or mad woman.” 

Here, Rama describes the consequences of her decision not to remarry following Modou’s death, despite having multiple suitors. Since she has denied two matches her village regards as “good”—Tamsir and Daouda Dieng—her neighbors decide she must be insane. Rama regards this with detached amusement. Since taking a stand against the men in her life, she appears not to care what others think of her. 

“Reunited, will we draw up a detailed account of our faded bloom, of will we sow new seeds for new harvests?” 

Rama wonders what it will be like to see Aissatou again, after so many years. Having spent most of her long letter recounting the most difficult moments in their lives, she is cautious about doing so again in person. She tentatively proposes that she and Aissatou, free of the men who plagued them, might move forward in positive ways. 

“Life is an eternal compromise.”

This quote sums up Rama’s view of the world. She has, since she was a young girl, survived by compromising. She will not leave her husband, but she will forge a new role for herself. She will not disown her daughter for an unplanned pregnancy, but will make sure her younger children avoid that fate. Life is never black and white for Rama.

“Suddenly I became afraid of the flow of progress…Does it mean that one can’t have modernism without a lowering of moral standards?” 

Despite her flexibility and progressive notions about feminism, Rama is still uncomfortable with Senegal’s rapid modernization. Her daughters now smoke and wear pants, and one has even become pregnant out of wedlock. Rama is lenient and understanding, realizing that she can’t prevent change, but cannot wholeheartedly accept all these changes. She retains a sense of intrinsic, eternal morality that she worries is slipping from her children’s lives. 

“So many devastating wars! And yet man takes himself to be a superior being. In what way is his intelligence useful to him? His intelligence begets both good and ill, more often ill than good.” 

Here, Rama rails against war and men’s complicity in continued violence, despite their high levels of intelligence. Rama sees the world as complicated and nuanced. While others might see intelligence as intrinsically useful, she sees that intelligence can cause just as much harm as good. In this way, she quietly rejects absolutism and traditional ideas about what is right and good. In her small ways, Rama bucks convention and thinks for herself. 

“One is a mother to lighten the darkness. One is a mother to shield when lightning streaks the night, when thunder shakes the earth, when mud bogs one down. One is a mother in order to love without beginning or end.” 

Here, Rama describes what she sees as her most important role: as a good, ever-loving mother. Mothers are meant to shield and shelter their children and love unconditionally. Just as she places higher value on female friendships than she does on romantic relationships, so she places higher value on motherhood than on fatherhood. Though she never says so explicitly, Rama, despite the patriarchal society she lives in, values women far more than she does men. 

“I took my daughter in my arms. Painfully, I held her tightly, with a force multiplied tenfold by pagan revolt and primitive tenderness.”

Though everyone expected Rama to reject her unmarried, pregnant daughter (including the daughter herself), Rama accepts her child and continues to love her unconditionally. Rama is a devout woman, keeping to her ritual seclusion exactly and trusting in God. And yet, when presented with something her religion unequivocally considers sinful and wrong, she is unable to see it as such, calling her continued love “pagan.” In this moment, Rama sets doctrine and societal expectations aside. Her first duty is, as always, to her children.

“I accepted my subordinate role. The ripe fruit must drop away from the tree.”

In this moment, Rama lets go of Young Aissatou, her beloved daughter. Though she was devastated by her daughter’s unplanned pregnancy, she is comforted by the dedication and kindness of Aissatou’s boyfriend, and sees a new family beginning. Though it is difficult to watch her daughter move away, she recognizes that Aissatou is ready, and that this is a natural, and positive, progression.

“My heart rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows.” 

Rama’s feminism is anything but self-centered. She desires freedom and opportunity for all women, not just herself. Her empathy is not only reserved for her friends, but even for women who have caused her pain. She feels for Binetou and young Nabou.