So Long a Letter
Mariama Ba
A Senegalese widow writes her way through grief and betrayal.
Ba's short epistolary novel takes the form of Ramatoulaye's long letter to a friend after her husband's death, reckoning with polygamy, abandonment, and the constraints on Muslim Senegalese women. Spare and intimate, it gave Francophone African women's writing a foundational text and voiced a female interiority rarely centered in the male-dominated canon.
Its legacy. It won the inaugural Noma Award for publishing in Africa in 1980.
- Author
- Mariama Ba
- First published
- 1979
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- The West African Novel
More from The West African Novel
- Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
The novel that answered colonial fiction from the inside.
- Arrow of God — Chinua Achebe
A priest, a god, and the machinery of indirect rule.
- The Palm-Wine Drinkard — Amos Tutuola
A quest through the land of the dead, told in improvised English.
- Jagua Nana — Cyprian Ekwensi
Lagos nightlife through the eyes of an aging good-time woman.