So Long a Letter | Enclosure/Disclosure in Mariama Ba's Une Si Longue Lettre
In the following essay, Mildred Mortimer studies the Senegalese woman writer Mariama Ba's novel Une si Longue Lettre and attempts to resolve whether Ba reinforces the idea that women social reformers are either sacrificed or remade by the patriarchal society or whether she expresses them as strengthening the female bond.
Depicting the Dakar-Niger Railway strike of 1947 in his novel Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, Ousmane Sembène gives several female protagonists revolutionary scripts. When Penda delivers a fiery speech proposing that the women of Thiés march on Dakar, she is responding to a community crisis, the railway workers strike, by moving women into public space. Both her speech and the march challenge societal norms: ‘‘De mémoire d'homme c'était la premiére fois qu'une femme avait pris la parole en public á Thiés.’’ Although Sembène projects the women into the political arena,...
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