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Mirasse, Xas, and Aha
In So Long a Letter, Ramatoulaye’s reflection on her life takes place during her tenge. This is the period when a woman is sequestered to mourn the death of her husband. It is a period of solitude, prayer, and reflection. The interesting thing, however, is that men do not have to go through this same process when they lose their wives. She uses the time of reflection that is afforded her to contemplate how the choices she has made in the past have impacted her life. Ramatoulaye decides to evaluate the man she had married with ‘‘the ear’’ of her friend Aissatou. She justifies sharing the most intimate details of her life with Aissatou by stating: ‘‘The mirasse commanded by the Koran requires that a dead person be stripped of his most intimate secrets; thus is exposed to others what was carefully concealed’’ (9). In keeping with the requirements of the mirasse, Ramatoulaye goes on to reveal the details of Modou’s life she never thought of revealing.
The fact that Modou Fall dies of a heart attack is a shock to Ramatoulaye. ‘‘Modou is dead. How am I to tell you? One does not fix appointments with fate. Fate grasps whom it wants, when it wants’’ (2). This strong belief in fate, tied to her Islamic religion and the Wolof worldview, ‘‘lu yalla dogol, Diam mun si dara’’ (what god decides, man can do nothing about), is what pulls her through the difficult time.
Modou’s death is a rapid death for someone who had accumulated so much aha (sin) in his life. It is widely believed in Wolof society that a major sin, such as the abandonment of one’s wife and children, deserves a fate no less than an ‘‘ugly’’ death—Modou Fall deserved this kind of death. Thus, because God ‘‘never sleeps,’’ Modou is ‘‘embarrassed’’ in death.
Modou Fall had lost his sense of shame and thought that money could right all his mistakes. It is discovered, according to Ramatoulaye, that he died ‘‘with- out a penny saved. Acknowledgement of debts? A pile of them: cloth and gold traders, home-delivery grocers and butchers, car-purchase installments’’ (9). At the time of his death, Modou had abandoned Ramatoulaye, his first wife, and their children for the younger Binetou, a friend of his oldest daughter. This type of abandonment (a form of betrayal known as ur) is frowned upon by the society, but Modou sees nothing wrong with his actions. He is going through a midlife crisis and needs a young woman to make him feel young again. Modou Fall’s belief in having ‘‘fresh blood’’ with a young wife is what leads him to Binetou. In the prime of his life, when he is supposed to dedicate his whole life to Allah, it is more important for him to have a young woman than to have any orderly life he and Ramatoulaye may have had.
This position within which Modou is located is contradictory. Mariama Ba makes it clear that the men in her fiction do not always follow the precepts of society (religious and traditional). On one hand, Modou knows and understands that tradition frowns upon abandonment; yet tradition sanctions more than one wife, and usually it is understood that the wife one takes in middle age is a young virgin. How does he reconcile these tensions in his life without commit- ting sacrilege against tradition? Ba offers some clarification regarding what Is- lam has to say about the taking of more than one wife: ‘‘A man must be like an evenly balanced scale. He must weight out in equal measures his compliments and his reproaches. He must give equally of himself. He must study his gestures and behavior and apportion everything fairly’’ (Scarlet Song, 7). With a pre- scription such as this one, no man is qualified to have more than one wife, because what kind of man will be able to be so fair minded as not to go against the teachings of Islam?
Modou Fall evidently does not have the presence of mind or the tenacity needed to have more than one wife, as ‘‘in loving someone else, he burned his path both morally and materially. He dared to commit such an act of disavowal’’ (So Long a Letter, 12). Modou Fall, Mbye Cham argues at this point, has a ‘‘selective adherence to tradition’’ (Cham, 1980, 90). This selectivity is based upon the idea of privilege, but never taking the responsibilities that come with one’s privilege. This puts Modou Fall in a space where he cannot transform his possibilities from the positions he inhabits. Transforming tensions that result from his multiple positionings is something he is incapable of.
As a result of this inability to transform his situation, Ramatoulaye now has the right to call him out on his indecencies and blatant disregard for tradition where his first family is concerned. Thus the use of the xas. It should be pointed out here that the concepts xas, mirasse, and aha are used concurrently in the text. The occasion Ramatoulaye uses to lash out indirectly at Modou is when Tamsir, Modou’s elder brother, proposes marriage to her. She decides that her voice, which was silenced during thirty years of marriage, will be heard. She names what she sees as Tamsir’s lack of regard for her in a violent sarcastic xas.
Ramatoulaye’s torrential tirade is a result of what she considers an affront to her sense of agency. She says that she commits this act of verbal violence to get back at Tamsir for announcing Modou’s marriage to her years earlier. But it is more than a revenge. It is an act of courage for Ramatoulaye to speak up about her feelings. Tamsir bears the brunt of her anger that she has bottled up over the years. Tamsir becomes the whipping boy for Modou Fall, whom she did not have the chance to xas before his death. All the anger Ramatoulaye had kept under wraps, due to Modou’s treatment of her and her children, surfaces in her somewhat misdirected anger at Tamsir.
What Mariama Ba does in this xas episode is to call to the attention of her readers that silence does not always mean a lack of agency. When the occasion presents itself, women are as capable as men in defining their needs and wants. She is also levelling a critique of the use of women as property under the guise of custom. In this process of wife inheritance, women are exchanged and dis- carded as goods rather than as human beings with rights. A custom thought of to keep children within a family, wife inheritance is widely abused nowadays. Customs, Ba seems to be saying, have their place in regulating society, but it is when people want to practice customs without all the responsibilities that come with them that they become problematic.
Tamsir wants to practice the custom of wife inheritance but cannot even afford to feed his own wives and numerous children. For a custom designed to finan- cially and emotionally help a widowed woman, his request is unreasonable. His lack of resources and any kind of emotion for Ramatoulaye makes him unsuit- able for the task at hand. He only sees Ramatoulaye as a ‘‘milch cow’’ to exploit. The exposure of Tamsir’s motives in public (he is accompanied by the Imam and Mawdo), coupled with the disclosure of Modou’s indiscretions to Aissatou, locates the xas within the concept of the mirasse, as these two terms work hand in hand to situate the aha.
Women and Caste
It is necessary to further explicate Ba’s fictional world by examining the caste system and women’s relationship to it. What is caste and how does it operate in Ba’s fictional world? The caste system in the Senegambia area is as old as the histories of the people who inhabit the area. It needs to be suggested at this point that not all ethnic groups in the area have caste systems. The four major groups with the most sophisticated caste systems are the Peulh, the Toucouleur, the Wolof, and the Mandinka. What concerns us as we read Ba are the Wolof and the Peulh systems, which are similar in a great many ways. The caste system in Senegambia is occupationally based and not always economic. I will try to briefly explain a complicated system.
The guers are the highest caste in the caste system. This caste comprises the descendants of nobles and farmers. In the past, supposedly, this group ruled the various kingdoms in the region before the advent of colonialism.
The guewals are the second-highest caste in this man-constructed hierarchy. This group is formed by the praise singers, the poets, the guardians of history and culture.
The tegg caste is made of highly skilled members who work with metals. They work with the elements of water and fire, a skill that requires mathematical abilities, scientific know-how, and creativity.
The woodeh caste, also highly skilled, works with leather and wood. Its mem- bers are mostly the artists of the society. Of course, this situation is being chal- lenged as gifted artists from all castes practice their craft.
In Ba’s fiction the issue of caste is well woven into her texts. Her stance is one of resistance. She creates the possibility of a relationship between two women from two different castes. In Aissatou and Ramatoulaye, a tegg and a guer come together in a friendship based on equality and mutual respect.
Evidently, these two women have transcended the boundaries drawn by caste. Tante Nabou, Mawdo’s mother and Aissatou’s mother-in-law, cannot transcend the parameters set up by her society. To her it is each to his or her own. Mawdo’s marriage to Aissatou is perceived by her as an affront to her noble birth. For people like Tante Nabou, the past cannot be separated from the present or the future. Her worldview (the kind Ba critiques) rests on the belief in ‘‘an- cient properties.’’ Tante Nabou believes that as one who is descended from a long line of notable nobles, she is superior to the members of the lower castes. Her belief in perpetuating the traditional way of life is informed by her annals of history that teach her that there should be no intermarriage between the castes. Caught between tradition and modernity, she opts for the glorious days of the past in which people respected the old ways and lived faithfully by them. For someone of her standing, female solidarity has no meaning, because she cannot transcend caste to transform her possibilities.
Mariama Ba, in her presentation of a woman like Tante Nabou, shows the problem involved in locating a female solidarity when caste, age, and ‘‘blood- lines’’ become more important than being female. Aissatou’s crime, as Ba pres- ents it, is marrying the man she loves despite the fact that he belongs to a ‘‘superior’’ caste. Tante Nabou, Mawdo Ba’s mother and Aissatou’s mother-in- law, totally disapproved of this kind of rah (mixing). She does not want grand- children who will be located in a position where they will suffer from the violence of xas because of the ‘‘inferior’’ blood inherited from their mother. Therefore, from the day Mawdo Ba married Aissatou, Tante Nabou lived ex- clusively to get Aissatou out of the household.
Thus Tante Nabou embarks on a journey of renewal of her roots that will purge her family of Aissatou. She travels to Diakhao, the place of Bour Sine, her revered ancestor. In Diakhao, she reexamines her location vis-a`-vis her son and her daughter-in-law, Aissatou. She becomes more determined than ever, after her ritualistic search for selves, to get ‘‘rid’’ of Aissatou. She swears that Aissatou’s existence ‘‘would never tarnish her noble descent’’ (28). Her offer- ings to her ‘‘Tours are a sign of her determination to live the ‘‘old way.’’ Ba comments on Tante Nabou’s role as an upholder of the ‘‘canons of tradition’’ (Cham). Aunt Nabou ‘‘lived in the past, unaware of a changing world. She clung to old beliefs. Being strongly attached to her privileged origins, she firmly believed that blood carries its virtues, and, nodding her head, she would repeat that humble birth would always show in a person’s bearing’’ (26). Tante Na- bou’s attitudes, it is important to note, do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they are the sum total of a way of positioning and naming people in her society. Her language reflects caste as conceptualized within the language of division and difference (in a negative way). To Tante Nabou, ‘‘those people’’ are not worthy of her company or family because they have a specific place and function in society. You call on them when you need their services; otherwise, each to his or her own when it comes to marriage.
The question raised by this kind of presentation is, does Ba successfully cri- tique women’s relations based upon caste thoroughly, or does she contribute to the perpetuation in placing the lower-caste women in particular positions? Ba, it can be argued, carefully negotiates the spaces inhabited by the different women in her fictional world. She does present women with tensions in their lives contingent on their locations, locations replete with tensions. These ten- sions are exacerbated further by generational gaps and caste pretensions, to the point where the women always seem to be in contention and opposition. These oppositions and tensions are not always negative, as Ba seems to leave space for transformation, as in the relationship with Ramatoulaye and Farmata. Ba sees transformations of culture and traditions as a solution to the problem of the alleviation of the situation of the woman in Senegalese society in particular and Africa in general.
At the same time, this does not absolve her from reinscribing caste in ways that can be read as acquiescence. For instance, even though Ramatoulaye tries not to be caught in the game of castes, she does turn to Farmata for help in sending a letter to Daouda Dieng. Farmata, she tells the reader, ‘‘was happy, having dreamed of this role right from our youth’’ (67). Farmata is supposedly happy to finally have the chance to act out the role of her subordination in society. The use of caste, though, seems to rest on Ba’s characters, who are rooted in their belief, in tradition. Yaye Khady, Tante Nabou, and Lady Mother- in-Law represent the last bastion of this tradition.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
When one looks at the state of the criticism on Mariama Ba, there seem to be distinctions within the criticism. There is clearly an international interest in Ba, probably more than in her other female compatriot writers. As a result, there is a distinctly Francophone body of criticism that places her in a Francophone literary tradition. The Europeans and the Americans identify her as a represen- tative of African women, especially in the context of feminism. African- American critics, it should be added, claim her within the context of black women’s writings. There is also a small but distinctly Senegambian form of criticism within this body of criticism. As opposed to ‘‘the other’’ areas of criticism, this area seems to offer an insider’s view.
The pioneering contributions to the body of criticism on Ba started from her home country of Senegal. Journalists and academics alike wrote mostly short pieces and interviews that dealt with her life and achievement. Among these people were Annette MbayeD’Enerville, Aminata Ka Maı¨ga, and Alioune Toure Dia, to name a few. One of the major critical pieces on Ba换 that provided much insight into her work in the context of her society came from Mbye Cham. The article, titled ‘‘The Female Condition in Africa: A Literary Exploration by Mar- iama Ba换,’’ brought into focus issues that moved away from the mostly biograph- ical pieces of the time, contextualizing for readers Ba换’s concerns. Aminata Maı¨ge Ka and Sada Niang, in the same tradition, provide insight into the culture that Ba wrote about. In their works on Ba these two authors look at Wolof concepts and how Ba worked them into her fiction. How is this different from the Western readings of Ba?
There are diverse Western and Eastern readings of Ba that show insights from cultural perspectives different from those of Ba. These readings bring richness to her works but at the same time reiterate stereotypical themes of the supposed concerns of ‘‘African feminist writers.’’ These works are too numerous to dis- cuss here, but will make interesting reading.
Ba’s intellectual project leaves the baton to the young women to change the status quo. Her hopes are that through the younger generation, the archaic and negative attachment to tradition will make way for a different way of construct- ing knowledge within tradition, but in a positive manner. She firmly believed that this transformation can and will take place within Senegalese society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Mariama Ba
Un chant e´carlate. Nouvelles ´Editions Africaines, 1981. Translated into English by Do-
rothy Blair as Scarlet Song. Essex: Longman, 1986.
Une si longue lettre. Dakar: Nouvelles ´Editions Africaines, 1980. Translated into English
by Modupe Thomas as So Long a Letter. London: Heinemann, 1981.
‘‘La fonction politique deslitte´ratures africainese´crites. ’’ ´Ecriture Franc¸aise 5.3 (1981):
Studies of Mariama Ba
Abubakr, Rashidah Ismaili. ‘‘The Emergence of Mariama Ba换.’’ Essays on African Writ- ing, A Re-evaluation. Oxford: Heinemann, 1993. 24–37.
Arnhold, Barbara. ‘‘The Long Road to Emancipation,’’ (interview). Afrika, 1980.
Borgomano, Madeleine. Voix et visages de femmes, dans les livres e´critspar des femmes en Afrique francophone. Abidjan, CEDA: Corlet, 1989.
Cham, Mbye. ‘‘Contemporary Society and the Female Imagination: A Study of the Nov- els of Mariama Ba换.’’ African Literature Today 15 (1987): 89–101.
——— . ‘‘The Female Condition in Africa: A Literary Exploration by Mariama Ba换. ’’ Current Bibliography on African Affairs 17.1 (1984–85): 29–52.
——— . ‘‘Islam in S ne´ galese Literature and Film.’’ Faces of Islam in African Literature. Ed. Kenneth Harrow. London: James Currey, 1991. 163–186.
Champagne, John, ‘‘ ‘A Feminist Just Like Us?’ Teaching Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter. ’’ College English 58.1 (1996): 22–42.
D’Almeida, Irene Assiba. ‘‘The Concept of Choice In Mariama Ba’s Fiction.’’ Ngam- bika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1986.
Diarra, Fatoumatta-Agnes, and Pierre Fougeyrollas. Two Studies on Ethnic Group Re- lations in Africa: Senegal, the United Republic of Tanzania. Paris: UNESCO, 1974.
Diop, Abdoulaye. La socit wolof: Tradition et changement: Les syste`mes d’ine´galite´ et de domination. Dakar: Karthala, 1981.
Diop, Papa Samba. Die frankophone Literatur des Senegal und ihre Beziehungen zu den afrikanischen Sprachen und Kulturen—am Beispiel des Wolof. Translated by Janos Riesz. Munich: Edition Text and Kritik, 1994. 190–212.
Edson, Laurie. ‘‘Mariama Ba and the Politics of the Family.’’ Studies in Twentieth Cen- tury Literature 17.1 (1993): 13–25.
Fandio, Pierre. ‘‘Mariama Ba et Angele Rawiri: Une Autre Verite de la Femme.’’ Dal- housie French Studies 30 (1995): 171–178.
Fetzer, Glenn W. ‘‘Women’s Search for Voice and the Problem of Knowing in the Novels of Mariama Ba.’’ College Language Association Journal 35.1 (1991): 31–41.
Flewellen, Elinor C. ‘‘Assertiveness vs. Submissiveness in Selected Works by African Women Writers.’’ Ba Shiru
© SIGA FATIMA JAGNE
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