Betrayal and Heartbreak In Senegal

I picked up this book last fall in Laramie when I was knocking around town with Erika before our climbing adventures in Grand Junction and Moab. It appealed to me because it was only 89 pages long. I thought it would be a good book for the road, but I couldn't seem to concentrate well enough for it. Being lightweight helped it make the cut and the moves from SD, MI, FL, and MI again. Being sick in a motel room in Alabama allowed me the quiet I seemed to need to read it. I'm glad I did.

The book, So Long a Letter, by Mariama Ba, translated by Modupe Bode-Thomas, is written in epistolary style. It takes place in Senegal, I would guess in the late 1970's. Ramatoulaye, a recent widow, writes a very long letter to her lifelong friend, Aissatou.

From the first page:

If over the years, and passing through the realities of life, dreams die, I still keep intact my memories, the salt of remembrance.

I conjure you up. The past is reborn, along with its procession of emotions. I close my eyes. Ebb and tide of feeling: heat and dazzlement, the woodfires, the sharp green mango, bitten into in turns, a delicacy in our greedy mouths. I close my eyes. Ebb and tide of images drops of sweat beading your mother's ochre-coloured face as she emerges from the kitchen, the procession of young wet girls chattering on the way back from the springs.

We walked the same paths from adolesence to maturity, where the past begets the present.

My friend, my friend, my friend, I call on you three times.

Both women were educated, professionals married to men they loved. Both had their lives torn apart by polygamy. Their situations were not the same and their reactions differed.

Reviews of this book point out the highlighting of the inequality of women in Senegalese society and the mixing of european and traditional values. It does do this, but the real strength of the book is in the very human quality of the characters. They seem like real people with distinctive personalities, strengths and foibles. They are not cardboard cutouts used to make a point. In fact, I had sympathy for everyone, even the dweeb who abandoned his wife and 12 children to chase a young skirt, who happened to be his oldest daughter's best friend. Ok, I didn't have any sympathy for one particularly treacherous mother-in-law, and I did despise the mother that more or less sold her daughter off to the old guy, but I did have sympathy for her.

It was a good read and got me thinking about human relations in general and how life doesn't necessarily turn out how one expects, but how worth it it is.