Mariama Ba's novella is actually a long letter written by a Senegalese
schoolteacher Ramatoulaye to her friend Aissatou who share one common
tragic experience but have chosen to react differently. The book shows how
two people in the same situation can choose to react in differently, thus
altering their lives and influencing the impact of the tragedy. Ramatoulaye
is a widow with twelve children to take care of but it is not the death of
her husband that bothers her as much as the fact that during his life, he
chose to take a second wife without giving any thought to the feelings of
his first wife and their 12 children. Ramatoulaye fails to come to terms
with the reality as she cannot comprehend why her husband would want a
second wife when she had been such a dutiful and obedient wife all along:
"I tolerated his sisters, who too often would desert their own homes to
encumber my own.... I tolerated their spitting, the phlegm expertly
secreted under my carpets. His mother would stop by ... just to show off
... her supremacy in this beautiful house in which she did not live.."
What I liked the most about the book was its completely unique, original
and fresh perspective on issues that we have become so hackneyed that we
have somehow lost a desire to genuinely discuss them. Female liberation is
one such issue. In the west, we believe that every woman wants liberation
and close the discussion at that. We never realize that there is still a
large section of female population that is not comfortable with the western
idea of female liberation. We cannot say that it is the culture that has
turned some women against the idea of liberation because we notice that two
women brought up in the same culture with similar traditional beliefs would
react differently to this concept. In the novel, Ramatoulaye is the woman
who is happier in the role of a wife and while she finds liberation a good
...