A Year of Feminist Classics also had Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter as a January read as well as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

So Long a Letter is a letter from Ramatoulaye to her expatriate best friend Aissatou, the wife of her husband’s best friend. Both are first wives of men who suddenly took second wives. In the cases of the second marriages, neither of the first wives were consulted. Aissatou divorces her husband, learns a skill, and moves overseas to work in the country’s American embassy. Ramatoulaye remains married but lives separately and raises the couple’s 12 children alone. The start of the letter informs Aissatou that Ramatoulaye’s husband Modou Fall is dead. The rest of the letter relates her reaction to her widowhood and rehashes the history of her marriage to explain how she feels now.

The introduction to the book claims it to be one of the first books that presents African women not as victims. Perhaps that suggestion influenced how I viewed the book, as the practicality of Ramatoulaye shows through, as well as her resilience in the face of adversity. You can almost hear the Gloria Gaynor song fading in during the soundtrack to the movie version.

The two main women come across as flawed but sincere women who have strength and integrity. Both are educated. One second wife is portrayed as a conniving gold-digger, the other as a clueless dupe. Both of the husbands are weak, not able to face down their first wives or families. Not all men get that treatment. One of Ramatoulaye’s suitors is very dashing, intelligent, and thoughtful of Ramatoulaye’s needs without neglecting his own. I’m not sure how I feel about these portrayals. It feels just a tad manipulative, but for all I know, that’s exactly how most men who take second wives in Senegal act.

Ramatoulaye is interested in Senegal’s politics. She reminds her suitor, a member of parliament, that only 4 of the deputies are women, less than one per province. But it’s also clear that with the division of labor, women can’t participate very well. Ramatoulaye has 12 children under her care. Even before her husband abandoned her, she had little help from him in the day to day care of them. It’s not coincidence that women started gaining political power in the U.S. when they started having access to birth control (as ineffective as it was around the turn of the century) and could start reducing their family sizes. Which is one of the reasons why I think some the U.S. most effective aid is that which goes toward family planning.

One thing to note is that the polygamy portrayed here is not the polygamy most in the U.S. are familiar with, that of the fundamentalist Mormons. Although the women are young, they are not coerced or kept powerless. The harms caused are different than the ones we’re used to seeing. Abandonment and an inability to support families is what comes up in the book. Abuse is the problem we see in the states.

No links again this time. Check A Year of Feminist Classics for roundup posts and more discussion.

Title: So Long a Letter (originally Une si longue lettre)
Author: Mariama Bâ
Cover creator: Tony Richardson (designer) / John Montgomer (art)
Series: African Writers Series
Imprint / publisher: Heinemann / Pearson
Format: Paperback
Length: 96 p.
Publication date: September 2008 (originally 1979)
ISBN-13: 978-0-435913-52-6

I really liked Nnedi Okorafor’s Zahrah the Windseeker, and seeing Nnedi Okorafor on a couple of panels at Wiscon made me like her even more. I’d be hard-pressed to think of someone more positive than her. So I picked up The Shadow Speaker at the dealer room.

The Shadow Speaker has a lot in common with Zahrah the Windseeker: a setting that appears in both books, a young female protagonist learning her new powers, male supporting cast, and similarly creative fantastic creatures. All of that was awesome! What wasn’t awesome was the disjointed hero quest plot. Zahrah had to save her friend. Ejii has to save five extra-dimensional worlds from war. Along the way she encounters seemingly random obstacles that seem to be there only to introduce Ejii to her traveling companions. I was disappointed overall.

Ejimofor Ejii Ugabe is a shadow speaker living in magical Kwàmfà in West Africa in 2070. The Great Change, a nuclear war semi-aborted by interfering technology released by a peace group, released magic as a more powerful force than technology. Some people fear meta-humans such as flying wind-seekers and extra-sensory shadow speakers because of superstition and some view them as normal.

The semi-mythical Jaa has ruled Kwàmfà for a few years. She’d established the town and then gone away. During Jaa’s time away, Ejii’s father ruled the village in manner similar to current day Islamic countries, hard and discriminating, before Jaa returned and summarily executed Ejii’s father. Time has passed though, and Jaa heads to a great peace conference in Ginen across the desert and through a dimensional portal. Ejii, no lover of her own father, follows and hopes to join Jaa because the shadows have told her she must go to prevent the war.

The strength of the book is the creativity Okorafor used to create creatures and situations. She included giant sentient sandstorms, talking camels, ostrich-like birds that will carry women but not men, and more.

Ejii is a solid main character, particularly for a girl. She isn’t a cookie cutter stereotype that seems to plague a lot of young adult female characters. She’s smart but not super-brainy. Mostly respectful when she deals with others. Sometimes resourceful, but able to let others such as her fellow school-age shadow speakers help her. In short, I like her. Her traveling companion Dikéogu treats her as an equal or sometimes as his better. He’s charmingly stubborn.

Stubbornness seems to be a prominent characteristic for every character though. In addition, the adults all seem to have a streak of knee-jerk in them that felt extremely false to me. I might not have noticed if it weren’t combined with the mundane plotting.

And that’s the Achilles heel for the book, the plotting. As Ejii journeys, she periodically encounters obstacles, resolves them, and moves on. Episodic is the mold for a hero quest, of course. In this case, each obstacle, whether it’s a group of man-eating cats, a sandstorm, a magician, or a hotel desk clerk, follows a very predictable path and then goes away and Ejii continues her journey. They don’t build on each other, excepting the lesson Ejii learns from each builds on previous lessons. But the events themselves usually just leave Ejii back on her journey having learned her lesson but having advanced no further in her actual quest.

I think lots of people, possibly including the young adults at which the book is targeted, won’t have that reaction to the plot because they will be enjoying the scenery. So I hesitate to unrecommend it. For me though, it was very middle of the road.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Attention Rebellious Jezebels
• Morsie Reads
• Muslimah Media Watch
• Becky’s Book Reviews
• SherMeree’s Musings
• Andy Wolverton

Title: The Shadow Speaker
Author: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Cover creator: Elizabeth H. Clark (designer) / Luca Trovato and Colin Samuels (photographers)
Imprint / publisher: Jump at the Sun / Disney Hyperion
Format: Paperback
Length: 336 p.
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-142310036-2
Subject: Adventure and adventurers — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Adventure and adventurers — Fiction
Subject: Fantasy
Subject: Sahara — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Africa — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Sahara — Fiction
Subject: Africa — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.O4157 Sh 2007