THE POLITICS OF GENDER IN MARIAMA BÂ'S SO LONG A LETTER

The feminist struggle and agitation for equality in society have always been a part of the literary representation of
gender roles. The present research paper aims to analyze the text and determine the novelist’s specific brand of
feminism. The research paper focuses on the novel So Long a Letter and attempts to establish distinctiveness of Bâ’s
feminist stance in it. However, there are existing claims among African feminist critics that Mariama Bâ portrays the
oppression of women by men through the prevalent paradigms of tradition, polygamy, patriarchy, and Islamic religion
in Senegal. This paper argues that while the protagonists' revolt against polygamy, religion, and tradition is real, it
posits that any claim of a collective feminist struggle in So Long a Letter is ambivalent. Their engagement with rivalry
and threats to marital fulfilment, an aspect which existing scholarship on the novel has often ignored, also undermines
the claim of a collective feminist struggle for change and progress. In the end, both women succeed through
universalism, formal education, and Westernization in attaining poise and contentment. The present study adopts an
eclectic framework that leans on the theory of deconstruction by revealing the characterization, themes and study of
the text. This article concludes that Bâ’ treatment of feminism in So Long a Letter is quite different as it is free from
biased portraiture of a character based on gender. This sort of treatment in the text shows Bâ to be more humanist
than feminist.