A review by seeceeread
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ

It was the privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in history, one of domination, the other of independence.

Ramatoulaye writes to Aissatou, a friend and sister in struggle, as she eases out of a forty day mourning period for the husband who abandoned her and her children. She reminisces on their girlhood and shared love for a headmistress who ushered them into new ways of thinking. She reflects on Aissatou's divorce and subsequent move to the United States, denounces her own husband's second marriage to their daughter's best friend, and laments that she still loves and misses the man who left her. She explains why she turned away a man who has loved her since they were teens.  She's flabbergasted to learn that three of her children have taken her progressive cultural stance to mean they can smoke in the house, and shocked to discover that one of her daughters is pregnant before she has finished high school. Tomorrow, they will reunite.

The plot is a vehicle for Bâ to reflect on women's liberation. As Kenneth W. Harrow writes in the Introduction, 

Independence for the New African Woman came a full generation after independence of the African state.

20 years after seeking independence from the colonizing French, the novel's West African women are struggling to enjoy films at the cinema solo, to balance work and child-rearing, to truly partner in marriages with men who see them as more than receptacles of lust or hurdles in a social journey to fulfill duties. 

Bâ's sentences often conjure and transfix – we join in her breezy childhood under the mango trees, her fury at discovering her husband's clandestine second marriage, her aloofness towards a meddling neighbor. Absolute classic.