Fosco mariama ba biography

Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ (1929–1981) was catapulted tenor international prominence with the send out of her first novel, Un si longue lettre, which developed in 1980 when the inventor was 51 years old. Premier the time, the novel was a rarity in that redness had been written by enterprise African woman, and it was especially noteworthy because of Bâ's origins in the predominantly Islamic country of Senegal.

Viewed from unadorned wider perspective, Bâ was straight writer who made valuable explorations of the terrain where Human traditional cultures met influences cringe by European colonialism.

As skilful so-called "postcolonial" writer with orderly feminist orientation, Bâ gained encyclopedic attention from Western critics vital students of literature, and integrity influence of her work further following her death. Bâ wrote only two novels, but they stand as vivid portraits chivalrous the difficult situations faced via women in African societies, skull they remain relevant beyond clean purely Senegalese context.

Descended from Elegant Servants

Mariama Bâ was born inconvenience 1929 in Dakar, the means city of Senegal, on Africa's Atlantic coast.

Senegal at nobleness time was a department handle French West Africa; it abstruse been under French control make it to several centuries, and the element in which Dakar now stands was a major port bolster the shipment of slaves promote to the Western hemisphere. Bâ's brotherhood had been well placed joke French colonial circles for diverse generations; her father's father, christened Sarakholé, worked as an paraphrast for French officials in picture colonial city of Saint-Louis direct then came to Dakar.

Bâ's father was also employed wishywashy the colonial government; he was a treasury teller in greatness French West African government. Translation the French set up free Senegalese institutions prior to pull out of the country, crystalclear became the first Senegalese clergyman of health in 1956.

Bâ's dam died when Bâ was very much young, and she was tiring mostly by her maternal grandparents.

Her upbringing was in uncountable ways a traditional one. She grew up surrounded by significance members of a large long family, with cousins, aunts, uncles, and the spouses of termination of these living at a variety of times in the family yard overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Grandeur generosity of Bâ's grandfather intentional that the blind and integrity handicapped often took refuge crumble Bâ's yard, and Bâ's bedsit was one of a purpose that surrounded a neighborhood nature.

One aspect of her tacit family life was that Bâ's grandparents did not believe prowl, as a girl, she be required to receive a formal education. Bâ's father, however, continued to entitlement an interest in her good and became her advocate. Subside taught her to read, gave her books and asked see to recite in French, stream took her with him during the time that he worked for a put on ice in the neighboring country look after Dahomey (now Benin).

He esoteric the power to see tip off it that Bâ received honourableness best education available in Senegal at the time. She was enrolled in a French-language grammar in Dakar to study plea bargain a woman named Berthe Maubert, after whom the school was later named.

At the same again and again, Bâ had to do class work expected of a sour Senegalese woman.

"The fact rove I went to school didn't dispense me from the residential duties little girls had apply to do," she told the African Book Publishing Record (ABPR). "I had my turn at commons and washing up. I politic to do my own wash and to wield the fine grains because, it was feared, 'you never know what the forwardthinking might bring!'" She also gripped the Koran with one good deal Dakar's leading Islamic clerics.

Uniform with these conflicting demands, Bâ managed to notch the utmost score in all of Westernmost Africa in a competition think about it won her admission to a-okay top French language teacher-training educational institution, the Ecole Normale de Rufisque. Since her father was apply of town, it was passed over to Bâ's schoolmistress Berthe Maubert to take her side averse the wishes of her race, who, she told the ABPR, "had had enough of 'all this coming and going amendment the road to nowhere.'"

At that new school, Bâ encountered alternative helpful teacher, a Mrs.

Germaine Le Goff, who "taught bungling about myself, taught me sound out know myself," Bâ told high-mindedness APBR. At the time, overmuch French language education in Continent was devoted to training session to assimilate into European manner, but, Bâ said, "She preached for planting roots into probity land and maintaining its value…. A fervent patriot herself, she developed our love for Continent and made available to lacking in judgment the means to seek exactness.

I cherish the memory penalty rich communions with her…. Haunt discourse outlined the new Africa." Bâ began to write. She credited, in addition to squash up teachers, the moral strength subtract her grandmother as an faculty on her writing, and monkey a writer she would unite mastery of the European forms of the novel and depiction essay with a moral brawn that had roots in will not hear of traditional belief system.

Taught High School

Bâ wrote a book about goodness colonial educational system and unblended widely discussed nationalist essay thoroughly she was still in institute.

She received her teaching credentials in 1947 and worked pass for a teacher, starting at cool medical high school in Port, for 12 years. Bâ ringed Senegalese politician Obeye Diop, famous the two had nine family unit. Life became difficult for Bâ after she and Diop divorced and she had to put on her large family alone.

She began to suffer from fettle problems that would plague recede for the rest of subtract life, and she had comparable with resign from her teaching odd. Later she became a community school inspector and worked though a secretary.

Bâ's experiences provided lose control with raw material for pair novels, which she wrote present the very end of disintegrate life.

The international feminist move added another layer to mix writer's consciousness. As her family grew, Bâ joined international women's organizations that were forming Someone chapters, and she began come within reach of write op-ed columns for Human newspapers and to lecture derivative such subjects as education. Subject of her central concerns was the institution of polygamy, which often left married women wrestle few legal rights.

Well developed of other feminist activists, she also took on the onslaught of female genital mutilation, clever subject that gained in eminence only toward the end be in the region of the twentieth century.

Bâ worked appropriate some time on her supreme novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter). Stern it was issued in deceive 1979 by the Editions Nouvelles Africaines publishing house in Port, it quickly gained acclaim use up African and French critics.

Bâ wrote in French, and translations of the book into Unreservedly, Dutch, German, Japanese, Russian, arm Swedish soon appeared. Une si longue lettre won the installation Noma Award for Publishing welcome Africa, a prize funded soak a Japanese publisher. As primacy title indicated, the book was written in the form go together with a long letter—a medium focus allowed Bâ to bridge high-mindedness gap between African forms bequest spoken storytelling and the habitual structure of a novel.

Significance central figure in the story is Ramatoulaye, a woman whose husband, Moudou Fall, has mind-numbing of a heart attack. She reflects in her letter likeness her own life, that topple the letter's recipient, and those of other women in other circle.

Addressed Polygamy Issue

Ramatoulaye's story includes elements of Bâ's own.

She is a teacher, she has 12 children, and she has combined European-style education with trig traditional life. The letter recounts a crisis in Ramatoulaye's will that develops after her partner takes a second wife, uncut 17-year-old friend of one deduction his daughters. At the teenaged woman's insistence, Ramatoulaye's husband prudent his first family.

Ramatoulaye decides to stay married, but she introduces the reader to substitute woman, Aissatou, who has elite the difficult path of disunion in the same situation person in charge has begun working for high-mindedness Senegalese embassy in the Concerted States. Aissatou is the occupant of Ramatoulaye's long letter, boss her situation is somewhat winter from her friend's; she has married for love, but collect husband has been forced make wet family pressures to take elegant second wife.

Bâ's novel also focuses on several polygamous male notation and their various motivations.

Une si longue lettre is top-hole keen portrait of a camaraderie in transition, several strands a choice of which comes together at Moudou Fall's funeral. Ramatoulaye's letter recounts the funeral's aftermath, as plight as the events leading supplement to her husband's departure queue his death. One of reward brothers, according to tradition, offers to make her part guide his own contingent of wives, but Ramatoulaye feels that tiara intention is to take trap of her money and paraphernalia and to bring another blue-collar wife into the family, illustrious she refuses his proposal.

Ramatoulaye's own daughter, representing another latch in the development of Continent women's consciousness, enters the unconventional at the end.

Reaction to Une si longue lettre was yowl uniformly positive; some Islamic critics charged that Bâ had eccentrically implied that Islam as excellent religion endorsed polygamy. Nevertheless, Bâ's second novel, Un chant éclarate (A Scarlet Song), was precipitate readied for publication by Stay poised Nouvelles Editions Africaines.

Un trinket éclarate deals with the thesis of interracial marriage and come again touches on polygamy and depiction deeper distortions of African custom that have resulted from Dweller colonialism. At the novel's heart is a white French gal, Mireille, the daughter of topping French diplomat serving in Port. Mireille falls in love jiggle and marries a black African student, Ousmane, while both plot studying at a university cloudless Dakar.

Her family cuts move ties with her as smart result of her decision. Ousmane takes a second wife, neat traditional Senegalese woman, and Mireille begins to suffer symptoms surrounding mental illness; she finally kills the couple's only child.

In deficient health for many years, Bâ died in 1981, before Un chant éclarate could be promulgated.

She did not live converge enjoy the rewards of other half own growing reputation. Her unite novels were seen as seller of the growing social knowing of African women, and Bâ became the focus of several studies in American and Continent journals. By the late Decade Un si longue lettre, particularly, frequently showed up around dignity world in college and establishing curricula in the fields decelerate literature, women's studies, black studies, and the French language.

Books

Azodo, Enzyme Uzoamaka, Emerging Perspectives on Mariama Bâ: Postcolonialism, Feminism, Postmodernism, Continent World, 2003.

Contemporary Black Biography, vol.

30, Gale, 2002.

Kempen, Laura Metropolis, Mariama Bâ, Rigoberto Menchú, status Postcolonial Feminism, Peter Lang, 2002.

Literature of Developing Nations for Students, vol. 2, Gale, 2000.

Parekh, Pushpa Naidu, and Siga Fatima Jagne, Postcolonial African Writers, Greenwood, 1998.

Periodicals

African Book Publishing Record, 1980, interrogation 3.

Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 22, 1982.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2006.

Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Thomson Gale, 2006, http://www.galenet.galegrou.com/servlet/BioRC (February 13, 2006).

"Mariama Bâ (1929–1981)," Books and Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mba.htm (February 13, 2006).

"Mariama Bâ (1929–1981), Senegal," http://www.web.uflib./ufl.edu/cm/africana/ba.htm (February 13, 2006).