Two key women’s novels

Today I will dwell on two female authors who have become dominant whenever people look for African writers who write about the complex conditions of the African woman in changing times. These two are Mariama Ba and Tsitsi Dangarembga.

Senegalese writer Mariama Ba’s novel called So Long a Letter is the most vicious attack on polygamy that I have ever read. It is written in the voice of a depressed Muslim woman, Ramatoulaye, who is a school teacher in Senegal. It is a series of letters addressed to her friend called Aissatou, who lives in America. Aissatou has long rebelled and left.

Ramatoulaye gradually and objectively reflects on her marriage to Modou, from beginning to end. She tries but she cannot fully understand what leads a man to lose interest in his wife of twenty five years and marry his daughter’s best friend, a young school girl called Binetou. Ramatoulaye cannot understand why men even think about taking a second wife. “Was it madness, weakness, irresistible love? What inner confusion led Modou Fall to marry Binetou?” Ramatoulaye pines.

She goes on: “And to think that I loved this man passionately, to think that I gave him thirty years of my life, to think that twelve times over, I carried his child….In loving someone else, he burned his past, both morally and materially…” The more she tries, the more Ramatoulaye fails to understand why men go for second wives.

But Ramatoulaye’s husband sends his male friends and relatives to alert her that he has taken a second wife. The reason for that awkward new marriage is flatly given, quoted around fate and destiny and there are no regrets: “Modou sends his thanks. He says it is fate that decides men and things: God intended him to have a second wife, there is nothing he can do about it. He praises you for the quarter of a century of marriage in which you gave him all the happiness a wife owes her husband. His family, especially myself, his elder brother, thank you…”

Ramatoulaye is wounded by what she thinks is deep betrayal, but she hides it from her guests. She does not even ask for the name of her co-wife. Then finally the grapevine indicates that it is Binetou, her daughter, Daba’s friend, who used to come to the house with Daba!

Roumatoulaye wonders if she must walk out of this marriage and humiliation and her thoughts are dreamy and gradual: “Leave? Start again at point zero, after living twenty-five years with one man, after having borne twelve children? Did I have enough energy to bear alone the weight of this responsibility, which was both moral and material?”

Eventually she is unable to leave a man who has humiliated her because, as she says, she has not known any woman who has been happy for leaving a man after a huge fallout. Ramatoulaye remains in limbo. She is unlike Aissatou, who moved out of a marriage when her husband married a second woman.

This novel is a psychological quest on the sins of African men, the changes they go through as they move from one point to the other in life. At some point, Ramatoulaye realises that it is very possible, and even normal that her husband’s love and passion for her had naturally died: “I no longer interested Modou, and I knew it. I was abandoned: a fluttering leaf that no hand dares to pick up, as my grandmother would have said. I faced up the situation bravely…” But the more she registers this, the more she comes to terms with who she is.

Around the time that Ramatoulaye marries Modou, her friend, Aissatou, marries Mawdo, a medical student and overall model citizen. The two were greatly in love. However, Mawdo is of noble birth, while Aissatou is merely the daughter of a goldsmith. Mawdo’s family — in particular his mother, Aunty Nabou — objected to the union.

In an effort to undermine the marriage, Aunty Nabou travels to her ancestral hometown and convinces her brother to relinquish one of his daughters — Aunty Nabou’s namesake — to her care.

Aunty Nabou proceeds to raise and preen young Nabou. Then, when the girl was of proper age, Aunty Nabou begs Mawdo to take young Nabou as his second wife. Mawdo, fearing that his mother would become distressed and fall ill if he declines, agrees to marry young Nabou.

Mawdo clearly accepts that his second marriage is not for love but he is not prepared to forgo it.
Mawdo assures Aissatou that he does not love young Nabou, but he also has children with her. Aissatou cannot accept this and divorces Mawdo. Assiatou focused on her education, received a degree in diplomacy, and moved to America to work in the Senegalese embassy.

Where Ramatoulaye hesitates and remains in limbo, Aissatou takes action and leaves the man who humiliates her. Ramatoulaye has a measure of conservatism as a strict Muslim. She remains in her situation when people around her, including her daughter Daba, think that she should revolt or take an action that shows disapproval of Modou’s action.
In both cases, one also realises that elderly women in the family are involved in fighting fellow women during their oppression. Mawdo’s mother rejects Aissatou because she is a mere blacksmith’s daughter.

Modou’s mother and Modou’s sisters reject Ramatoulaye too. They would prefer choosing a bride for Modou. Even Binetou’s mother encourages her to take over Ramatoulaye’s husband because she is in search of prestige and material things. There is no solidarity between the women.

But Ramatoulaye remains consistent in a rather baffling way. She refuses to fight Binetou over Modou. She refuses to go see recommended marabouts who give charms to women who want to win back their men. She says: “No I would not give in to the pressure. My mind and my faith rejected supernatural power…I looked reality in the face.” Even after the death of Modou, Ramatoulaye’s childhood lover, the rich politician Daouda Dieng, offers to marry her but she refuses.

Ramatoulaye’s argument is: “Esteem is not enough for marriage, whose snares I know from experience. And then the existence of your wife and children further complicates the situation. Abandoned yesterday because of a woman, I cannot lightly bring myself between you and your family.

You think the problem of polygamy is a simple one. Those who are involved in it know the constraints, the lies, the injustices that weigh down their conscience in return for ephemeral joys of change…”

The only point that moves Ramatoulaye is when she finds her own children engaged in acts of rebellion like smoking cigarettes and having sex. It is the acts of rebellion in others that give her a kind of thrill. She is solid and gradual, moving only after very careful consideration.

Nervous Conditions, a novel by Zimbabwean author, Tsitsi Dangarembga, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988 was the first book published by a black woman from Zimbabwe in English. Set over a period of about ten years, from the 1960s to the early 1970s, Nervous Conditions takes place in Zimbabwe before the country had attained independence from Britain and while it was still known as Southern Rhodesia or simply Rhodesia.

The novel centres around the experience of several female characters as they either challenge, or come to terms with, the colonial society and the traditional patriarchal structure of their society. The young narrator, Tambu, must show great determination as she overcomes all the obstacles to her progress in life. She also has to learn how to understand, largely through the difficult experiences of her cousin Nyasha, the negative effects that British colonialism has had on her society.

“Nervous conditions” is a statement from the radical and revolutionary Franz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. The original statement is that the condition of the native is a nervous. In that very critical book, Fanon explores the psychological behaviours of people who happen to have been once colonised. The systematic behaviour includes an inferiority complex in the native and the resultant tendency to accept wholesome the coloniser’s culture and world view at the expense of native culture.

In that regard, Nervous Conditions is about women’s troubled conditions in an African patriarchal setting that has itself been overtaken by colonial modernity. These women have to deal with colonial oppression and with the predicament of being women in a colonised modern African society. They carry a double burden. The key women in this novel occupy a variety of social positions and have different perspectives on how they should deal with forms of oppression in their lives.

Tambu’s mother, despite her material poverty and lack of western education, is very conversant and well educated about her role in the family and she has no opportunity to romanticise. For her, womanhood is “a heavy burden.”

She knows that womanhood brings with it the inevitable role of bearing children, thereby reducing one’s room for social maneuver. In addition, she knows that womanhood is made worse by “the poverty of blackness.” She defines womanhood within the basic framework of wife and mother. When both her children are taken from her to be empowered educationally, she views it as her disempowerment and also as a process of giving them new and strange values.

Although Amaiguru, is very educated, with a Master’s degree, she remains surbodinate to her husband, Babamukuru. She also continues to uphold traditional family values. She defines herself by her marriage and not her education.

She tells the other women that she is only a daughter-in-law and therefore a foreigner amongst the Sigaukes. She is aware of many things she could have achieved outside male authority. Her education, however, provides her with relative material freedom and cushions her from poverty, unlike Tambu’s mother. That Amaiguru once picked a fight with Babamukuru, escapes to her brother’s place and eventually coming back to Babamukuru’s oppression, suggests that she fails to live outside male authority.

Lucia seems to be wayward and living outside male authority. But a closer consideration shows that Lucia would actually be happier with a man and a family of her own. She perceives her being non-attached to a man as a misfortune. Much as she would quarrel with anyone, she is aware of being in the Sigauke territory and it is them who offer her space, sex and in the end, a job. She is only frank, clever and cunning but not free.

Nyasha is a child of two worlds. She is African by birth and English by association and the struggle between the two is embodied in her. That struggle cannot be won by either of the two. That struggle destroys Nyasha’s body as the story progresses.

Nyasha represents the failure by both worlds to strike a compromise. Her parents have made her English but will not allow her to practice full Englishness. In her psychological trauma, she goes to the heart of the matter as she points out that first, “They have done it to me.” Second: “They did it to them.” Third and final: “They have deprived you of you, him of him, ourselves of each other.”

Tambu, on the other hand, smoothly negotiates the changes from rural dirt and poverty to Babamukuru’s modernity, learning, hygiene and relative comfort. Her strength is that while she acknowledges that Babamukuru’s world is comfortable, she does not break away from her people in her rural home. She is going the Amaiguru route and her final entry into a white school is her final test of character.

Babamukuru is intriguing! He is humane in so far as he sticks to the traditional African communalism. He maintains his role of the eldest son and father figure. However, he insists that the source of authority is western education and he embraces it uncritically.

In the process his children, Nyasha and Chido, lose their native language and experiences. He educates them away from their identity. Babamukuru imposes a white wedding on his brother and that farce is lost to him. Babamukuru is some kind of colonial authority in the traditional family.

Mariama Ba and Tsitsi Dangarembga have brought fame to their respective countries through writing works that explore the challenges faced by black women in an African set up that is fast changing.

Memory Chirere