Mariama Bâ and Djaïli Amadou Amal: So long a letter of (im)patient women

Abstract

The paper brings into a fruitful dialogue the classic epistolary novel So Long a Letter (1980) by Mariama Bâ and Les Impatientes (2020) by Djaïli Amadou Amal. It is structured around the following four points highlighting the synergy between the two novels despite the four decades time span separating them: 1. Cultural philosophical lexicon (pulaaku words addressing the wounds of polygamy) derived from Les Impatientes 2. Literary itinerary. 3. Narrative perspective (voices and routes of female narrators), and 4. Novels’s telling style. The essay lays an emphasis on this novel because there is a countless number of critical works on So Long a Letter whereas only a few interviews in media have so far paid attention to Djaïli Amadou’s novel. Therefore, this contribution uses a philosophy/theory ‘munyal’ suggested by the text itself to analyse the unchanging fate of women in two Muslim contexts, which boils down to building a corpus of literary criticism on creative works by one of the currently most significant female literary voices in Cameroon.