So Long a Letter
Ramatoulaye, newly widowed in Dakar, sits out the four months and ten days of mourning and writes to her oldest friend, now working in America, an account of thirty years: the teacher-training school that made them the first salaried women of their generation, her husband's second marriage to their daughter's teenage schoolfriend, the inventory his relatives take of the household before the body is cold. The friend met the same situation with divorce and departure, and the letter sets the two answers side by side without ruling on which was courage. The first novel by a Senegalese woman to travel widely in translation, and the text through which francophone African feminism entered the world curriculum.
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