Volume I Special Issue I September 2021

Name of Author : A. Ashmi

Title of the paper : Gender Inequality and Polygamy: The Images of Women in African Literature with Specific Reference to Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter

Abstract: Mariama Ba‟s So Long a Letter presents issues of feminism, such as selfhood, racial and economic oppression, empowerment and the tragedy of sexual politics. The novel is one of the world‟s most studied feminist literary works for portraying about the role played by marriage traditions and religion in women‟s subjugation. Further, it also explores how Senegalese women are oppressed in Islamic society and how some women manage to empower themselves. This paper proposes that, women should stand united to overcome the obstacles that they all confront. Mariama Ba in So Long a Letter projects the Islamic-influenced patriarchal Senegalese society where families place a lot of pressures upon young people in order to maintain traditional taboos, norms and rights in relation to marriage. This paper deals with the analysis of So Long a Letter, a novella by Mariama Ba, a Senegalese woman with a view to bringing out the issue of polygamy and gender inequality as thematically presented in the work. It also explores the role of woman, male domination, divorce, motherhood and widowhood. The article also consists of an investigation of repressive traditional norms and values such as polygamy, the point to which male children are valued, while female children are maligned.

Keywords : Oppression, education, polygamy, widowhood, gender stereotypes.

DOI :

Page Number : 143-145