Ousmane tells his mother that the photograph of Mireille in his room is that of a film star but when Mireille’s father discovers a photograph of Ousmane in his daughter’s possession, inscribed to her with love, he takes the drastic step of sending her back to France. “Was he a possible partner for Mireille? Could he assume such a mutation?”īoth keep the relationship secret from their families. Their relationship blossoms but Ousmane can’t help but wonder if they are compatible: “Ousmane Gueye, who had mistrusted all women, threw himself at the mercy of a woman, and a white woman at that.” Though it is nothing more than a friendship, when the final exams are over, he finds himself thinking about her more and more frequently until “never a day now passed without his dreaming of her, her quivering lips became the focal point of his desire.” He allows himself this fantasy in the belief that they are unlikely to see each other again but when he arrives at university, he discovers that Mireille has declined the chance to continue her education in France and now, finally, he allows himself to fall in love This begins to change when he befriends Mireille, the daughter of a French diplomat, in his final year of high school.
“Whenever he felt himself beginning to fancy any girl, after the Ouleymatou experience, the memory of her mocking indifference and his own disillusionment had made him fiercely determined to nip any emotional attachment in the bud.” Ousmane has worked hard to reach this point, rejecting other temptations such as falling in love, especially after an early rebuff: Scarlet Song (translated by Dorothy S Blair in 1985) does not adopt the epistolary format of So Long a Letter, nor does it initially seem concerned with the lives of women, focusing instead on Ousmane, the son of a poor Senegalese Muslim family, who has the opportunity to escape poverty through a university education. Of course, now I know that this was both Ba’s second and final novel, published in 1981, the same year that she died at the age of fifty-two. Almost forty years later, having failed to take advantage of the proliferation of the internet in the meantime to investigate this further, I was both surprised and excited to encounter a second novel by Ba casually slanted on a second-hand bookshop shelf: Scarlet Song. (This was a time when finding information on any writer, never mind an African writer, was far from straight forward). It seemed clear even then that it was an important work of African literature, and therefore surprising that little else of Ba’s work was visible. I first read Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter in the 1980s, not long, therefore, after it was originally published in French in 1979.
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