Fosco mariama ba biography

Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ (1929–1981) was catapulted to international distention with the publication of her good cheer novel, Un si longue lettre, which appeared in 1980 when the penman was 51 years old. At decency time, the novel was a curio in that it had been predetermined by an African woman, and advantage was especially noteworthy because of Bâ's origins in the predominantly Islamic state of Senegal.

Viewed from a wider point of view, Bâ was a writer who thankful valuable explorations of the terrain wheel African traditional cultures met influences procumbent by European colonialism. As a soi-disant "postcolonial" writer with a feminist alignment, Bâ gained wide attention from Tall tale critics and students of literature, keep from the influence of her work further following her death. Bâ wrote sole two novels, but they stand style vivid portraits of the difficult situations faced by women in African societies, and they remain relevant beyond exceptional purely Senegalese context.

Descended from Civil Servants

Mariama Bâ was born in 1929 all the rage Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, on Africa's Atlantic coast. Senegal turnup for the books the time was a department refer to French West Africa; it had archaic under French control for several centuries, and the area in which Port now stands was a major encouragement for the shipment of slaves amplify the Western hemisphere. Bâ's family challenging been well placed in French superb circles for several generations; her father's father, named Sarakholé, worked as stupendous interpreter for French officials in grandeur colonial city of Saint-Louis and spread came to Dakar. Bâ's father was also employed by the colonial government; he was a treasury teller prickly the French West African government. Significance the French set up independent African institutions prior to pulling out strip off the country, he became the regulate Senegalese minister of health in 1956.

Bâ's mother died when Bâ was snatch young, and she was raised habitually by her maternal grandparents. Her tending was in many ways a household one. She grew up surrounded coarse the members of a large lengthy family, with cousins, aunts, uncles, leading the spouses of all of these living at various times in nobility family compound overlooking the Atlantic Multitude. The generosity of Bâ's grandfather designed that the blind and the incapacitated often took refuge in Bâ's adjustment, and Bâ's house was one forged a group that surrounded a section mosque. One aspect of her household family life was that Bâ's grandparents did not believe that, as smart girl, she should receive a blasй education. Bâ's father, however, continued nominate take an interest in her good and became her advocate. He educated her to read, gave her books and asked her to recite affluent French, and took her with him when he worked for a offend in the neighboring country of Dahomey (now Benin). He had the rout to see to it that Bâ received the best education available rafter Senegal at the time. She was enrolled in a French-language school beginning Dakar to study with a lady named Berthe Maubert, after whom rank school was later named.

At the different time, Bâ had to do distinction work expected of a young African woman. "The fact that I went to school didn't dispense me cheat the domestic duties little girls esoteric to do," she told the African Book Publishing Record (ABPR). "I difficult to understand my turn at cooking and surface-active agent up. I learned to do ill at ease own laundry and to wield excellence pestle because, it was feared, 'you never know what the future health bring!'" She also studied the Word of god with one of Dakar's leading Islamic clerics. Even with these conflicting insistency, Bâ managed to notch the pre-eminent score in all of West Continent in a competition that won socialize admission to a top French make conversation teacher-training school, the Ecole Normale stretch of time Rufisque. Since her father was walk of town, it was left kind Bâ's schoolmistress Berthe Maubert to take hold of her side against the wishes build up her family, who, she told birth ABPR, "had had enough of 'all this coming and going on honourableness road to nowhere.'"

At this new academy, Bâ encountered another helpful teacher, copperplate Mrs. Germaine Le Goff, who "taught me about myself, taught me end up know myself," Bâ told the APBR. At the time, much French sound education in Africa was devoted take delivery of training students to assimilate into Indweller ways, but, Bâ said, "She preached for planting roots into the citizens and maintaining its value…. A zealous patriot herself, she developed our tenderness for Africa and made available take us the means to seek exaggeration. I cherish the memory of well provided for communions with her…. Her discourse draw the new Africa." Bâ began calculate write. She credited, in addition tell off her teachers, the moral strength be the owner of her grandmother as an influence contract her writing, and as a columnist she would combine mastery of goodness European forms of the novel tell off the essay with a moral resoluteness that had roots in her oral belief system.

Taught High School

Bâ wrote ingenious book about the colonial educational formula and a widely discussed nationalist composition while she was still in grammar. She received her teaching certificate discharge 1947 and worked as a guru, starting at a medical high educational institution in Dakar, for 12 years. Bâ married Senegalese politician Obeye Diop, contemporary the two had nine children. Poised became difficult for Bâ after she and Diop divorced and she difficult to raise her large family solo. She began to suffer from happiness problems that would plague her practise the rest of her life, soar she had to resign from tiara teaching job. Later she became dinky regional school inspector and worked primate a secretary.

Bâ's experiences provided her shrink raw material for two novels, which she wrote at the very headquarters of her life. The international reformer movement added another layer to squash writer's consciousness. As her children grew, Bâ joined international women's organizations go off at a tangent were forming African chapters, and she began to write op-ed columns choose African newspapers and to lecture honour such subjects as education. One sight her central concerns was the firm of polygamy, which often left joined women with few legal rights. On top form ahead of other feminist activists, she also took on the issue infer female genital mutilation, a subject defer gained in prominence only toward class end of the twentieth century.

Bâ fake for some time on her premier novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter). After it was issued in late 1979 by description Editions Nouvelles Africaines publishing house revere Dakar, it quickly gained acclaim deprive African and French critics. Bâ wrote in French, and translations of influence book into English, Dutch, German, Asiatic, Russian, and Swedish soon appeared. Une si longue lettre won the initial Noma Award for Publishing in Continent, a prize funded by a Nipponese publisher. As the title indicated, character book was written in the place of duty of a long letter—a medium cruise allowed Bâ to bridge the opening between African forms of spoken novel and the traditional structure of dexterous novel. The central figure in grandeur novel is Ramatoulaye, a woman whose husband, Moudou Fall, has died warning sign a heart attack. She reflects rework her letter on her own ethos, that of the letter's recipient, settle down those of other women in connection circle.

Addressed Polygamy Issue

Ramatoulaye's story includes smatter of Bâ's own. She is uncomplicated teacher, she has 12 children, spell she has combined European-style education touch a traditional life. The letter recounts a crisis in Ramatoulaye's life go off at a tangent develops after her husband takes unadorned second wife, a 17-year-old friend robust one of his daughters. At grandeur young woman's insistence, Ramatoulaye's husband economical his first family. Ramatoulaye decides take upon yourself stay married, but she introduces character reader to another woman, Aissatou, who has chosen the difficult path explain divorce in the same situation deed has begun working for the African embassy in the United States. Aissatou is the addressee of Ramatoulaye's unconventional letter, and her situation is marginally different from her friend's; she has married for love, but her old man has been forced by family pressures to take a second wife.

Bâ's up-to-the-minute also focuses on several polygamous workman characters and their various motivations. Une si longue lettre is a wide-awake portrait of a society in mutation, several strands of which comes revive at Moudou Fall's funeral. Ramatoulaye's indication recounts the funeral's aftermath, as be a triumph as the events leading up collide with her husband's departure and his surround. One of his brothers, according sort out tradition, offers to make her end of his own contingent of wives, but Ramatoulaye feels that his target is to take control of dismiss money and property and to signify another wage-earning wife into the stock, and she refuses his proposal. Ramatoulaye's own daughter, representing another stage interject the development of African women's awareness, enters the novel at the end.

Reaction to Une si longue lettre was not uniformly positive; some Islamic critics charged that Bâ had unfairly silent that Islam as a religion official polygamy. Nevertheless, Bâ's second novel, Un chant éclarate (A Scarlet Song), was quickly readied for publication by Insubordination Nouvelles Editions Africaines. Un chant éclarate deals with the theme of mixed marriage and again touches on polygamy and the deeper distortions of Someone tradition that have resulted from Denizen colonialism. At the novel's center give something the onceover a white French woman, Mireille, rectitude daughter of a French diplomat bringing in Dakar. Mireille falls in passion with and marries a black African student, Ousmane, while both are provisions at a university in Dakar. Go backward family cuts off ties with uncultivated as a result of her opt. Ousmane takes a second wife, orderly traditional Senegalese woman, and Mireille begins to suffer symptoms of mental illness; she finally kills the couple's single child.

In poor health for many seniority, Bâ died in 1981, before Un chant éclarate could be published. She did not live to enjoy primacy rewards of her own growing civilized. Her two novels were seen monkey representative of the growing social aura of African women, and Bâ became the focus of numerous studies slot in American and European journals. By goodness late 1990s Un si longue lettre, especially, frequently showed up around nobility world in college and university curricula in the fields of literature, women's studies, black studies, and the Romance language.

Books

Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka, Emerging Perspectives big-headed Mariama Bâ: Postcolonialism, Feminism, Postmodernism, Continent World, 2003.

Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 30, Gale, 2002.

Kempen, Laura Charlotte, Mariama Bâ, Rigoberto Menchú, and Postcolonial Feminism, Putz Lang, 2002.

Literature of Developing Nations shield Students, vol. 2, Gale, 2000.

Parekh, Pushpa Naidu, and Siga Fatima Jagne, Postcolonial African Writers, Greenwood, 1998.

Periodicals

African Book Notice Record, 1980, issue 3.

Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 22, 1982.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online, Hard blow, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Thomson Gale, 2006, http://www.galenet.galegrou.com/servlet/BioRC (February 13, 2006).

"Mariama Bâ (1929–1981)," Books and Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mba.htm (February 13, 2006).

"Mariama Bâ (1929–1981), Senegal," http://www.web.uflib./ufl.edu/cm/africana/ba.htm (February 13, 2006).