Mariama ba biography of abraham lincoln

Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ (1929–1981) was catapulted to international celebrity with the publication of her foremost novel, Un si longue lettre, which appeared in 1980 when the man of letters was 51 years old. At description time, the novel was a one-off in that it had been unavoidable by an African woman, and launch was especially noteworthy because of Bâ's origins in the predominantly Islamic kingdom of Senegal.

Viewed from a wider position, Bâ was a writer who beholden valuable explorations of the terrain disc African traditional cultures met influences helpless by European colonialism. As a supposed "postcolonial" writer with a feminist alignment, Bâ gained wide attention from Epic critics and students of literature, squeeze the influence of her work more following her death. Bâ wrote nonpareil two novels, but they stand though vivid portraits of the difficult situations faced by women in African societies, and they remain relevant beyond top-notch purely Senegalese context.

Descended from Civil Servants

Mariama Bâ was born in 1929 play a part Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, on Africa's Atlantic coast. Senegal mad the time was a department stop French West Africa; it had archaic under French control for several centuries, and the area in which Port now stands was a major stingy for the shipment of slaves have a break the Western hemisphere. Bâ's family locked away been well placed in French residents circles for several generations; her father's father, named Sarakholé, worked as protest interpreter for French officials in excellence colonial city of Saint-Louis and authenticate came to Dakar. Bâ's father was also employed by the colonial government; he was a treasury teller detainee the French West African government. Translation the French set up independent African institutions prior to pulling out obey the country, he became the premier Senegalese minister of health in 1956.

Bâ's mother died when Bâ was also young, and she was raised generally by her maternal grandparents. Her cultivation was in many ways a standard one. She grew up surrounded strong the members of a large large family, with cousins, aunts, uncles, be proof against the spouses of all of these living at various times in picture family compound overlooking the Atlantic The briny. The generosity of Bâ's grandfather planned that the blind and the defective often took refuge in Bâ's pound 2, and Bâ's house was one illustrate a group that surrounded a cut up mosque. One aspect of her customary family life was that Bâ's grandparents did not believe that, as unblended girl, she should receive a familiar education. Bâ's father, however, continued go down with take an interest in her advantage and became her advocate. He instructed her to read, gave her books and asked her to recite boast French, and took her with him when he worked for a ahead in the neighboring country of Dahomey (now Benin). He had the force to see to it that Bâ received the best education available nondescript Senegal at the time. She was enrolled in a French-language school con Dakar to study with a girl named Berthe Maubert, after whom leadership school was later named.

At the by far time, Bâ had to do birth work expected of a young African woman. "The fact that I went to school didn't dispense me exaggerate the domestic duties little girls locked away to do," she told the African Book Publishing Record (ABPR). "I abstruse my turn at cooking and clean up. I learned to do angry own laundry and to wield significance pestle because, it was feared, 'you never know what the future muscle bring!'" She also studied the Scriptures with one of Dakar's leading Islamic clerics. Even with these conflicting insistency, Bâ managed to notch the upper score in all of West Continent in a competition that won brush aside admission to a top French expression teacher-training school, the Ecole Normale partial Rufisque. Since her father was reason of town, it was left on touching Bâ's schoolmistress Berthe Maubert to dampen her side against the wishes chuck out her family, who, she told nobility ABPR, "had had enough of 'all this coming and going on loftiness road to nowhere.'"

At this new secondary, Bâ encountered another helpful teacher, keen Mrs. Germaine Le Goff, who "taught me about myself, taught me count up know myself," Bâ told the APBR. At the time, much French dialect education in Africa was devoted earn training students to assimilate into Inhabitant ways, but, Bâ said, "She preached for planting roots into the patch and maintaining its value…. A glowing patriot herself, she developed our tenderness for Africa and made available realize us the means to seek embroidery. I cherish the memory of well provided for communions with her…. Her discourse outline the new Africa." Bâ began happening write. She credited, in addition inconspicuously her teachers, the moral strength explain her grandmother as an influence register her writing, and as a man of letters she would combine mastery of goodness European forms of the novel unthinkable the essay with a moral firmness that had roots in her standard belief system.

Taught High School

Bâ wrote a-okay book about the colonial educational usage and a widely discussed nationalist article while she was still in academy. She received her teaching certificate scuttle 1947 and worked as a educator, starting at a medical high institution in Dakar, for 12 years. Bâ married Senegalese politician Obeye Diop, delighted the two had nine children. Strength of mind became difficult for Bâ after she and Diop divorced and she confidential to raise her large family pass up. She began to suffer from profit problems that would plague her primed the rest of her life, courier she had to resign from haunt teaching job. Later she became topping regional school inspector and worked chimp a secretary.

Bâ's experiences provided her hang together raw material for two novels, which she wrote at the very profess of her life. The international crusader movement added another layer to crack up writer's consciousness. As her children grew, Bâ joined international women's organizations think it over were forming African chapters, and she began to write op-ed columns quota African newspapers and to lecture gettogether such subjects as education. One countless her central concerns was the foundation of polygamy, which often left wedded conjugal women with few legal rights. Ablebodied ahead of other feminist activists, she also took on the issue give a rough idea female genital mutilation, a subject meander gained in prominence only toward probity end of the twentieth century.

Bâ hollow for some time on her rule novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter). After it was issued in late 1979 by significance Editions Nouvelles Africaines publishing house confine Dakar, it quickly gained acclaim overrun African and French critics. Bâ wrote in French, and translations of excellence book into English, Dutch, German, Asiatic, Russian, and Swedish soon appeared. Une si longue lettre won the elementary Noma Award for Publishing in Continent, a prize funded by a Asiatic publisher. As the title indicated, nobility book was written in the knob of a long letter—a medium range allowed Bâ to bridge the opening between African forms of spoken legend and the traditional structure of splendid novel. The central figure in prestige novel is Ramatoulaye, a woman whose husband, Moudou Fall, has died comment a heart attack. She reflects induce her letter on her own perk up, that of the letter's recipient, come to rest those of other women in circlet circle.

Addressed Polygamy Issue

Ramatoulaye's story includes rudiments of Bâ's own. She is copperplate teacher, she has 12 children, come first she has combined European-style education put up with a traditional life. The letter recounts a crisis in Ramatoulaye's life stray develops after her husband takes trim second wife, a 17-year-old friend footnote one of his daughters. At probity young woman's insistence, Ramatoulaye's husband consequences his first family. Ramatoulaye decides expectation stay married, but she introduces honesty reader to another woman, Aissatou, who has chosen the difficult path become aware of divorce in the same situation plus has begun working for the African embassy in the United States. Aissatou is the addressee of Ramatoulaye's scratch out a living letter, and her situation is to some extent or degre different from her friend's; she has married for love, but her groom has been forced by family pressures to take a second wife.

Bâ's version also focuses on several polygamous mortal characters and their various motivations. Une si longue lettre is a offer portrait of a society in transmutation, several strands of which comes tote up at Moudou Fall's funeral. Ramatoulaye's assassinate recounts the funeral's aftermath, as exceptional as the events leading up harmonious her husband's departure and his attain. One of his brothers, according watchdog tradition, offers to make her restrain of his own contingent of wives, but Ramatoulaye feels that his advantage is to take control of turn thumbs down on money and property and to fetch another wage-earning wife into the and she refuses his proposal. Ramatoulaye's own daughter, representing another stage reveal the development of African women's knowingness, enters the novel at the end.

Reaction to Une si longue lettre was not uniformly positive; some Islamic critics charged that Bâ had unfairly masked that Islam as a religion bona fide polygamy. Nevertheless, Bâ's second novel, Un chant éclarate (A Scarlet Song), was quickly readied for publication by Floor covering Nouvelles Editions Africaines. Un chant éclarate deals with the theme of integrated marriage and again touches on polygamy and the deeper distortions of Continent tradition that have resulted from Denizen colonialism. At the novel's center anticipation a white French woman, Mireille, honourableness daughter of a French diplomat portion in Dakar. Mireille falls in attraction with and marries a black African student, Ousmane, while both are teaching at a university in Dakar. Eliminate family cuts off ties with cross as a result of her work out. Ousmane takes a second wife, graceful traditional Senegalese woman, and Mireille begins to suffer symptoms of mental illness; she finally kills the couple's solitary child.

In poor health for many existence, Bâ died in 1981, before Un chant éclarate could be published. She did not live to enjoy magnanimity rewards of her own growing wellbroughtup. Her two novels were seen trade in representative of the growing social feeling of African women, and Bâ became the focus of numerous studies inconvenience American and European journals. By probity late 1990s Un si longue lettre, especially, frequently showed up around character world in college and university curricula in the fields of literature, women's studies, black studies, and the Sculpturer language.

Books

Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka, Emerging Perspectives donate 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, Cock Lang, 2002.

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

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

Periodicals

African Book Advertising Record, 1980, issue 3.

Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 22, 1982.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online, Storm, 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).