So Long a Letter

 “I listen to the words that create around me a new atmosphere in which I move, a stranger and tormented. Death, the tenuous passage between two opposite worlds, one tumultuous, the other still.”

Rama describes the sudden, unexpected death of her husband. It is her husband’s death that catapults her into a new phase of her life. Life and death are not the only opposing worlds Rama encounters in this novel—her life before Modou’s death and her life after represent another set, and her husband’s death is the catalyst for all the changes she undergoes as the plot progresses. 

“To lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us: these were the aims of our admirable headmistress.”

This quote introduces the importance of education in the lives of Senegalese women, a theme that will color Rama and Aissatou’s lives. Their headmistress, one of the novel’s few white characters, challenges the girls to look critically at the culture they’ve been raised in and compare and contrast their experiences with other, far-away worlds. This instills in both girls a sense that their own culture is valuable as long as it helps and benefits them—if it harms them, there are other worlds worth exploring. Both women do eventually explore new ways of living, such as when Aissatou leaves her husband and Rama supports her pregnant, unmarried daughter.