International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies (Dec 2020)
Mariama Ba: An Early Intersectional Feminist
Abstract
This article looks into Mariama Ba’s seminal novel, So Long a Letter, through the lens of intersectional feminism. Its main objective is to demonstrate that the Senegalese writer, by representing women at the intersection of multilayered and interlocking systemic oppressions, is an early intersectional feminist. Developed from the scholarship of African American Kimberle Crenshaw on intersectionality - to highlight how overlapping social identities relate to systems and structures of oppression, and discrimination - intersectional feminism examines imbricated structures of discriminations to which women are subjects, due to their ethnicity, sexuality or economic condition. Object of analyses and controversies, (Lykke, 2016; Preira, 2020; Hivon, 2019; Collins, 2000), intersectional feminism has become a paradigm of analysis used in literature and critical studies, on a transdisciplinary basis, to shed light on the invisibilization and exclusion of many “constituents within groups that claim them as members, but often fail to represent them” (Crenshaw, 2015). In its representation of a chain of oppressions around the neck of women from different walks of life, Mariama Ba articulates, in her narrative, principles of intersectional feminism. The work first discusses tenets of this aspect of feminism, and then foregrounds that women are at the intersection of sexism, caste system, classicism and racism, in the private and public spheres. Another conclusion focuses on the regenerative power of the author’s fight for women’s visibility and inclusion, through characters’ positionalities within the family and society.
