Articulating Visibility in the African-Muslim Contexts of Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter and Leila Abouzeid's Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman's Journey Toward Independence

Abstract

SummaryBoth So Long a Letter and Year of the Elephant were written in the aftermath of the struggle for liberation from colonial rule, articulating the visibility of women in traditional, patriarchal African-Muslim contexts at a time when personal and socio-political exposés by women writers were quite uncommon. These first generation novellas, situated within the former French colonies Senegal and Morocco respectively, are articulations of agency which move both within and across borders and boundaries. Due to their personal circumstances, both narrators find themselves in a personal space where they are insiders as well as outsiders within their African-Muslim nations. Since they state that their commitment to their Islamic faith encompasses a critical interrogation of traditional and religious practices within their own societies, I will draw on the term dihliz, an Arabo-Persian term, (Moosa 2006:7) which suggests a liminal, threshold space. During their periods of iddat, their seclusion enables the narrators to explore the prosaic and the sacred, the personal and the political from this space of dihliz, and also promotes a sensitive perception of their historical and personal contexts from multiple perspectives, thereby re-positioning and re-constructing their identities as Muslim women.