Reclaiming the Voice in So Long a Letter by Bâ Peter Barry identifies as a major goal of postcolonial criticism the rejection of "claims of universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature ” and more specifically “to show his limitations of perspective, particularly his general inability to empathize across the boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference” (198). While Bâ's intentions are not primarily anti-colonial, his novel So Long a Letter exemplifies how African literature offers a different perspective of their culture and, despite not fitting the mold of the English canon, is valuable and significant in its own right. Bâ does not write in defense of Africa. She is writing about Africa, and gender and class are much more central to her work than race. It can be argued that instead of responding to Empire, she is responding to African male authors on behalf of African women, reclaiming the voice that was previously denied to them. Mariama Bâ was born into an influential Senegalese family in 1929. She was one of the first women to receive a Western education in Senegal. Raised by her maternal grandparents in a traditional Muslim family, she attended school only by the grace of her father, who had a strong vision of the future for his daughter. Bâ attended the French School of Dakar and went on to study at the École Normal in Rufisque, entering with the highest marks in the exams in all of French West Africa, graduating in 1947. He experienced life under colonialism and also witnessed firsthand the events surrounding Senegal. independence from France, granted on 4 April 1960.1 Taking into account the social and political context from which Bâ writes, it is... middle of paper... Bâ's Fiction." Ngambika: Women's Studies in African Literature. Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves, NJ: African World Press, 1986. 161-71. Carole Boyce and Elaine Savory Fido History of Twentieth-Century African Literatures. Ed. Oyekan Owomoyela. U. of Nebraska P., 1993. Rueschmann , Eva "Female Self-Definition and African Community in the Epistolary Novel So Long a Letter." International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. 3-18. Yousaf, Nahem, "The 'Public' versus the 'Private' in the Novels of Mariama Bâ." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30.2 (1995): 85-98 readers to African literature. York: Heinemann, 1983.