Short stories
La Voie du salut
Not translated into English
Aminata Maïga Ka · 1985
Synopsis
From the beyond, a mother who died on the operating table tells the life of her daughter Rabiatou, a magistrate trained in France. Rabiatou's marriage to the schoolteacher Racine Ly at first founders on the dowry; she chooses to become pregnant so as to marry him without one, the "way of salvation" of the title, but Racine takes a second wife and squanders their savings. In Le Miroir de la vie, which completes the volume, a young Serer maid is seduced and then abandoned.
Context
The volume appeared in 1985 from Présence africaine and brings together two stories; the author would go on to publish En votre nom et au mien, in 1989, then Brisures de vies, in 1998. In 2024 Doyle D. Calhoun showed how she transposes the fait divers of the Senegalese press, both denounced and sought out as a means of bearing witness, into stories of dowry, polygamy, class and domestic service. The book has not been translated into English.
Who it is for
To read the condition of Senegalese women in the eighties, between dowry, polygamy, ambition and domestic service.
Prizes and reception
Its publisher sees in it the power, at once limited and conquered, of the modern woman who has entered business and politics.