So Long a Letter

Consider the extract below and begin by identifying at least 7 literary devices (metaphors, imagery, diction, symbolism, similes, personification e.t.c.)

Women, close relatives, are busy. They must take incense, eau-de-cologne, cotton-wool to be the hospital for the washing of the dead one. The seven meters of white muslim, the only clothing Islam allows for the dead, are carefully placed in a new basket. The Zem-Zem, the miracle water from the holy places of Islam religiously kept by each family, is not forgotten. Rich, dark wrappers are chosen to cover Modou.

My back propped up by cushions, legs outstretched, my head covered with a black wrapper, I follow the comings and goings of people. Across from me, a new winnowing fan bought for the occasion receives my first alms. The presence of my co-wife beside me irritates me. She has been installed in my house for the funeral, in accordance with tradition. With each passing hour her cheeks close on their secrets, perhaps regrets. At the age of love and freedom from care, this child is dogged by sadness.

While men the men, in a long, irregular file of official cars, public busses, lorries and mopeds, accompany Modou to his last rest (people were for a long time to talk of the crowd which followed the funeral procession), our sisters-in-law undo our hair. My co-wife and myself are put inside a rough and ready tent made of a wrapper pulled taut above our heads and set up for the occasion. While our sisters-in-law are constructing it, the women present, informed of the work in hand, get up and throw some coins on the fluttering canopy so as to ward off evil spirits.

This is the moment dreaded by every Senegalese woman, the moment when she sacrifices her possessions as gifts to her family-in-law; and, worse still, beyond her possessions she gives up her personality, her dignity, becoming a thing in the service of the man who has married her, his grandfather, his grandmother, his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, his uncle, his aunt, his male and female cousins, his friends. Her behavior is conditioned: no sister-in-law will touch the head of any wife who has been stingy, unfaithful or inhospitable (Ba 4-5).

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