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Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies, London: Penguin Classics, 2003. pp169
Cheering to see Tayeb Salih's most famous book as a Penguin Classic -- and not only because Season of Migration to the North (first published in the Beirut magazine Hiwar in 1966 and in book form by Dar Al-Awda in 1970) is one of few Arabic novels adequately translated into English, and one of very few to acquire an international reputation prior to Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel prize. The book remains an epoch-making achievement at more than one level: as virtually the only postcolonial comment in Arabic fiction; as an unreliably narrated love story comparable to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier; as a serious and indelibly readable thriller evocative of Graham Greene; and as a classic example, in Arabic, of what is arguably Europe's most significant literary form. To confine one's view of the novel to any of these angles would result in a limited perspective. The text's place in a contemporary and increasingly problematic bicultural literary sensibility provides an alternative and by far more interesting cue to a present-day reading, which should take into account not only subsequent developments in south-north relations (the book's most relevant theme) but also the fate of the literary renaissance of which it was a product. Subsiding in the face of ever hollower attempts at postmodernism -- and an ever widening gap between writers-readers and the wider public -- the surge of creativity and enlightenment in question (an affair, principally, of the 1950s and 1960s) has given way to an aura of stifling conservatism and ludicrous piety -- so much so that, some 25 years after the initial, principally ideological controversy it generated, Season of Migration to the North was, and remains, banned in Sudan.
One interesting mechanism Salih employs is to introduce a nameless narrator who acts as a kind of younger Doppelgænger for the protagonist, Mustafa Sa'eed, a bright, emotionally hardened student whose ambition and intelligence drive him continually north, through Khartoum and Cairo to the London of the inter-war period, where as a modern-day, exotically black Casanova he conquers his coloniser, only to find himself, eventually, in Othello's shoes -- uncertain of the fidelity of the woman he lives with -- with a knife in one hand and a suitcase in the other. Mustafa settles in the narrator's village, not the former's birthplace, marries a beautiful woman, Hosna, and leads a quiet life cultivating a small plot of land. The presence of a narrator both facilitates Mustafa's unexplained death by drowning -- a relatively early event, chronologically speaking -- and provides the space for manoeuvre necessary for an account of village life. The narrator has just returned, having earned a PhD in England; and he first meets Mustafa during his reunion with fellow village people -- whose curiosity about the life of Nasara (Christians) he cautiously satisfies. Much of the surface plot revolves around the narrator's sympathy with Mustafa's widow, whose father and an obstinate doter, Wad Rayyes, force her into a marriage she rejects. In a violent scene that seems to echo the climax of her husband's London life, Hosna (whose marriage to Mustafa, it is repeatedly said, acted to transform her) stabs her new husband with a knife. Similarly, the narrator, having recounted the last of Mustafa's conversations with him, steps into the water and wades on -- and on. Mustafa's own death is once again evoked in the narrator's increasingly helpless struggle with the water. "It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning," he confesses as the novel draws to a close. "If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. I shall live by force and cunning. I moved my arms with difficulty, until the upper part of my body was above water," he says. "Like a comic actor shouting on a stage, I screamed with all my remaining strength, 'Help! Help!'"
Much of the London events are recounted in Mustafa's own voice, in initially reluctant, eventually impassioned conversation with the narrator -- a dualistic approach to story telling that typifies the novel's structure. The novel is both a thriller -- how did Mustafa die? what secrets did this reticent and antisocial man harbour? who, in the end, killed Wad Rayyes? -- and an extended metaphor for the destructive effects not only of an encounter between colonised and coloniser but, at an appropriately sophisticated level, of the latter's intervention in the mental and spiritual life of the former. Its events progress through cycles of creation-destruction that take the form of journeys to, and back from, the north. The narrator and Mustafa, while not obviously at odds with village society, have seen and known too much to bear the mentality that insists on Hosna marrying Wad Rayyes even though she is intent on remaining a faithful widow. (Hosna herself, it may be added, would never have exhibited such defiance had she not been married to Mustafa.) Notwithstanding the dualistic narrative style (and the narrator's uncertain relation to Mustafa), the heat of Sudan contrasts with the snow-covered streets of London. Even Mustafa's dubious relations with white women assume dualistic form: once "the hunter", as he describes himself, he turns into a prey. The novel's many dualities may just be the secret to its wide-ranging and enduring appeal. And it is largely through them that it speaks so eloquently to the aforementioned bicultural sensibility, which prefers evocation to overstatement and appreciates an open end.
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 20 - 26 November 2003 (Issue No. 665)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/665/bo2.htm