Season of Migration to the North

“Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood.”

With Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih proves that simple writing can be beautiful. Hardly a word in this book would challenge a middle schooler. Yet the writing is beautiful. The translation played a big part. Denys Johnson-Davies proved that translation can carry beauty across language and culture. What an excellent read.

Season of Migration to the North is an anticolonialist narrative. It follows an unnamed narrator who returns to Sudan after earning a doctorate in England for a thesis on the life of an obscure western poet. His studies kept him away for seven years. Upon his return, he meets the protagonist, a quiet man called Mustafa Sa’eed.

At first, Mustafa passes as a quiet, land-working migrant from another part of Sudan. One drunken evening, he betrays his past by reciting poetry in English. Perplexed, the narrator soon seeks him out to learn his true identity.

“Thus Mustafa Sa’eed has, against my will, become a part of my world, a thought in my brain, a phantom that does not want to take itself off. And thus too I experience a remote feeling of fear, fear that it is just conceivable that simplicity is not everything.”

It turns out that Mustafa is the product of colonial education: “We teach people in order to open up their minds and release their captive powers. But we cannot predict the result. Freedom – we free their minds from superstition. We give the people the keys of the future to act therein as they wish.”

As a fatherless boy, he went to Cairo to study. Success sent him to London, but never with feelings of love. “Behind me was a story of spectacular success at school, my sole weapon being that sharp knife inside my skull, while within my breast was a hard, cold feeling – as if it had been cast in rock.”

In London, he established himself as a respected scholar. He published. He taught. People respected him. Yet he cared for nobody. “This is a fact in my life: the way chance has placed in my path people who gave me a helping hand at every stage, people for whom I had no feelings of gratitude; I used to take their help as though it were some duty they were performing for me.”

That would be enough to make him troubling. It also turns out that Mustafa was a womanizer. Some of his ex-lovers committed suicide. “There is a still pool in the depths of every woman that I knew how to stir. One day they found her dead. She had gassed herself. They also found a small piece of paper with my name on it. It contained nothing but the words: ‘Mr Sa’eed, may God damn you.’”

Mustafa also murdered a woman he married in London. The victim’s name was Jean Morris. Time and again, Jean Morris denied Mustafa before they finally came together in a marriage of farce. You might read Jean and Mustafa as allegories for their respective cultures.

Mustafa tells the narrator: “Everything which happened before my meeting her was a premonition; everything I did after I killed her was an apology, not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life.”

This is where the cultural clash really cuts through: “Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life, which is more dangerous to the future of Africa than imperialism itself.”

Shortly after the narrator learns all this, Mustafa presumably drowns in the Nile, leaving him with unanswered questions about his identity and, surprisingly, the responsibility of caring for Mustafa’s current wife and two sons. In passing, Mustafa also entrusts him with a key to a locked room in his house; nobody knows what’s inside.

Mustafa’s widow, Hosna, is later pressured to remarry. She refuses and tries to appeal to the narrator. Against her will, she is married to Wad Rayyes. When he attempts to forcefully consummate the marriage, she kills him and then takes her own life.

Only after this does the narrator enter the locked room. Inside, he finds Western literature, poetry, newspapers and art. He discovers Mustafa’s published works from his time in London, as well as more recent scraps of poetry and other fleeting projects. He receives this like a blow, the impact of outside influence. He wants to burn it all down.

The narrator laments: “He wants to be discovered, like some historical object of value. There was no doubt of that, and I now know that it was me he had chosen for that role. It was no coincidence that he had excited my curiosity and had then told me his life story incompletely so that I myself might unearth the rest of it. It was no coincidence that he had left me a letter sealed with red wax to further sharpen my curiosity, and that he had made me guardian of his two sons so as to commit me irrevocably, and that he had left me the key to this wax museum.”

The real trouble, though, is that the narrator, educated in the west, sees Mustafa in himself, especially upon entering the room: “I struck a match. The light exploded on my eyes and out of the darkness there emerged a frowning face with pursed lips that I knew but could not place. I moved towards it with hate in my heart. It was my adversary Mustafa Sa’eed. The face grew a neck, the neck two shoulders and a chest, then a trunk and two legs, and I found myself standing face to face with myself. This is not Mustafa Sa’eed – it’s a picture of me frowning at my face from a mirror. Suddenly the picture disappeared and I sat in the darkness for I know not how long listening intently and hearing nothing.”

Mustafa, his passing, and Hosna’s suicide, along with uncertainty about his place in the world, push the narrator to his limits. He questions his sanity. At the end of the book, we find him floating on his back in the Nile, halfway between north and south. He resolves to rid himself of Mustafa’s lingering presence and to stand as an individual in his own right.

“Though floating on the water, I was not part of it. I thought that if I died at that moment, I would have died as I was born – without any volition of mine. All my life I had not chosen, had not decided. Now I am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. I shall live by force and cunning. I moved my feet and arms, violently and with difficulty, until the upper part of my body was above water. Like a comic actor shouting on a stage, I screamed with all my remaining strength, ‘Help! Help!’”