Season of Migration to the North

Author

Tayeb Salih (1929-2009):

•       Studied at the University of Khartoum before leaving for the University of London in England.

•       Came from a background of small farmers and religious teachers

•       Worked as a broadcaster

•       Worked with UNESCO

About the text:

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•       1966 novel – published in Beirut in 1967

•       Banned in Sudan

•       Novel about two Sudanese men of different generations, each of whom

•       travels North for education in England and returns to the Sudan

•       Investigates colonial racism and sexism

•       Explores identity split between West/East and North/South

Contextual information:

•       Sudan gained independence from Egypt and the UK in 1956

•       Novel returns to the colonial era: The character Mustafa was born in Khartoum in 1898 (page 18), the year of the bloody defeat of the Mahdist forces by Kitchener's army in the battle of Omdurman, which signalled the final collapse of Sudanese resistance to British encroachment.

Interesting narrative techniques:

•       Framed narrative

–    1001 Arabian Nights 

–    “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

–    The Reluctant Fundamentalist

    

•       Dislocations among spaces: England, Egypt and Sudan

•       Use of Doppelgänger

•       First-person perspective is turned inward and registers a series of visions in which inner and outer realities are often fused

•       Relational stream-of-consciousness

•       Reference to Othello

•       Reference to Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford)

Characterisation: Doppelgänger:-

1. Mustafa Sa’eed	2. Primary narrator
•       Studies and becomes a Lecturer in Economics at University of London •       Nicknamed “the black Englishman” •       Drives three women to suicide and murders one •       Jailed for 7 years when he kills Jean Morris •       During a flood, disappears (presumed dead) •       Secret locked room that is a kind of shrine to his English life/wife	•       Studies English poetry (doctorate) •       Goes to Khartoum to teach pre-Islamic Arabic poetry at the secondary school level •       Later works as a bureaucrat in the Education ministry in Khartoum •       Falls in love with the widow of Mustafa •       Novel ends with him floating on the Nile, yelling for help.

Themes:

Arab Patriarchy:

•       Whether father, brother, or husband, man is guardian or master of woman and totally controls her life. (From text: “Does she imagines she's some queen or princess? Widows in this village are more common than empty bellies. She should thank God she's found a husband like me .... She'll marry me whatever you [the narrator] or she says or does. Her father's agreed and so have her brothers. ... In this village the men are guardians of the women.” (pp. 97-98)

•       Early marriage is welcome to guarantee the bride's virginity, a symbol of family honor. Forced marriages are customary and it is taken for granted that the girl has no say in the choice of her husband. (Example from text- Hosna's father promises her to Wad Rayyes, then swears at her and beats her until she yields (p. 122). Mahjoub himself, the narrator's life-long friend and Hosna's former playmate, says, "Women belong to men, and a man's a man even if he's decrepit" (p. 99). /The narrator's mother also judges Hosna in the following terms: "What an impudent hussy! That's modern women for you!" (p. 123).

•       Sexual life and sexual fulfillment are therefore prohibited to women, while men indulge in polygamy and concubinage.

•       Indeed, the circumcision of women is still practised and is often mentioned in Season (p. 80 for example), curbing sexual desire in the woman. Salih and Mahfouz dramatize this traditional outlook on marriage and sex in their novels.[1]

•       In the novel, Sudanese wife (Hosna Bint Mahmoud) is, however, left prey to the sexual fancies of the much-married, 70-year-old Wad Rayes with the complicity of the village patriarchy, she is forced into marriage while the narrator is away in Khartoum and he sexually assaults her and she kills him and commits suicide.

Cultural/Racial Difference &
Sado-Masochistic Sex:

•       “Just as imperialism had violated its victims, Mustafa violates his, and his unwitting lovers become sacrifices in his violent campaign. The acts of finding lovers and engaging with them sexually become scouting operations and skirmishes in a war fought on the personal level. The descriptions used by Mustafa for his conquests are couched not only in terms of military operations in general, but in terms of traditional Arab military campaigns in particular: going to meet new victims is described in terms of saddling his camels; the process of court-ship is compared to laying siege, involving tents, caravans, the desert, and so forth. The imagery associated with sexual acts are those of battle: bows, axes, spears, and especially swords and knives. He compares his exploits to those of Tarik ibn-Ziyad, the commander of the Arab army that conquered Spain in the eighth century, as he tells the narrator, ‘I imagined the Arab soldiers' first meeting with Spain. Like me at this moment, sit-ting opposite Isabella Seymour, a southern thirst being quenched in the northern mountain passes of history’” (S, p. 46).

Source: Saree S. Makdisi, “The Empire Renarrated: "Season of Migration to the North" and the Reinvention of the Present,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 4, Identities (Summer, 1992), p. 811.

Sexual desire North/South:

•       “In her eyes I was a symbol of all her hankerings. I am south that yearns for the North and the ice" (30).

•       Mustafa embodies an "icy" aura and contends to have no feelings or emotions, just a heartless and reckless person.

•       The two aspects are present together in this passage dealing with a woman: "...a southern thirst being dissipated in the mountain passes of history in the north" (42).

Critical perspectives:

•       The translator, Denys Johnson-Davies, says about the novel: “Season has been variously described as an "Arabian Nights" in reverse, or as a story of a modern-day Othello who seeks to turn the political tables on the West by bedding as many of its women as he can.” (Johnson-Davies v)

Do you agree with this statement?

•       “Season is, generally, a novel, a form imported by the Arabs from the West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Europe and the Middle East confronted each other over issues of culture, colonialism and curiosity. But if Season is, by Western literary critical definitions, a novel, it nonetheless participates as well in what, in Arabic literary terms is called mu'aradah, literally opposition, contradiction, but here a formula whereby one person will write a poem, and an-other will retaliate by writing along the same lines, but reversing the meaning. Tayeb Salih's use of the "novel" form might be taken as a practice of this sort. It is a re-reading of Shakespeare's Othello, a restatement of the tragedy, a re-shaping of the tragic figure of the Moor.”

Source: Barbara Harlow, "Sentimental Orientalism: Season of Migration to the North and Othello," Amyuni, p. 75.

Is it a rewriting of Othello?

Season of Migration to the North & Othello

Othello/ Desdemona

Sa’eed/ Isabella

There are two direct references to Othello in the novel. The protagonist Sa'eed compares himself to Othello as he talks to Isabella Seymour, an English woman whom he seduces (she can be read as a Desdemona figure).

Reference:  “There came a moment when I felt I had been transformed in her eyes into a naked, primitive creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other, hunting elephants and lions in the jungles. This was fine. Curiosity has changed to gaiety, and gaiety to sympathy, and when I stir the still pool in the depths the sympathy will be transformed into a desire upon whose taut strings I shall play as I wish. ‘What race are you?’ she asked me. ‘Are you African or Asian?’ ‘I am like Othello-Arab-African,’ I said to her.” (Salih, Season 38)

Mustafa as Anti-Othello:

•       He says: "I am no Othello: I am a lie," and that "I am no Othello: Othello was a lie" (S, pp. 37, 98).

•       Does not kill out of love

•       Does not kill himself after he kills the Desdemona figure

•       Character seems to be all intellect with no heart

•       Masquerade: adopts various identities with lovers: Richard, Hassan, Charles, Amin, and Mustafa

•       Senses that he is wearing a mask in the West, but also goes home and hides his identity – so he is in a constant state of masquerade.

Open Ending:

•       Image of the narrator as a kind of compass on the river, floating (167). Perhaps the river represents the dying waters of colonialism? 

•       He is filled with rage at everything that has happened, and also at himself, so the narrator plunges into the Nile. A “numbness” strikes him, “half-way between north and south”, leaving him “unable to return” (167). From the water, he sees birds flying “northwards”, perhaps in a “migration”, and he “wak[es] from the nightmare” (168). He decides that there are things worth living for, and he shouts for help (169).

•       Fluid, uncertain ending.

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[1] Source: Mona Takieddine-Amyuni, “Images of Arab Women in Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb., 1985), pp. 25-36