Sudanese author Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, translated from Arabic to English by Denys Johnson-Davies, with some help from the author, is considered one of the greatest novels in the Arabic language for the 20th century. As someone trying to expand my fervor for world literature beyond Africa, Caribbean and African-American literature, Salih's novel seems like a great start, especially since it's also African literature in addition to Arab. Indeed, the novel is laden with references to folklore, poetry, and Islamic faith of the Arabic-speaking northern Sudan and the wider Arab world. Nevertheless, the novel also remains fundamentally African based on the dark skin of the Sudanese themselves and the plethora of stereotypes and experiences under colonialism that the novel's characters experience. Indeed, it blurs the distinction between "Arab" and "African" because of the intersecting identities possessed by characters such as Mustafa Sa'eed, the Sudanese intellectual who studies abroad in England, becomes a darling of the left because of his black skin, and uses his time there to "liberate Africa with his penis" by exacting vengeance for Kitchener's conquest of the Sudan, often related to sexual conquest because of the inherent gendered power dynamic and violent nature of European colonialism in Africa. Indeed, the novel's strong sexual overtones and openness, as well as criticism of female circumcision and patriarchy, made it controversial in Sudan.
The novel, though short and quite poetic in language and tone, especially regarding the beautiful metaphors and similes connecting the characters to nature and the Nile, uses an episodic structure that is initially confusing. The unnamed narrator, returning from England after studying poetry, meets a newcomer in his village along the Nile, Mustafa Sa'eed. The son of an Ababda man and a woman from the south, Mustafa Sa'eed lived his life independently and with an intellectual fervor quite remarkable, winning scholarships to study in Cairo and in England. His presence strikes a curiosity in the narrator, who, after hearing the man recite an English poem, insists on learning his life story. This leads to Mustafa telling an incomplete narrative of his life while leaving clues and pressure after death to ensure that the narrator uncovers the truth of his life for Mustafa's sons and posterity, since Mustafa's ego demands immortality. After Mustafa's death, the narrator receives his letter, a key to a secret room in the house, and guardianship of his sons and wife, a young woman, Hosna, who never uncovered Mustafa's secrets and was not interested in marriage afterwards. The rest of the novel consists of a sort of reversal of Heart of Darkness with the narrator traveling back to Khartoum from his village further north along on the Nile, encountering Bedouin, other drivers and soldiers, and eventually, an entire rural community where everyone breaks into communal feasting, dancing, and merriment. He also uncovers more of Mustafa's history while engaging with the people of the Sudan and discovering that “we shall pull down and we shall build, and we shall humble the sun itself to our will; and somehow we shall defeat poverty” (114).
Salih, a Sudanese person who studied in England himself, could likely be the narrator. The narrator, after criticizing the extreme, patriarchal and ignorant views of his fellow villages regarding an arranged marriage between Mustafa's widow and Wad Rayyes, an elderly man with a penchant for marrying different young women for sexual purposes, realizes he is in love with Hosna, this young woman, but fails to make a decisive stand and marry her to prevent her from being forced into a marriage with a lustful old man with horrendous views on gender. Indeed, during a scene of surprising but semi-hilarious discussion, the narrator's grandfather, Wad Rayyes, Bakri, and an elderly woman, all seniors, engage in a raunchy talk about sex where Wad Rayyes proudly lists off his sexual accomplishments, including the time he raped a slave (and yes, this novel is set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but Wad Rayyes is over 70 by this point). His views are best summarized in the following quotation, “I swear to you, Hajj Ahmed,” said Wad Rayyes, “that if you’d had a taste of the women of Abyssinia and Nigeria you’d throw away your string of prayer-beads and give up praying--the thing between their thighs is like an upturned dish, all there for good or bad. We here lop it off and leave it like a piece of land that’s been stripped bare." Wad Rayyes correctly attacks the practice of genital mutilation, but still sees women as essentially property for reproduction and pleasure, even misquoting the Koran to justify it by mistaking "women" for "wealth" in "wealth and children."
Despite the misogynistic views held by the men and reinforced or accepted by many women in the narrator's small village, the older woman participating in the discussion openly and unashamedly reveals her love life and which of her past husbands satisfied her the most, indicating the ways in which the environment, though inherently sexist, still allowed room for female autonomy and sexuality, just so much as it was done under the sanction of marriage. This, when added to the spirit and determination of the villagers as well as other poor, rural Sudanese exploited or neglected by the central government in Khartoum, contributes to the narrator feeling that "by the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe” (73). Their ability to persevere, or at least hope as much in the liberation of nightfall from the sun's indefatigable heat, displays an ability to make a decision and stand up for themselves, something the narrator finally does near the novel's conclusion:
“Then my mind cleared and my relationship to the river was determined. 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 no chosen, had not decided. Now I am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are 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" (168).
Season depicts all the strengths and flaws of human nature and Sudanese society while correctly criticizing European colonialism and racism. Furthermore, instead of the racism solidified by Europeans in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this novel shows the reader the other side, where the narrator and Mustafa's travels along the Nile and to England reject racism and assumptions of European supremacy and uncover the natural compulsion toward life and humanity among the people of the Sudan. The novel is also interesting to read because of the masterful use of metaphors and poetic phrasing and makes constant references to poets, such as Abu Nuwas, and Arab folklore, such as the afreet or ifrit spirits. The novel is also quite comedic, despite the horrendous murder and suffering of the characters. Mustafa, "the black Englishman," concocted lies of all sorts to play up to stereotypes of Africa and Arabs to bed as many white women as possible, going to such lengths as organizing his apartment in a harem-like bedroom and deliberately exaggerating and lying about African cultures. His misdirected desire to avenge Africa for European hegemony, manifested in the form of sleeping with various white women and having a disastrous impact on their lives, also causes Mustafa's own downfall after his marriage to Jean Morris. Simple sexual conquests from an invader from the South will not liberate Africa, but only further the conquest and control of female bodies, reinforcing patriarchy and colonialism.
Nevertheless, it's also interesting to see a story set on the Nile's other vast nations beyond Egypt, since the Sudan and Ethiopia have just as much of a claim and dependence on its affluence for sustaining life. Salih's accurate, poetic language conjures images of the desert, the Nile's bountiful waters, it's excesses as it inundates the land, and the mud and mud-brick homes of the villagers. He also depicts the conflicts between north and south, west and central in the novel by the marginalization and enslavement of darker-skinned, non-Arabic speakers from what is now South Sudan. Unfortunately, these dynamics are not fully explored, but Salih remains a constant critic of postcolonial Sudan's government corruption. Moreover, the novel's ambiguous ending for the narrator, in my mind, symbolizes the ambiguities of life and the problem of attaining balance between the north and south banks of the Nile, the West and the East. This duality, always ambiguous in Salih's novel, avoids making a pronounced denunciation of colonialism without likewise criticized local traditions, thereby echoing the crisis of the dichotomy in the lives of the narrator and Mustafa, two educated individuals caught between Sudan and England.
The best part is the structure of the novel fits a frame story, like Arabian Nights. The intertextuality obviously extends to Heart of Darkness as well because of the symbolic importance of the river, Africans going to Europe and during the narrator's own traveling in the Sudan, he encounters the spontaneous celebration with rural peoples, depicted as savage in Europe's projection of barbarity on Africa, but seen as life-affirming by the African narrator. Moreover, Mustafa, while in Europe, finds the worst of himself, the darkness of his heart which Kurtz finds in the Congo. Salih wrote an excellent reverse Heart of Darkness.