Season of Migration to the North (2 page)

Most of Salih’s novels and short stories are set in the
fictional village of Wad Hamid in northern Sudan and form a continuous
narrative cycle — the Wad Hamid Cycle — which spans the period from the mid-nineteenth
century to the 1970s. The main narrator of the Wad Hamid Cycle appears as a
child in the early short story
‘A Handful of Dates’
, then again as the
narrator in
Season of Migration to the North
, a young man who has just
returned from England with a Ph.D. in English literature shortly after Sudanese
Independence in 1956. He does not appear in
The Wedding of Zein
, which
has a third- person omniscient narrator, but returns as a middle-aged man in Salih’s
1976 short story
‘The Cypriot Man'
, and as a disenchanted and nostalgic
old man in
Bandarshah
. He is identified as Meheimeed in that novel, but
remains unnamed in the other works.

Like
Season of Migration to the North
, several of Salih’s
fictions deal with the impact of colonialism and modernity on rural Sudanese
society in particular and Arab culture in general. In his highly acclaimed
short story ‘
The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid’
, the attempts of both colonial
and postcolonial governments to impose modernisation programmes threaten to
sever the villagers’ ties to their spiritual world. Set a few years after
Sudanese Independence and narrated by an elderly villager, the story registers
the bitterness and resignation of the elders who find themselves unable to
preserve their way of life as their children, educated in modern schools,
eagerly set the village on an irreversible course of modernisation. Members of
this younger generation become the village leaders in
The Wedding of Zein
.
They oversee the introduction of modern schools, hospitals and irrigation
schemes into the village and manage most of its other affairs. They present
themselves as benign, responsible, yet shrewd politicians who are capable of
harmoniously integrating traditional culture with ‘progress’, as they conceive
it. They befriend and protect the protagonist, Zein, a village idiot regarded
as a saintly fool in the tradition of Sufi dervishes. Zein’s marriage to the
most desirable girl in the village represents the spiritual unification of the
community as well as the leaders’ ability to bring together the sometimes
contentious factions within the village. As such, the novella constructs a
utopia in which, despite the shortcomings of the central government, the new
nation succeeds at the local level in fulfilling its material and spiritual
potential.

Such idealism is shattered, however, in Salih’s next novel,
Season
of Migration to the North
, which depicts the violent history of colonialism
as shaping the reality of contemporary Arab and African societies. A naively
optimistic, British-educated Meheimeed confronts his double, Mustafa Sa’eed, a
Kurtz-like figure who uses the power of racist stereotypes of Africans as
hyper-sexual and of Arabia’s exotic appeal to Europeans to seduce and
manipulate English women, who for him stands in metonymic relationship to the
British Empire, ruled over as it was in its heyday by a mighty woman, Queen Victoria.
One source of the novel’s power is its dramatisation of the ways in which
colonial hegemony is inextricably mixed with racial and gender hierarchies, an
explosive mix the destructiveness of which is graphically illustrated in the
novel. As the story continues in Wad Hamid, an unprecedented murder-suicide
shocks and enrages the villagers and unveils the violence of traditional
patriarch); linking it in kind to sexualised colonial violence. In this way the
novel shows that the synthesis of traditional culture and modern ideas
envisioned in the liberal discourse of the Nahda and given such poetic expression
in
The Wedding of Zein
cannot succeed in the shadow of colonial and
patriarchal hegemony.

The crisis of Arab consciousness, ideology and leadership in
the late 1960s and 1970s and which led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is
the subtext in Salih’s third novel,
Bandarshah
, which centres on the
relationship between past, present and future; or, in the mythical-allegorical
scheme of the novel, grand-fathers, fathers and grandsons. This problematic
relationship is depicted as a vicious cycle in which the past repeats itself:
grand-sons are ever in conspiracy with grandfathers (of whom they are the split
image and whose first name they always bear) against fathers. The novel
suggests that the vicious cycle can be broken only when the rigid patriarchal
order reflected in the novel’s central allegory is broken.

In the turbulent decades that give the Wad Hamid Cycle its
temporal frame, the contours of personal, cultural and national identity shift,
sometimes violently within a complex matrix of values, traditions,
institutions, power relations, new ideas and social and international pressures.
Colonisation and decolonisation involve the redrawing of boundaries, within and
across which human beings suffer the traumas of continuity and discontinuity In
tackling the questions of cultural memory and identity the impact of
colonialism on Arab and African societies, the relationship between modernisation
and traditional belief systems, social reform, political authority and the
status of women, Salih’s fiction vividly portrays those dislocations and
enables a vision of human community based on greater justice, peace and
understanding, rather than rigid boundaries jealously guarded by antagonistic
communities.

Wail  S. Hassan

Champaign
, 2008 

FOR
FURTHER REFERENCE

Amyuni,
Mona Takieddine, ed.
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North: A
Casebook
(Beirut: American University of Beirut Press: 1985)

Hassan,
Wail S.
Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction
(Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2003)

It
was, gentlemen, after a long absence
— seven years to be exact, during
which time I was studying in Europe — that I returned to my people. I learnt
much and much passed me by — but that’s another story. The important thing is
that I returned with a great yearning for my people in that small village at
the bend of the Nile. For seven years I had longed for them, had dreamed of
them, and it was an extraordinary moment when I at last found myself standing
amongst them. They rejoiced at having me back and made a great fuss, and it was
not long before I felt as though a piece of ice were melting inside of me, as
though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone — that life
warmth of the tribe which I had lost for a time in a land ‘whose fishes die of
the cold’. My ears had become used to their voices, my eyes grown accustomed to
their forms. Because of having thought so much about them during my absence,
something rather like fog rose up between them and me the first instant I saw
them. But the fog cleared and I awoke, on the second day of my arrival, in my
familiar bed in the room whose walls had witnessed the trivial incidents of my
life in childhood and the onset of adolescence. I listened intently to the
wind: that indeed was a sound well known to me, a sound which in our village
possessed a merry whispering — the sound of the wind passing through palm trees
is different from when it passes through fields of corn. I heard the cooing of
the turtle-dove, and I looked through the window at the palm tree standing in
the courtyard of our house and I knew that all was still well with life. I
looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down into the
ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I
experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but
like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose.

My mother brought tea. My father, having finished his prayers
and recitations from the Koran, came along. Then my sister and brothers came
and we all sat down and drank tea and talked, as we have done ever since my
eyes opened on life. Yes, life is good and the world as unchanged as ever.

Suddenly I recollected having seen a face I did not know
among those who had been there to meet me. I asked about him, described him to
them: a man of medium height, of around fifty or slightly older, his hair thick
and going grey, beardless and with a moustache slightly smaller than those worn
by men in the village; a handsome man.

‘That would be Mustafa,’ said my father.

Mustafa who? Was he one of the villagers who’d gone abroad
and had now returned?

My father said that Mustafa was not a local man but a
stranger who had come here five years ago, had bought himself a farm, built a
house and married Mahmoud’s daughter — a man who kept himself to himself and
about whom not much was known.

I do not know what exactly aroused my curiosity but I
remembered that the day of my arrival he was silent. Everyone had put questions
to me and I to them. They had asked me about Europe. Were the people there like
us or were they different? Was life expensive or cheap? What did people do in
winter? They say that the women are unveiled and dance openly with men. ‘Is it
true,’ Wad Rayyes asked me, ‘that they don’t marry but that a man lives with a
woman in sin?’

As best I could I had answered their many questions. They
were surprised when I told them that Europeans were, with minor differences,
exactly like them, marrying and bringing up their children in accordance with
principles and traditions, that they had good morals and were in general good
people.

Are there any farmers among them?’ Mahjoub asked me.

‘Yes, there are some farmers among them. They’ve got
everything — workers and doctors and farmers and teachers, just like us.’ I
preferred not to say the rest that had come to my mind: that just like us they
are born and die, and in the journey from the  cradle to the grave they dream
dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear
the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some
are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve
by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are
narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak. I did not say this to Mahjoub,
though I wish I had done so, for he was intelligent; in my conceit I was afraid
he would not understand.

Bint Majzoub laughed. ‘We were afraid,’ she said, ‘you’d
bring back with you an uncircumcised infidel
*
for a wife.’ But Mustafa had said nothing. He had listened
in silence, sometimes smiling; a smile which, I now remember, was mysterious,
like someone talking to himself

I
forgot Mustafa after that, for I began to renew my relationship with people and
things in the village. I was happy during those days, like a child that sees
its face in the mirror for the first time. My mother never wearied of telling
me of those who had died that I might go and pay my condolences and of those
who had married that I might go and offer my congratulations, and thus I
crossed the length and breadth of the village offering condolences and congratulations.
One day I went to my favourite place at the foot of the tall acacia tree on the
river bank. How many were the hours I had spent in my childhood under that
tree, throwing stones into the river and dreaming, my imagination straying to
far-off horizons! I would hear the groaning of the water-wheels on the river,
the exchange of shouts between people in the fields, and the lowing of an ox or
the braying of a donkey; Sometimes luck would be with me and a steamer would
pass by; going up or down-river. From my position under the tree I saw the
village slowly undergo a change: the waterwheels disappeared to be replaced on
the bank of the Nile by pumps, each one doing the work of a hundred water-wheels.
I saw the bank retreating year after year in front of the thrustings of the
water, while on another part it was the water that retreated. Sometimes strange
thoughts would come to my mind. Seeing the bank contracting at one place and
expanding at another, I would think that such was life: with a hand it gives,
with the other it takes. Perhaps, though, it was later that I realized this. In
any case I now realize this maxim, but with my mind only; for the muscles under
my skin are supple and compliant and my heart is optimistic. I want to take my
rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly; I want love to flow
from my heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be
visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls
of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand. I looked at the
river — its waters had begun to take on a cloudy look with the alluvial mud
brought down by the rains that must have poured in torrents on the hills of
Ethiopia — and at the men with their bodies learning against the ploughs or
bent over their hoes, and my eyes take in fields flat as the palm of a hand,
right up to the edge of the desert where the houses stand. I hear a bird sing
or a dog bark or the sound of an axe on wood — and I feel a sense of stability;
I feel that I am important, that I am continuous and integral. No, I am not a
stone thrown into the water but seed sown in a field. I go to my grandfather
and he talks to me of life forty years ago, fifty years ago, even eighty; and
my feeling of security is strengthened. I loved my grandfather and it seems
that he was fond of me. Perhaps one of the reasons for my friendship with him
was that ever since I was small stories of the past used to intrigue me, and my
grandfather loved to reminisce. Whenever I went away I was afraid he would die
in my absence. When overcome by yearning for my family I would see him in my
dreams; I told him this and he laughed and said, ‘When I was a young man a
fortune-teller told me that if I were to pass the age when the Prophet died —
that’s to say sixty — I’d reach a hundred.’ We worked out his age, he and I,
and found he had about twelve more years to go.