Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
In the mid-twentieth century, the Sudanese-born narrator returns to his home country after seven years of British education. He settles in Khartoum, working as a minor bureaucrat in his newly independent nation’s department of education, where he forms the conviction that “Civil servants like me can’t change anything.”
On his monthly visit to his native village on the Upper Nile, he encounters Mustafa Sa’eed, a brilliant scholarship boy of Afro-Arab parentage who also spent many years in England, attending Oxford, teaching at the London School of Economics, and becoming a minor academic celebrity.
These two troubled men have something compelling in common: both need to straddle the almost unimaginably wide gulf between the hidebound Islamic traditions of the Nile farming village of their ancestors, and the academic western modernity they’ve inhabited in the west.
The book is suffused with sublime poetic imagery that evokes Mustafa’s longing for the country of his birth. “The glow of sundown is not blood but henna on a woman’s foot, and the breeze that carries us from the Nile Valley carries a perfume whose smell will not fade from my mind as long as I live.” He sees his life in images of Nile floods, caravanserais and camel halts, the memories according with the land of his birth.
The language and imagery is filled with oppositions and contradictions: control versus manipulation, hunter versus quarry, winter versus summer, torment versus pleasure, black versus white, lies versus truth, philosophy versus personality, Islam versus drunkenness, education versus superstition, Africa versus England, wife versus whore.
In the village scenes, the reader is exposed to the brutal consequences of the villagers’ behaviour. They gossip, yet maintain taboos against discussing important personal matters. They tacitly condone violence by ignoring it or blaming it on fate and luck. They keep the sexes mentally segregated, and relegate women to stark and simplistic oppositional categories. Fathers have charge of daughters, so that even a middle-aged widow with children has no say in who her next husband should be.
Scenes in London echo village attitudes of sexism and condoned violence. In London, Mustafa’s white British wife deliberately arouses her husband’s jealousy in order to incite a bar fight. The Englishman who separates the two quarreling males echoes words spoken in the village on the upper Nile when he comments casually, “I’m sorry to have to tell you, if this woman’s your wife, you’ve married a whore.”
The writer hints at the unseen effects of colonialism through subtle images such as that of two elephants arriving from Rangoon by ship and walking from Tilbury Docks to the London Zoo. In Mustafas’s locked and secret room, filled with western decor, books and artifacts, he writes that while the purpose of educating people is “to open up their minds and release their captive powers,” the results are unpredictable. He also notes leaving London as “Europe has begun to mobilize her armies once again for even more ferocious violence.”
The novel contains a thread of mystery and fatalism. Though all are brothers, “no one knows the mind of the Divine.” After a period of depression, the narrator, who has has become an increasingly unreliable reporter of events as the novel progresses, undergoes a kind of redemption, feeling as he swims desperately in the Nile that he is “able to rise up to the sky on a rope ladder.” In a moment of clarity, he realizes that after living his life without his own volition, after having “decided nothing,” he is at last able to make a conscious and clear decision to “choose life,” to discharge his duties, and spend time with his loved ones, regardless of whether life has meaning or not.