More than Sudan’s Heart of Darkness

Tayeb Salih: Season of Migration to the North Translated by: Denys Johnson-Davies Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers Length: 169 pages

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is central to 20th-century African literature and Arabic-language literature, but it’s more of a “never-yet-known” than forgotten book to us. Despite being a staple on university syllabuses, it has never quite gained the same popular traction as anglophone works such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. In the hands of Johnson-Davies (one of the past century’s greatest literary translators), the work is so tautly lyrical that it may as well have been written in English.

Its central character, Mustafa Sa’eed is a figure of inhuman genius and sexual prowess; his closest antecedent is Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, and Season is sometimes referred to as an inverted Heart of Darkness, in which the African subject finds his own madness inside the dark heart of Europe. There are definite parallels in the structure and narration of both books, but Sa’eed is more than Kurtz’s shadow. He is cold and intellectually masterful, progressing up through the colonial education system to become a widely read author and popular wit of London’s leftist circles, a necessary man. He is also the cruelest Lothario, serially seducing women then leaving them to their own suicides. When he finally meets one woman whom he cannot seduce, he marries her, loves her, murders her — and returns, broken, to Sudan after seven years in prison.

The first half of his story is told to the narrator before Sa’eed’s apparent suicide in the flooded upper Nile, and the second half read in Sa’eed’s diary by the narrator several years later. At the centre of the book is the story of Sa’eed’s local widow, whom he had married after his return to Sudan. When in her widowhood she is married off to an old landowner, she will not knuckle under to tradition and be possessed, but slaughters her new husband even as he rapes her to death.

Across this complex plot, seemingly never his own story, the narrator’s breathy presence plays like a skittish brush fire. From the opening pages, we know the narrator as a PhD in British poetry; Sa’eed is gradually revealed as his greater and more terrible alter ego. The narrator comes to love and to lose Sa’eed’s widow. He even tries to die Sa’eed’s death. The last scene of the novella has him attempt to swim north across the Nile, in an attempt to free himself from his rage at Sa’eed: he sinks, he struggles upward, he cries for help — and then the words stop.

This book is political — and yet never politically simple. It is reflexively opposed to colonialism without a single unjust Englishman. It is nationalist without caring for the nation. It is entranced with the warmth and easy laughter of the same Sudanese countryside which brutalizes its daughters. Perhaps the best way to think of the work is as a presentation of the possible roads for those stumbling through colonialism’s hangover. Sa’eed’s path of engagement with the West is simultaneously the route of maximum consciousness and maximum contradiction: perfect love and hatred, inseparable and entwined. In contrast, the post-independence life of the riverside village is a place of averages and accommodation. There is curiosity about the ways of Khartoum, or Cairo, or London, but this is always outweighed by the familiar rhythms of agriculture, coarse sexuality, and inattentive piety.

It would therefore be less than accurate to call this a novella about the divergent possibilities of cosmopolitan versus xenophobic selfunder standings in the years after Sudanese independence. It is a human novella about greatness versus reversion to the mean, expressed in the terms of its historical situation. Salih’s analysis of the relationship of sexuality to proud achievement in those raised under colonial governments is not limited to its historical circumstances: there are deeper structures at work, of ambition and repulse, of desire and selfscorn, of regret and renewal. Most of us will never have to choose between stardom abroad and cultural loyalty at home, but we can all understand the pressure of the choice. Daniel Fried is an associate professor at the University of Alberta. He teaches classes on world literature and literary theory for the comparative literature program, and classes on Chinese literature for the department of East Asian studies. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ ChinaCompLitter, or email dfried@ualberta.ca.