Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is a fine-tuned web of a novel that ends with the unnamed narrator wading into the nearby water of the river Nile. He ends the water questioning whether he was “asleep or awake…alive or dead?” and finds himself “unable to continue, unable to return.”
These existential questions come as the logical conclusion to a novel where the boundaries of seemingly binary worlds are highlighted as deeply precarious, unstable, and fluid. In the water, drowning literally, symbolically, and metaphorically, the narrator ends the novel by asserting, “Like a comic actor shouting on a stage, I screamed with all my remaining strength, ‘Help! Help!’”
But asserting that we are all players on a world stage would be a gross simplification of one of the most intriguing postcolonial novels. For one, its narrative framing – that of an unnamed narrator sharing the story of another character named Mustafa Sa’eed – centralises the theme that the stories we tell are connected to the person doing the talking.
Stories told depend on the person doing the talking. But what if the person talking is paradoxically impossible to name or define and keeps signalling that they are easy to name or define? Put in a way that I want it, what if they position themselves out of the box by ensuring they are given attributes commonly found in that box?
Summary of Season of Migration to the North
Season of Migration to the North begins with the unnamed narrator returning to his Sudanese village after studying in England for seven years. He is happy to return to his homeland. Still, his return is marked by discovering a mysterious man named Mustafa Sa’eed, who has settled in the village during the narrator’s absence. Mustafa is an enigmatic figure, and the villagers know little about his past.
Mustafa reveals his knowledge of English poetry one evening, piquing the narrator’s curiosity. Mustafa then shares his life story with the narrator, which becomes the novel’s central narrative. Mustafa was a child prodigy who excelled in colonial schools in Sudan and was sent to study in Cairo and then London. In England, he became a successful academic but also engaged in a series of destructive relationships with English women, exploiting their fascination with his exotic background.
Mustafa’s relationships with these women end tragically, with three of them committing suicide. His most tumultuous relationship is with Jean Morris, an English woman who resists his control and ultimately provokes him into a violent confrontation. Mustafa kills Jean in a fit of rage and is subsequently tried for her murder. He is sentenced to seven years in prison, after which he wanders through various countries before returning to Sudan.
Back in the village, Mustafa marries a local woman and tries to lead a quiet life. However, his past continues to haunt him. During a flood, Mustafa disappears, presumed dead, leaving his family and property in the care of the narrator. The narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with Mustafa’s story and the secret room in Mustafa’s house, which contains books and artefacts from his life in England.
The narrator’s own life becomes entangled with Mustafa’s legacy when an elderly villager, Wad Rayyes, expresses a desire to marry Mustafa’s widow, Hosna Bint Mahmoud. Hosna vehemently opposes the marriage, threatening to kill anyone who tries to force her into it. Despite her protests, the marriage is arranged, leading to a tragic outcome. Hosna kills Wad Rayyes and then herself, shocking the village.
Distraught by these events, the narrator enters Mustafa’s secret room and is confronted with the remnants of Mustafa’s double life. He feels a deep sense of betrayal and disillusionment. In a moment of existential crisis, the narrator goes for a swim in the Nile and finds himself struggling to reach the shore.
My Season of Migration to the North Notes
Unsurprisingly, the first woman that Mustafa Sa’eed encounters is his mother. The relationship Mustafa Sa’eed has with his mother is complex. She remains shut up to him and hidden behind “a thick mask, or rather a series of masks”. He describes her as “some stranger on the road with whom circumstances had chanced to bring me.” This suggests a lack of a rooted connection with her.
To him, she is an NPC-like character in his life who happened to birth him. He does not see her again once he goes to Cairo for school. What can be seen here is a separation from what created him – his mother – and what he believes will develop him: education. Mustafa Sa’eed appears to think the not-uncommon idea during British colonial times that education would grant him equal access in an inherently unequal system.
The separation from that which he is roped into is further extended by introducing another female into his life: Mrs Elizabeth Robinson. She becomes a guardian figure to Mustafa Sa’eed as she maintains contact with him during his life in Europe. During their initial meeting, Mustafa Sa’eed notes a “vague sexual yearning I had never previously experienced.” This is a pivotal emotion throughout the novel. It begins Mustafa Sa’eed’s connection with European women as a cure for his sexual desires.
This is just one connection among many. Additionally, the web-like narrative of Season of Migration to the North creates a structure of interconnectedness. For this reason, it would be oversimplistic to develop a cause-and-effect explanation for why Mustafa Sa’eed later declares, “I’ll liberate Africa with my penis.” Psychoanalytic frames to explain colonised subjects were in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s: Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth appeared roughly five years before Tayeb’s novel.
Reading the book outside of its historical context can lead to a misunderstanding about Mustafa Sa’eed’s desire to conquer Europe with his penis – not to mention the argument that this statement is a satire against colonial expectations or an early take on postmodern irony and its connected cynicism.
Season of Migration to the North can be cast as a novel that falls into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls “The Age of Independence” in the African novel. That Mustafa Sa’eed was anti-colonial in the simple colonial powers ruined Africa way is indisputable: he himself wrote books like The Rape of Africa and The Cross and Gunpowder, both titles that suggest visceral reactions to European colonisation.
But while the character’s actions, and the story itself, can be so easily framed through the lens of a critic acting like an analyst, the structure of the text is either too ‘chopped up in bits’ to present a (failed) consciousness or is joined too perfectly by the unnamed narrator that we are compelled to see Mustafa Sa’eed mind in line with the river Nile or Thames.
The relationship between geographic entities and the body creates many symbolic possibilities throughout the next. Of Mrs Robinson, Mustafa Sa’eed notes that “Cairo, that large mountain to which my camel had carried me, was a European woman just like Mrs Robinson.” Conquering Cairo is like conquering a mountain is like conquering a European woman: all of which are achievements forming part of his migration further north towards England.
Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood, two of the women who killed themselves after being with Mustafa Sa’eed, provide ammunition for those who call Tayeb’s novel deeply misogynistic. It’s noted, for instance, that Mustafa Sa’eed saw Ann as “easy prey”. Additionally, Sheila Greenwood was supposedly so timid that “she died without a single word passing her lips”. Their voicelessness and lack of power are worth unpacking, but I am more interested in them as two of many women throughout the text.
Mustafa Sa’eed’s relationship with Isabella Seymour, for instance, is filled with self-assertion on her part. When he tells her one of his many fake names – introducing himself as “Amin Hassan” here – she replies that she shall call him “Hassan”. While this might seem like a minor statement by Isabella, it does have significance.
She decides what she shall call him, but her decision is based on an initial lie from Mustafa Sa’eed about his true identity. And his own creation comes with history. He goes on to share with her “fabricated stories about deserts of golden sands and jungles where non-existent animals called out to one another.”
Within this act of naming is a microcosm at the heart of identity in the novel: Mustafa tells Orientalist fantasies that the women are all too naive and racist to think of as untrue, but at the same time as Isabella is falling into his trap, she still holds the ability to call him what she likes. The two of them are mutually engaged in an identity-constructing process whose basis is deceit and power. The truth that communication should bring is all but devoid.
The woman Mustafa Sa’eed goes on to kill is called Jean Morris. She is set apart from the other women in that he admits to intentionally killing her. The fact that their relationship would be tumultuous (to say the least) is evident from their first encounter. Unlike the other women, Jean clearly expresses her feelings towards his body.
He calls him “ugly” and states, “I’ve never seen an uglier face than yours.” Jean becomes the woman who either won’t let their exotic desires take hold or alternatively lays the racism inherent in her exoticism bare. Whatever her intentions, thoughts, or desires, Mustafa Sa’eed stabs her with a knife – the phallic connection between this and his liberation statement is almost too self-evident.
Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen, an Oxford professor who taught Mustafa Sa’eed, defends him during this murder trial. Professor Foster-Keen states that “these girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.” Mustafa Sa’eed is quick to note to himself that the Professor had “turned the trial into a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which I was one of the victims.” It’s not surprising that Mustafa Sa’eed is not called to testify himself.
What is being said here is that Mustafa Sa’eed is not being understood as a person. Instead, he is being cast into an identity diseased with barbarism over which he has no control. Moreover, by denying that he was the driver of his own actions, his struggle for liberation is ignored. All that matters is the voice of a grand old Oxford man and their pre-conceived ideas of others.
The final death in the novel – not counting the potential narrator’s death at the end of the novel – occurs between Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa’s wisdom, and her newly appointed husband, Wad Rayyes. After hearing that she is being forced to remarry, she states: “If they force me to marry, I’ll kill him and myself.” But her statement is ignored. She then kills Wad Rayyes and herself.
The village’s response is to cover up the incident. Their reasoning is interesting. They declare that it is “something we have never seen or heard of in times past or present”. Of course it is something never seen or heard of: past incidents would have also been covered up. Again, we see that an ignored voice opens up some kind of dark historical hole that supposedly has no precedent of equal acknowledgement.
Voice and its connection to who is or isn’t speaking is central to how the novel’s plot unfolds and how its story is shared. The character’s own impressions of Mustafa Sa’eed influence how they see him and his place in the world. Mustafa Sa’eed, acutely aware of this, acts into their impressions as part of some kind of liberation struggle. Stereotyping and the silent voices that inevitably arise alongside them are portrayed as ultimately wrong, but they are shown to be a common characteristic.
This idea – if it is true – might explain why the unnamed narrator felt compelled to both commit suicide and subsequently scream to be saved at the end of the novel. Just like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness exposed the depraved kernel of colonisation, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is, at its core, a vitiated novel. Its forms and structures are beautifully unstable in their approach to uncovering the story of Mustafa Sa’eed through an unnamed narrator whose life is parallel.
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Kris Van der Bijl 
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