Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih | 1966 | New York Review Books | Paperback $ 14.95

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood — the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.

But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man — whom he has asked to look after his wife— in an unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

I’ve been making more of an effort to read works in translation, especially works from outside of the typical European and Euro-American classic lit canon. Season of Migration to the North is one of these selections — a novel written in Arabic by a Sudanese author, widely regarded by academics and critics as one of the most consequential post-colonial Arab-African books of the past century.

This book includes the intertwined stories of two men who left and then returned to their home in the valley of the Nile after an education and various adventures in England, as told by an unnamed narrator.

I’ll go ahead and admit that, once again, I am having some trouble deciding on a rating for this one. I’m sometimes torn between rating a book in a way that perhaps it probably ought to be rated by a for-real lit critic or an actual expert on a book’s topic, and rating solely on its ability to keep me personally interested or entertained.

First, let’s talk about the good stuff. The prose is beautifully descriptive, practically lyrical in places, even in translation; I can only assume it is particularly lovely in the original Arabic. Reading a book in translation is always a little bit of a risk; anything that is not quite satisfying about the writing might be blamed on the translator, even if they tried to be as faithful to the original as possible.

The book offers a carefully considered contrast between the worlds of the colonizers and the colonized, but is also an examination of the similarities between them. I’ve read a couple of other reviews that evoked Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which I think is a fair comparison; Season of Migration to the North might be considered a kind of answer to that story, an extension of its themes from the perspective of a native of a land targeted by rapacious colonizers.

That said, I did find it a little difficult to follow the storylines, as they tend to jump from the perspective of the narrator himself to that of his fellow returnee Mustafa, and not necessarily in timeline order. This is certainly on purpose, this bleeding of one storyline into the other as a means of conveying the connection between them, but I just don’t usually find that sort of thing particularly enjoyable as a reader.

But the thing that really started to get to me is the book’s treatment of women. Nearly all the women that either of the main characters encounter are merely objects, with the exception of one older woman who has some part in a dialogue with other characters, Bint Majzoub. She is too aged, by this time, to be especially sexualized, and so is allowed to drink and chat with the men (and is even described as manly, as though any lingering femininity about her must be removed), so long as she generally falls in line with their patriarchal interests; although she is allowed at least to speak frankly of sex from a feminine perspective, she is not allowed to, for example, protest an instance of marital rape or speak against the practice of female circumcision (more frequently termed female genital mutilation in contemporary terms).

Other women are treated as pawns in one character’s mission of inverting colonial subjugation by seducing and then discarding — sometimes violently — white women who are willing to exoticize him. In another case, a widow is forced against her will to remarry, even against the frankly rather milquetoast protestations of the narrator himself, with tragic consequences when she does eventually assert her own will. I feel quite sure that all of this is of a piece with the author’s intended critique of his own culture as well as + in contrast to that of the colonizers, but the end result is still a story in which the female characters are mainly just agentless objects that are used for making a narrative point. This is not really my cup of tea.

In the end, I’ve opted to err on the side of rating the book based on my own personal feelings, with the caveat that another reader with a deeper perspective of the historical context might get more out of it; likewise, someone who appreciates a little bit of poeticism-leaning-towards-ambiguity in storytelling may simply enjoy the the book a bit more. This is, after all, my own personal little bookish corner of the internet, not an academically rigorous sort of publication.

I think I could in any case recommend this book to other folks who are hungry for literature beyond the bounds of what is typically found in high school libraries in the global West, if one is not put off by the things I’ve just complained of; it might be worth a try particularly for folks who are interested in Arab-African culture or history.

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Links:

• Obituary of Tayeb Salih from The Guardian
• “The Season of Tayeb Salih: Crossing Boundaries” article from Al Jadid

Publication information: Salih, Tayeb. Season of migration to the north. New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2009. Print.
Source: Public library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products