.
Tayeb Salih, one of the best known Arabic novelists of the 20th century, died on Wednesday in London, aged 80. The London GUARDIAN Photograph: Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates / The National / February 27, 2009
The Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, who died last week in London, used literature to rebuke both colonial powers and their liberated subjects.
Laila Lalami considers the enduring power of his masterpiece.
Mourners stand over Tayeb Salih’s coffin during his funeral in Khartoum on February 20. AFP
In 1966, when Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North was published in Beirut, most Arab and African nations had already achieved independence from European colonial rule. The Sudan, where Salih was born and raised, had been under home rule for a decade; the Congo, once the personal estate of King Leopold II, had won its freedom six years before; and Algeria, whose war of liberation cost the lives of one million people, had recently declared its independence. The mood in the newly established nations was defiant, passionate, full of hope. Ahmed Sékou Touré told Charles de Gaulle that, “There is no dignity without liberty. We prefer liberty in poverty to wealth in slavery.” In his first state speech, Kwame Nkrumah declared, “We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation.” Patrice Lumumba promised his countrymen, “We are going to begin a new struggle, a sublime struggle, which will lead our country to peace, prosperity, and greatness.”
Not long after independence, Sékou Touré turned into a brutal dictator: in the course of his 26-year reign, thousands of Guineans were jailed in concentration camps. Nkrumah, too, started to stifle dissent in Ghana and was later overthrown in a military coup. As for Lumumba, he had no time to govern: barely three months after his election, he was assassinated by Congolese rivals, who were working in collusion with Belgian and American intelligence services.
Salih chronicles this bitter start to the postcolonial age. In Season of Migration to the North, a local community representative – a man of limited formal education, but long practical experience – explains how independence movements, though necessary and rightful, would at first lead to a succession of rulers who would treat their people no differently than the colonisers:
“[The British] sowed hatred in the hearts of the people for us, their kinsmen, and love for the colonisers, the intruders. Mark these words of mine, my son. Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do.”
So precise is Salih’s assessment of both the colonial and the postcolonial condition, and so perceptive is his discussion of racial relationships under and after empire, that the novel continues to be widely read, discussed and studied today, more than forty years after its publication. But what makes Season of Migration to the North such an enduring book is its literary accomplishment: Salih’s masterful use of time, his depiction of place, his prose style, his seamless use of oral literary forms. Reading the text in Arabic, it is easy to see why a group of leading Arab critics joined together in 1976 to declare him “the genius of the Arabic novel.”
Salih was born in 1929 in Ed-Debba, a village on the banks of the Nile, in the northern province of the Sudan. His parents, Muhammad and Aisha, were local farmers. Salih went to the primary school in his village, but transferred to Port Sudan for junior high and to Omdurman for high school. At the University of Khartoum, he studied natural sciences, though he appears to have left without graduating. For a while he worked as a schoolteacher, but in 1953, at the age of 24, he decided to move to Great Britain. He completed a degree in international relations at the University of London and worked for the BBC Arabic Service, where he eventually became director of the drama section. A few years later, he relocated to Qatar to serve as director-general for the Ministry of Information. He moved once again, this time to Paris, to work for Unesco and serve as its representative in Qatar and Jordan. Finally he returned to London, where he lived until his death last week.
Salih’s first two books – a collection of stories and a novella, The Wedding of Zein – were published in the early 1960s. But it was Season of Migration to the North that would make his reputation. First serialised in the Lebanese magazine Hiwar in 1966, it was published in book form in 1967. Denys Johnson-Davies worked closely with Salih on the text, translating portions into English soon after the author finished writing them. Heinemann published the novel in its African Writers Series in 1969, and it has been in print in various English-language editions ever since.
Another novel would follow, Bandarshah. This was conceived as a trilogy, the first two volumes of which (Dau al-Beit and Meryoud) were published in 1971 and 1976. Salih said in interviews that he continued to work on the third volume, but it has never appeared in print. He did, however, write regular columns on literature, culture and politics for the London-based Arabic magazine Al Majallah, and those have been collected in nine volumes, published as Mukhtarat in 2004.
Season of Migration to the North begins with the return of an unnamed Sudanese man to his village on the banks of the Nile, after seven years spent studying poetry in Britain. At a gathering of family and friends, he notices a stranger, a middle-aged man who has remained silent while everyone else has been asking questions about life in distant Europe. The stranger turns out to be a certain Mustafa Sa‘eed, who moved to the village from the capital of Khartoum. Intrigued by the presence of a city man in an ancestral town, the narrator wants to know more, but Sa‘eed is reluctant to talk about himself. One night, after a few drinks, Sa‘eed begins to recite poetry in English. The narrator is shocked, not having expected that anyone in the village beside him would know any English poetry. Relentlessly, he asks Sa‘eed about his life, until Sa‘eed gives in.
And so begins the story within the story, also told in the first person: Sa‘eed is born in Khartoum at the turn of the century and loses his father at a young age. Without telling his mother, he enrols in a local grade school run by English missionaries. The headmaster, taking note of Sa‘eed’s natural talents, recommends that he continue on to high school. Sa‘eed journeys by train (by himself) to Cairo, where he lives with friends of the schoolmaster. After high school, he leaves Cairo behind, this time travelling to London, where he studies economics. He befriends many white women, of different backgrounds and levels of education, and uses their stereotypical expectations of him – they see in him “tropical climes, cruel sun, purple horizons” – to seduce them. Finally, he meets Jean Morris.
Unlike the other women, Morris doesn’t give in to Sa‘eed so easily. He pursues her until she agrees to marry him, but their union ends in tragedy; he murders her, in what appears to be a bizarre act of erotic fulfilment. After serving his sentence, he returns to the Sudan, moves to the village of Wad Hamid, and marries a local woman, to whom he is, by all accounts, a perfect husband. He fathers two children and leads a quiet life. The story doesn’t quite satisfy the narrator, and the mystery that surrounds Mustafa Sa‘eed only grows when he disappears, leaving behind a will in which he names the narrator as his trustee, begging him to spare the two children “the pangs of wanderlust”.
The narrator moves to Khartoum, where he becomes a civil servant, slowly rising through the postcolonial hierarchy. He wants to forget about Mustafa Sa‘eed, but on a visit to the village, he finds out that Sa‘eed’s widow is being pressured to marry an elderly womaniser. Now the narrator is confronted with his responsibility as trustee, a position he neither sought nor desired. His unwillingness – or inability – to act leads to yet another tragedy.
The two main characters in the book, the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Sa‘eed, travel between north and south; they move between eastern and western traditions; they speak English and Arabic; they live, at one point or another, in a village and in a city; they are foreign men in a white world, or foreign-educated men in a black world. And the story itself presents a duality for the reader: it is an oral story, as indicated by its beautiful first line: “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.” But it is told in a European literary form, the novel.
Season of Migration to the North was not the first book in which a writer of colour decided to “write back” to the Empire, of course. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965), Camara Laye’s Le Regard du Roi (1954), and Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), for instance, can all be seen as attempts to subvert European colonial discourse. But Season of Migration to the North is unique among these books in that it is written in the author’s native language, rather than the colonial one. Indeed, Salih stands out among African writers of his generation for his insistence on using Arabic in spite of having lived the majority of his life outside the Sudan. (“It’s a matter of principle,” he once told an interviewer.)
Salih, however, took a different approach from that of Arab writers belonging to the Nahda – the literary renaissance movement that came into being in Egypt starting in the late 19th century, which was still influential at the time Salih was writing. Proponents of the Nahda were usually men who had gone on their own migrations to the north and returned to Egypt determined to emulate European civilisation. But their views tended to be quite schizophrenic, in that they advocated material modernity (scientific, technological and artistic) within the moral framework of Islamic traditions.
This kind of rosy conciliation between modernity and tradition, a hallmark of Nahda-era novels, is absent from Season of Migration to the North. The narrator initially thinks that his seven-year migration is a mere parenthesis, and that life can resume its course for him, but he soon discovers that he has been permanently changed. His doctorate in poetry has not prepared him for the tasks he has to take up in a newly independent country, and he is reduced to having to follow along, while the leaders of the ruling party – to which he belongs – drive the country to ruin.
The abundant literary references in Season of Migration to the North might give the impression that Salih simply set out to respond to stories – both eastern and western – about the “Other.” But the novel can also be read independently of these references, and Season is at its most powerful as a modern Arab-African story: two men who migrate north in pursuit of knowledge and return home to find that, in the intervening years, their country has changed just as much as they have.
Although it was written at the time of the collapse of European colonialism in Africa, Season of Migration to the North remains highly relevant today. One of the persistent metaphors in the novel is that of colonialism as a disease – it spreads from one people to the next and from one continent to the next, leaving behind it a steady trail of violence and destruction. At Mustafa Sa‘eed’s trial, the defence lawyer argues : “These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa‘eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.” The mention of the Roman invasion of Britain might give the reader pause, but this image is expanded upon throughout the novel, its effect growing and becoming clearer with each mention.
Indeed, many years after the trial, while recounting the event to the narrator, Sa’eed adds: “[The British] imported to [the Sudanese] the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago.” Still later, when the narrator discusses the prospects of independent Sudan with a local councilman, he is told: “Everyone who is educated today [in the Sudan] wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected to the reality of our life, which is more dangerous to the future of Africa than imperialism itself.” In this way, Salih draws a direct line from the Roman Empire to the German Empire, from European colonialism to Africa’s postcolonial disappointment. Our great tragedy is that we continue to be entirely heedless of the warnings of history.
Laila Lalami’s introduction to a new edition of
Season of Migration of the North, from which this article is adapted, will be published by New York Review Classics in April.
Click to read Obituary
Cairo-based
Denys Johnson-Davies reflects on the life of the great novelist, his colleague and friend
Tayeb Salih (1929 – 2009).
© Copyright of Abu Dhabi Media Company FZLLC
Tayeb Salih, one of the best known Arabic novelists of the 20th century, died on Wednesday in London, aged 80. The London GUARDIAN Photograph: Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates / The National / February 27, 2009
The Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, who died last week in London, used literature to rebuke both colonial powers and their liberated subjects. Laila Lalami considers the enduring power of his masterpiece.
Mourners stand over Tayeb Salih’s coffin during his funeral in Khartoum on February 20. AFP
In 1966, when Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North was published in Beirut, most Arab and African nations had already achieved independence from European colonial rule. The Sudan, where Salih was born and raised, had been under home rule for a decade; the Congo, once the personal estate of King Leopold II, had won its freedom six years before; and Algeria, whose war of liberation cost the lives of one million people, had recently declared its independence. The mood in the newly established nations was defiant, passionate, full of hope. Ahmed Sékou Touré told Charles de Gaulle that, “There is no dignity without liberty. We prefer liberty in poverty to wealth in slavery.” In his first state speech, Kwame Nkrumah declared, “We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation.” Patrice Lumumba promised his countrymen, “We are going to begin a new struggle, a sublime struggle, which will lead our country to peace, prosperity, and greatness.”
Not long after independence, Sékou Touré turned into a brutal dictator: in the course of his 26-year reign, thousands of Guineans were jailed in concentration camps. Nkrumah, too, started to stifle dissent in Ghana and was later overthrown in a military coup. As for Lumumba, he had no time to govern: barely three months after his election, he was assassinated by Congolese rivals, who were working in collusion with Belgian and American intelligence services.
Salih chronicles this bitter start to the postcolonial age. In Season of Migration to the North, a local community representative – a man of limited formal education, but long practical experience – explains how independence movements, though necessary and rightful, would at first lead to a succession of rulers who would treat their people no differently than the colonisers:
“[The British] sowed hatred in the hearts of the people for us, their kinsmen, and love for the colonisers, the intruders. Mark these words of mine, my son. Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do.”
So precise is Salih’s assessment of both the colonial and the postcolonial condition, and so perceptive is his discussion of racial relationships under and after empire, that the novel continues to be widely read, discussed and studied today, more than forty years after its publication. But what makes Season of Migration to the North such an enduring book is its literary accomplishment: Salih’s masterful use of time, his depiction of place, his prose style, his seamless use of oral literary forms. Reading the text in Arabic, it is easy to see why a group of leading Arab critics joined together in 1976 to declare him “the genius of the Arabic novel.”
Salih was born in 1929 in Ed-Debba, a village on the banks of the Nile, in the northern province of the Sudan. His parents, Muhammad and Aisha, were local farmers. Salih went to the primary school in his village, but transferred to Port Sudan for junior high and to Omdurman for high school. At the University of Khartoum, he studied natural sciences, though he appears to have left without graduating. For a while he worked as a schoolteacher, but in 1953, at the age of 24, he decided to move to Great Britain. He completed a degree in international relations at the University of London and worked for the BBC Arabic Service, where he eventually became director of the drama section. A few years later, he relocated to Qatar to serve as director-general for the Ministry of Information. He moved once again, this time to Paris, to work for Unesco and serve as its representative in Qatar and Jordan. Finally he returned to London, where he lived until his death last week.
Salih’s first two books – a collection of stories and a novella, The Wedding of Zein – were published in the early 1960s. But it was Season of Migration to the North that would make his reputation. First serialised in the Lebanese magazine Hiwar in 1966, it was published in book form in 1967. Denys Johnson-Davies worked closely with Salih on the text, translating portions into English soon after the author finished writing them. Heinemann published the novel in its African Writers Series in 1969, and it has been in print in various English-language editions ever since.
Another novel would follow, Bandarshah. This was conceived as a trilogy, the first two volumes of which (Dau al-Beit and Meryoud) were published in 1971 and 1976. Salih said in interviews that he continued to work on the third volume, but it has never appeared in print. He did, however, write regular columns on literature, culture and politics for the London-based Arabic magazine Al Majallah, and those have been collected in nine volumes, published as Mukhtarat in 2004.
Season of Migration to the North begins with the return of an unnamed Sudanese man to his village on the banks of the Nile, after seven years spent studying poetry in Britain. At a gathering of family and friends, he notices a stranger, a middle-aged man who has remained silent while everyone else has been asking questions about life in distant Europe. The stranger turns out to be a certain Mustafa Sa‘eed, who moved to the village from the capital of Khartoum. Intrigued by the presence of a city man in an ancestral town, the narrator wants to know more, but Sa‘eed is reluctant to talk about himself. One night, after a few drinks, Sa‘eed begins to recite poetry in English. The narrator is shocked, not having expected that anyone in the village beside him would know any English poetry. Relentlessly, he asks Sa‘eed about his life, until Sa‘eed gives in.
And so begins the story within the story, also told in the first person: Sa‘eed is born in Khartoum at the turn of the century and loses his father at a young age. Without telling his mother, he enrols in a local grade school run by English missionaries. The headmaster, taking note of Sa‘eed’s natural talents, recommends that he continue on to high school. Sa‘eed journeys by train (by himself) to Cairo, where he lives with friends of the schoolmaster. After high school, he leaves Cairo behind, this time travelling to London, where he studies economics. He befriends many white women, of different backgrounds and levels of education, and uses their stereotypical expectations of him – they see in him “tropical climes, cruel sun, purple horizons” – to seduce them. Finally, he meets Jean Morris.
Unlike the other women, Morris doesn’t give in to Sa‘eed so easily. He pursues her until she agrees to marry him, but their union ends in tragedy; he murders her, in what appears to be a bizarre act of erotic fulfilment. After serving his sentence, he returns to the Sudan, moves to the village of Wad Hamid, and marries a local woman, to whom he is, by all accounts, a perfect husband. He fathers two children and leads a quiet life. The story doesn’t quite satisfy the narrator, and the mystery that surrounds Mustafa Sa‘eed only grows when he disappears, leaving behind a will in which he names the narrator as his trustee, begging him to spare the two children “the pangs of wanderlust”.
The narrator moves to Khartoum, where he becomes a civil servant, slowly rising through the postcolonial hierarchy. He wants to forget about Mustafa Sa‘eed, but on a visit to the village, he finds out that Sa‘eed’s widow is being pressured to marry an elderly womaniser. Now the narrator is confronted with his responsibility as trustee, a position he neither sought nor desired. His unwillingness – or inability – to act leads to yet another tragedy.
The two main characters in the book, the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Sa‘eed, travel between north and south; they move between eastern and western traditions; they speak English and Arabic; they live, at one point or another, in a village and in a city; they are foreign men in a white world, or foreign-educated men in a black world. And the story itself presents a duality for the reader: it is an oral story, as indicated by its beautiful first line: “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.” But it is told in a European literary form, the novel.
Season of Migration to the North was not the first book in which a writer of colour decided to “write back” to the Empire, of course. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965), Camara Laye’s Le Regard du Roi (1954), and Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), for instance, can all be seen as attempts to subvert European colonial discourse. But Season of Migration to the North is unique among these books in that it is written in the author’s native language, rather than the colonial one. Indeed, Salih stands out among African writers of his generation for his insistence on using Arabic in spite of having lived the majority of his life outside the Sudan. (“It’s a matter of principle,” he once told an interviewer.)
Salih, however, took a different approach from that of Arab writers belonging to the Nahda – the literary renaissance movement that came into being in Egypt starting in the late 19th century, which was still influential at the time Salih was writing. Proponents of the Nahda were usually men who had gone on their own migrations to the north and returned to Egypt determined to emulate European civilisation. But their views tended to be quite schizophrenic, in that they advocated material modernity (scientific, technological and artistic) within the moral framework of Islamic traditions.
This kind of rosy conciliation between modernity and tradition, a hallmark of Nahda-era novels, is absent from Season of Migration to the North. The narrator initially thinks that his seven-year migration is a mere parenthesis, and that life can resume its course for him, but he soon discovers that he has been permanently changed. His doctorate in poetry has not prepared him for the tasks he has to take up in a newly independent country, and he is reduced to having to follow along, while the leaders of the ruling party – to which he belongs – drive the country to ruin.
The abundant literary references in Season of Migration to the North might give the impression that Salih simply set out to respond to stories – both eastern and western – about the “Other.” But the novel can also be read independently of these references, and Season is at its most powerful as a modern Arab-African story: two men who migrate north in pursuit of knowledge and return home to find that, in the intervening years, their country has changed just as much as they have.
Although it was written at the time of the collapse of European colonialism in Africa, Season of Migration to the North remains highly relevant today. One of the persistent metaphors in the novel is that of colonialism as a disease – it spreads from one people to the next and from one continent to the next, leaving behind it a steady trail of violence and destruction. At Mustafa Sa‘eed’s trial, the defence lawyer argues : “These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa‘eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.” The mention of the Roman invasion of Britain might give the reader pause, but this image is expanded upon throughout the novel, its effect growing and becoming clearer with each mention.
Indeed, many years after the trial, while recounting the event to the narrator, Sa’eed adds: “[The British] imported to [the Sudanese] the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago.” Still later, when the narrator discusses the prospects of independent Sudan with a local councilman, he is told: “Everyone who is educated today [in the Sudan] wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected to the reality of our life, which is more dangerous to the future of Africa than imperialism itself.” In this way, Salih draws a direct line from the Roman Empire to the German Empire, from European colonialism to Africa’s postcolonial disappointment. Our great tragedy is that we continue to be entirely heedless of the warnings of history.
Laila Lalami’s introduction to a new edition of Season of Migration of the North, from which this article is adapted, will be published by New York Review Classics in April.
Click to read Obituary
Cairo-based Denys Johnson-Davies reflects on the life of the great novelist, his colleague and friend Tayeb Salih (1929 – 2009).
© Copyright of Abu Dhabi Media Company FZLLC
