Season of Migration to the North

"He was Sudanese, from northern Sudan , where he grew up in a remote village that you can’t find on maps or in guidebooks. He was a very bright lad and went on to be educated in Khartoum and then London. He was to spend the greater part of his life in London, working as a journalist partly, and then later he worked as UNESCO official in Paris and elsewhere. So he spent most of his life outside the Arab world, but he was often at conferences and so on. His oeuvre is not vast – four novels, plus one that’s not finished, and some short stories, some of which are very important, and they almost all of them focus on a small village in the Sudan and a small troop of figures who reappear in the novels. Most of the stories and novels deal with a self-enclosed Sudanese Islamic community and, insofar as they relate to any other works of literature, they draw on the Qur’an, sayings of the prophets, Sufi legends and folklore. A Season of Migration to the North is different – it’s the same village, the same cast of characters, but it’s a novel about the clash of cultures, the intermixture of cultures. It’s a novel about what happens to a man, or two men, when they leave their village and go north, to England, the land where the fish die of cold, and get a western education, and some of the dangers of that. It’s a very strange and very complex novel. There’s no way of summarising its plot in an ordinary way because any summary will elide what’s actually going on. It’s a very subtle novel. There’s an awful lot to be said about the Arabian Nights references in it – the Nights is one of the novel’s major sources – but I’d also point out echoes of The Picture of Dorian Gray , The Student of Prague , Jekyll and Hyde , fantasy literature… Yes, the novel is clearly playing a game with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , and it’s complicated. In this case the actual heart of the darkness is not a compound with heads on stakes and a man who’s dying and whispering horrors, it’s a little bricked room in this house kept by one of two men returned from England. No one is allowed in it, it’s locked. When eventually it’s forced open after his death, it’s full of English books, just full of western culture. That’s the heart of darkness here. Yes, the story concerns a man who goes to England and who successfully seduces three women. Two of them commit suicide and the third dies of cancer and then there’s a fourth woman whom he can’t seduce. Eventually they are drawn, hideously, to one another and they marry and they hate each other. They fight and she lures him into killing her. He spends a surprisingly short time in prison and then returns to Sudan. “In this case the actual heart of the darkness is not a compound with heads on stakes, it’s a little bricked room full of books” Then there’s this other man who has a much more straightforward life. Yes, the narrator – he’s a big problem in this novel. Who is he? As I read the novel, either Mustafa Sa’eed is the double of the narrator, this sort of sinister extra figure, or the narrator is the double of Mustafa Sa’eed – it plays either way. So, it’s a pretty complicated novel and the title is ambiguous, the ending is ambiguous, and who is being addressed by the narrator is ambiguous – these are wonderful problems that it throws up. As far as the villagers are concerned, it’s an utterly amazing land where a woman will want to have sex with you at the drop of a hat, and all that kind of thing – the novel is very frank about sex. He goes to London – and London, of course, from the Sudanese perspective might be seen as a land of marvels – and he presents himself in a very particular way. In one case while he’s doing a seduction, he seems to be wilfully acting like Othello talking to Desdemona about the land with the men with no heads, and all the rest of it – he’s doing that kind of selling talk to seduce her. In another case, he presents himself as a kind of reincarnation of somebody who was alive in the days of Harun al-Rashid in old Baghdad. So he’s sort of pedalling a vision of the Orient or of Africa in order to have sex, and for him sex is strangely a form of vengeance against the west for their imperial invasion of Sudan and elsewhere. It’s an absurd sort of fantasy of his. Probably, yes. I wondered about that myself, but wasn’t sure if Salih had read Fanon. I’ve recently been told that he had. Yes, but for a while, now I think it’s not banned. The weight of approbation has just been too much. He won all sorts of awards in his lifetime and subsequently. Yes, that was voted by a whole gang of Arab intellectuals in Cairo some years back, and I’m certainly not going to challenge that verdict. It was written very soon after Sudan had achieved independence, and already the glowing hopes were being disappointed. You get this sort of current of thought in the novel, that ‘oh, the imperialist are pretty bad and they built railways in order to help their troops conquer us faster, and yet…independence is not what it’s cracked up to be either.’ There is a lot of discontent in the village with the way Khartoum is a fantasyland, cut off from and not caring about what’s really happening in the villages. So we see the discontent of the agriculturalists with the bureaucrats in the centre. In the early 90s I did a series of radio programmes on the Arabian Nights and I went to interview Salih on the Arabian Nights and what it meant to him, and what story telling was like in Sudan, and what was it like in the village he grew up in. He spoke wonderfully, in a very rich voice, and invoked the sheer boredom of nights in these villages without television or anything, just story telling. Buddhism was a more obvious thing to get interested in, I think. But, no, from a fairly early age, around the age of 10 onwards, I got really interested in the Crusades and I read more and more… So I decided I wanted to work in Crusade history, but all the work had been done and, I thought, there’s no more to be said. All the Latin and Greek sources had been covered – but what about the Arabic? Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So that was in the back of my mind when I went to Oxford University to read history. There, I fell in with a disreputable company, but also an interesting company, and I was led through them to go and look for miracles and spiritual truth in North Africa in the Sufi monastery. It was extraordinary – apart from the sheer weirdness and the magic of it all, it is very odd for someone who is studying the Middle Ages to find oneself walking through the door into the Middle Ages, where the miraculous exists in everything. After that, and after a not terribly brilliant history degree, I went to SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies, London University] and signed up to do what eventually became an incomplete PhD, on the re-conquests of the crusader states by the Mamluk Sultans. Yes. It seemed to me to be true. Sufism isn’t something that you can practise or believe in outside Islam; Sufism is the very heart of Islam. It’s not a philosophy – philosophy is far too arid and academic – and there are many different types of Sufism and even more interpretations of what Sufism is, but at the end of it all, it’s the spiritual heart of it Islam. Historically it begins as hardly more than asceticism and devotionalism, and as it evolves it builds up to have its own rituals and religious orders and initiations and chains of transmission. You even get, particularly in India, Sufis fighting one another in these spiritual battles in which one Sufi will force another Sufi out of the village by performing miracles better. The order I was in relied on regular performances of prayer, all very strictly orthodox, and one got up not only for dawn prayer but an earlier one too. We lived very simply. One relied, apart from the strict performances of the rituals, on recitation of the dhikr, a formula in praise of God, often phrases from the Qur’an or elsewhere, which we would say again and again. Not a trance state, no, but the recitation does things to one. Then there would be, at least once a week, a dance – not the sort you see with the Mevlevis, but very beautiful, a fast-moving dance involving the voicing of the name of God and it gets faster and faster until some sort of climax has been reached. Then it recommences and everybody’s arm in arm, going up and down. It’s quite frightening; from the outside, it’s quite like a war dance. And every now and again someone will make some garbled noise and fall to the ground, with lots of screaming and tongue rolling and everything – he’s been seized, he’s in a fit. And that’s a sign that something is wrong with that person that particular week, or something’s not right. Outsiders say it’s all to achieve ecstasy and other such garbage – that’s not the point. It does seem to have a purifying effect. It’s a great social bonding. Apart from the dhikr and the dance there’s an awful lot of teaching of parables and things like that. I sat endlessly at the feet of one particular teacher, who happened to be a holy fool, but he could still teach the parables. I’m quite prejudiced. I went to a conference in Greece about how to get more Greek literature translated and all sorts of publishers and authors came up to me saying, ‘You must do this one. It takes the lid off what the Greek colonels were up to’, or ‘It shows what villains those communist were’ – every novel that’s proposed has some political subtext. And to a large degree that has been a big problem with modern Arab fiction. I’m not really competent to talk about the poetry, but certainly with the fiction, it’s very politicised. I’m not really a political person. “Now and again someone will make some garbled noise and fall to the ground, with lots of screaming and tongue rolling – he’s been seized” What is a new trend and has been happening in the last twenty years or so, is the rise of the historical novel. Several have been winners of major prizes in the Arab world and successfully translated into English, for which they’ve won further prizes. There’s one about Ibn ʿArabi, the 13th-century Sufi, and another well-known novel about Ibn Khaldun that’s been translated into English. These don’t seem to have a top-heavy political agenda; they do seem to be genuine historical novels, so that’s good. I still wonder, though, where is the Arabic equivalent of P G Wodehouse , or James Bond? What about science fiction ? There is some but not nearly enough. And I wish Arab literature could develop more genres. To a much lesser extent, this goes for Europe as a whole – it’s very striking how Germany, for instance, still relies on Anglo-American literature for its thrillers and popular fiction. I have put out a call. I was at a conference in Morocco last summer and the end of my talk I said, ‘we really need to focus more on genres.’ But I’ve been too hard on Arab fiction. The problem is that the economics of it are terrible. Readership is small in the Arab world – there’s still a high rate of illiteracy and then even those who are literate aren’t necessarily so literate that they take great pleasure in reading novels. Publication runs are very small, copyright is poorly enforced, book production quality is very poor, too, and even someone like Naguib Mahfouz couldn’t make a living writing novels. Most novels that get published follow a route described to me by one Beirut publisher like so: some person publishes a novel with a print run of 500, and he will sell 50 of them to his relatives, and 50 to his friends, and so on. Really, as far as a lot of Arab writers are concerned, they’re not really published until they’ve been translated into to German or French or English – that’s the target, and that has a slightly deforming effect on what’s being written. Arabic writers may be writing in Arabic, but quite often they’re targeting a western audience"

"I published this at Penguin and it’s translated from Arabic so it’s very beautiful language. I love the title. It’s about a Sudanese man who has lived in England and been educated at Oxford and he goes back to his village and meets a stranger there, Mustafa, who has also been to England. The narrator is not named. It’s about return and what happens when you make that journey. Really, once you’ve left you can never come back, even if you do go back. In a way, he is. He has also been to England but he has a shadow, he is harbouring a secret. I don’t want to be silly about it, but the narrator’s a bit miffed that this man’s there. You come feeling unique, but you’re not. He had wanted to come back and civilise everyone but they don’t need civilising. Well, I lived in Zimbabwe until I was five, and then in America until I was 19 and then back to Zimbabwe again – I am stuck at certain ages with certain people. With my grandmother I’m a five year old and in the village it’s hard to behave like an adult. With my parents I’m stuck at 19 and I’m out of my depth in Shona if the conversation is about politics or something. I keep having to tell myself I’m a 42 year old mother of two!"

"It’s very similar. Season of Migration to the North is also a story of deception through narrative voices. In this respect Season would be halfway between The Blind Owl and a subversion of One Thousand and One Nights . The main character of Season is not the narrator himself, as in Heart of Darkness , for example, where everything we know about Kurtz, we learn from Marlow. Season works in the same way with an intermediate character placed between us—the reader—and the main character, Mustafa Saïd. Pretty much like Scheherazade herself would tell a tale… Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a masterpiece. Probably the best Arabic novel of the 20th century. Subtle, dark and deeply ironic. It describes very well both rural life in Sudan in the 1960s and the relationships between Orient and Occident in the same period. It’s a tale of acculturation, of nativism and of sexual domination of man over women. It’s a tale of books, also. It’s about literature. A very free novella. Unique. I remember reading it for the first time in Cairo, in 1992, in the French translation. Then again in 1994 or 1995, in the Arabic original. The freedom of its style, the pleasure of its language and broad register stuck me then. I have read it many times since in Arabic and in translation with my students. It’s always an immense pleasure."

"In my opinion, it might be one of the best novels of the 20th century full stop. I picked it because it’s really good. It often comes top of these kinds of lists. It’s one of the few Arabic novels that has entered the canon of world literature. The book starts when the unnamed narrator comes back home to his small rural village after seven years of education abroad. That’s a classic trope of Arabic literature, so we are immediately on familiar ground. But things quickly move in unexpected directions. The narrator finds that there is a new resident of the village called Mustafa Sa’eed who has come from the capital Khartoum and is very popular with everyone there, although his past is a little murky. One night at a party, Mustafa gets very drunk and the narrator hears him reciting an English poem (Ford Madox Ford’s “In October 1914 [Antwerp]”). This appearance of Anglophone culture in a village, which seemed untouched by the outside world, disturbs the narrator. He begins to question him. It turns out that Mustafa has a whole previous life as a prominent economist in London. Not long after Mustafa reveals his whole background to the narrator, he drowns in the Nile (perhaps an accident, perhaps suicide). The rest of the book is this layering of three different stories. The first is flashbacks of Mustafa Sa’eed’s life in London where, we discover, he had embarked on a campaign of revenge against his former colonial overlord, sleeping with British women who all kill themselves except for the last whom he murders (a crime for which he serves time in prison). The second story is that of the narrator’s life in a newly independent Sudan. He has come back with his foreign education and is trying to build the country and move it forward while at the same time coming across all the typical problems of a post-colonial society: the kleptocratic elites, the feeling the British have set up a system which was doomed to fail. The final story is that of Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow who is forced into a marriage against her will and, on the wedding night, kills her new husband and then herself. It is a very violent book! Or, at least, there is always an undertone of violence, which occasionally rises to the surface. Season of Migration to the North pulls from many different traditions. People have often interpreted it as a reversal of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , the story of Mustafa Sa’eed’s corruption by the violence of the imperial center, rather than the African wilderness. But the novel is also deeply invested in the Arabic literary tradition The book is deconstructing a classic, and increasingly hackneyed, trope of the 20th-century Arabic novel. Many Arabic novels from the 1930s and 1940s centre on a young man who gets educated in the West (usually Paris, or perhaps London), returns home to experience an internal clash of cultures, finds a way to rectify it in some way—often by finding a happy medium in which he can take the best of the West and the best of the East and combine it into something great. This book is clearly playing with that trope but complicating it. The people in the book—whether they are victims or perpetrators—feel like real people and the relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘Coloniser’ and ‘Colonised’ is never simple. It’s short, under 200 pages, and the narrative jumps around quite a lot. This form works well with the content. It is a book that never lets simple explanations stand and that always offers different perspectives. In the book, we move quickly between different viewpoints without being able to identify fully with any of them. On top of this, it’s very well written—and translated. It’s an interesting example of the translation process because Denys Johnson-Davies, who did a lot of classic books in the period, was friends with Tayeb Salih and they worked on it together. So Tayeb Salih would write one chapter in Arabic and then send it straight to Denys Johnson-Davies, who would translate it and have the opportunity to ask questions. It’s a work of collaborative translation and it reads very well for that reason."

"I intentionally chose to put this book after Hussein’s because it is very similar in its idea but very different in its approach. Taha Hussein was very analytical. He had done two PhDs and was a very sharp academic. He tackled his subject using a highly analytical approach. Tayeb Salih has done the exact opposite. He tackled similar problems to those that Hussein had put forward, but he focused on the soft aspects. He looked at a middle-class family in an Arab society and how it embodied inherited traditions and values that have been passed from one generation to another, and how these have become part of the family’s psyche. In this case he took a family in Sudan and he explored how one person from that milieu was thrown into the heart of a Western society and then he came back to Sudan only to face an identity crisis. Salih approached this problem in a soft, delicate way. He focused on the feelings and emotions of that person; his approach was very different to Hussein’s. Family structures, value systems, how a person’s sense of belonging changes, all of these are themes that Salih touched on and that many Arabs who have had rich experiences with the West can relate to. There are many aspects in most Islamic societies that would fly against some of the values that any liberal would probably advocate. How do Arab liberals then face such situations? Do they face an identity crisis? Do they try to evade facing such dilemmas through escapism or perhaps avoiding the correct scoping of a question? What kind of decision-making process do Arab liberals adhere to? The value system of Arab liberalism is very interesting. Some might vote for a liberal party in a political election but then baulk at any notion of liberalism with it comes to family dynamics. Arab liberals’ attitudes towards religion, or at least how it was interpreted over the past few centuries, is also another very interesting area, because here we find extreme caution in addressing any controversial topic. Tayeb Salih in this particular novel goes into these kinds of questions, especially in his presentation of the main character, the novel’s protagonist. He is in a dilemma between his true love, what he wants to belong to, and his internal need to adhere to his inherited value system. Salih’s focus on the emotions and feelings is very revealing: it takes us into the depths of the dilemma that many Arab liberals experience. These days such focus is very relevant because there is a line of thinking in the West that believes that the wave of revolutions that have occurred in the Arab world could propel a new phase of liberalism in the region, and that the West should support the potential emergence of such Arab liberalism. I agree with that line of thinking, but I really think that many people in the West don’t fully understand what it means to be an Arab liberal. If you dissect it, you will probably find that its characteristics are very different from what you would inherently assume to be liberal values in the West. One way to understand these differences is to look at the hard-nosed assessment that Hussein put in his book; another way is read Tayeb Salih and delve into the fluid soft emotions of his novel. They would be very helpful."

"As I mentioned, I chose that book because I feel that African contemporary writing is in an age of restless migration to the North. You know, those stories of how people go to the North for different reasons: economic, political upheavals, all those things, and the issues migrants to the West are confronted by. Almost all the themes that he put there are what most writers at this particular moment are talking about. You can read Abdulrazak Gurnah , who won the Nobel Prize in Literature : Most of his themes are based on that. It’s as if he is haunted by the ghost of Salih. Then you can go to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , from Nigeria. It’s a very popular genre now, but I found that Tayeb Salih was the one who established it, especially from the African perspective. Oh, it’s a very beautiful book because it’s poetic also. Another thing that I complain about most of the time, because I read a lot of African writing, is that most writers don’t pay enough attention to the language. He does. He pays a lot of attention. His prose has a quiet wisdom with tinges of poetic lyricism. I love that about his writing. Mustafa, yes! I think there was an element of autofiction to the book because Salih himself worked in the UK for the BBC for some time. He always felt he lent his experiences to his protagonists. When the narrator comes back home, he finds that as much as he misses his culture, he can see how much he doesn’t fit into that culture anymore because he stayed too long in the West. But then, when he goes to the West, he finds that culturally and religiously he doesn’t fit there, either. There are also the elements of xenophobia and so much difficulty. Initially, when he’s undocumented, he can’t get a job. It’s all the things that we’re experiencing most of the time, as Africans, when we go to Western countries. I mentioned Paperless , by Buntu Siwisa: it goes into depth on that topic."