Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

The world has suddenly turned upside down. Love? Love does not do this. This is hatred. I feel hatred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs must confront him. Even so, there is still in my mind a modicum of sense that is aware of the irony of the situation. I begin from where Mustafa Sa'eed had left off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing. For a while the disk of the sun remained motionless just above the western horizon, then hurriedly disappeared. The armies of darkness, ever encamped near by, bounded in and occupied the world in an instant. If only I had told her the truth perhaps she would not have acted as she did. I had lost the war because I did not know and did not choose. For a long time I stood in front of the iron door. Now I am on my own: there is no escape, no place of refuge, no safeguard. Outside, my world was a wide one; now it had contracted, had withdrawn upon itself, until I myself had become the world, no world existing outside of me. Where, then, were the roots that struck down into times past? Where the memories of death and life? What had happened to the caravan and the tribe?

An unnamed Sudanese man returns to the village on the banks of the Nile where he was born; he has been away in England, where he studied the life of an obscure English poet. The village is much as he left it, with one addition: a stranger named Mustafa Sa'eed who has come to settle there. The narrator finds Sa'eed strange and beguiling; while drunk Sa'eed rattles off an English poem that signifies to the narrator that Sa'eed is, like him, a former traveler in the "cold North." If so, how did he end up in this place? Even the narrator has no intention to stay long in his old village; soon enough it will become too constricting and he will flee to Khartoum. Eventually, Sa'eed agrees to tell the man his story: a gifted child, he was sent to school in England, where he became a renowned economist. He quickly discovered that English women were attracted to his exotic identity, but his seductions had deadly consequences: three of his lovers killed themselves, and the fourth he stabbed to death in a fit of anger.

Colonialism, Tayeb Salih illustrates, reaches into the most remote places. The village is not Khartoum, and English control--and flight--have not changed it much, but people like Sa'eed and the narrator bring the disease of the colonial subject with them, infecting the village in their fashion. Sa'eed's relationships with English women are based on the violent fantasies inherent in colonialism: the women are drawn to Sa'eed's exotic nature--something he plays up by inventing fake names and Arabic mannerisms--but their dalliance fails to fix whatever deep lack resides within them. Sa'eed kills his final lover, whom he marries, when the tables are turned: she withholds her love and body, while being continuously unfaithful; she is symbolic of colonizers' easily withdrawn promises. Sa'eed's life is an image of colonial interaction that is cataclysmic for both colonizer and colonized.

Halfway through the novel, Sa'eed disappears, likely drowned, by suicide or accident. He leaves a letter asking the narrator to become the guardian of his wife and children, saying that only the narrator will know how to explain to the children who their father was and how he became it. Along with the letter is a key to a locked room in Sa'eed's house, a blisteringly symbolic space that, when finally opened, turns out to be a study with a replica English fireplace. (Not so useful, one might point out, in the hot Nile basin.) The narrator is a poor guardian, spending all his time in Khartoum. He's caught off guard, then, when Sa'eed's widow is married off against her will, and then kills her new husband and herself. Her appeal as a wife is inherited from Sa'eed--his prestige makes her a prize, because she has been valued by a valued man--but she inherits also his violent indignation, How can the murder of a Sudanese man by a Sudanese woman be fruit of colonialism's pillaging?

Season of Migration to the North is a wonderfully strange and elliptical book. Sa'eed's death and disappearance unsettle the core of the narrative, and Salih amplifies the instability by cutting off Sa'eed's life story early, allowing the grisly details--the suicides and murder--to drib out little by little, as the narrator's obsession with Sa'eed continues to grow after his death. It's a wonderfully psychic and metaphysical novel, all the more convincing it situates madness in geography, in politics.

I've never read a book from the Sudan, so Season of Migration of the North represents the 54th country I've read. Nice!