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 Outside, my world was a wide one; now it had contracted, had withdrawn upon itself, until I myself had become the world, no world existing outside of me.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!

A Way in the World by VS Naipaul

When I began to write of it, the Trinidad landscape that was present to me was the landscape I had known as a child and felt myself part of... Later, in London, when I was writing a book of history, I studied for many months the historical documents of the region. The documents (the early ones were copies of Spanish originals stored in Seville) took my back to the discovery. They gave me a sense of a crowded aboriginal Indian island, busy about its own affairs, and almost without relation to what I had known. A sense, rather than a vision: little was convincingly described in those early documents, and few concrete details were given. In my mind's eye I created an imaginary landscape for the aboriginal peoples living--on what was to become my own ground--with ideas I couldn't enter, ideas of time, distance, the past, the natural world, human existence. A different weather seemed to attach to this vanished landscape (like the unnatural weather in an illuminated painted panorama in a museum glasscase), a different sky.

Naipaul is the foremost postcolonialist we have still writing, not least because he himself is a thoroughly colonial product. British but born in Trinidad, an island which is perhaps not technically more diverse than the rest of the Western Hemisphere, but which has a diversity enlarged by its smallness: people of African and Indian descent have long shared tight quarters with Arawak natives, and the island itself has been ruled by the English, Spanish, French, and no joke, Latvia.

A Way in the World is Naipaul's attempt to sort through that heritage, to sift through the muddled sands of Caribbean history and discover himself. The narrator is a fictionalized Naipaul, who begins with his childhood and works strangely backward, telling stories of Columbus and Raleigh, and a failed South American revolutionary named Francisco Miranda, each of whom are in some sense, like Naipaul's narrator, frustrated and bewildered by the political and ethnic realities of the Caribbean. He tells us of an unfinished writing project about the three of them, here focusing on Raleigh's last excursion to the New World:

Perhaps a play or a screen play, or a mixture of both--that is how it came to me, an unrealizable impulse, a long time ago: the first set being a view in section of the upper decks of a Jacobean ship, the Destiny. The time, 1618. The setting, a South American river, grey when still, muddy when rippled. It is almost dawn. The sky is silver.

Naipaul wants to keep us at arm's length, to screen Raleigh's story through the false pretense of an unwritten play. Don't forget that I'm here, he tells us, this is not a story about Raleigh but a story about me. This choice causes Naipaul to descend into some truly horrific prose, as if pretending this were just a treatment would permit authorial laziness. Why does Raleigh's ship surgeon insist on recounting Raleigh's own story as if he didn't know it already?:

"When you showed the North African gold, people asked why you hadn't brought more back from this fabled land of El Dorado. Of course you didn't have the money to buy more. But you say in your Advertisement rather sharply that no one has the right to ask you for more. You go on to say that you didn't have the time or the tools or the men when you were on the river of El Dorado."

If Naipaul means to bring to mind the sort of illogical plot-recapping that takes place in bad movies, he succeeds. Elsewhere, this approach treats us to similarly banal sentences like, "We focus again on Don Jose: his confident face, his fine Jacobean tunic. He takes up his narrative again." Yes, I get it: We're all in this together.

A Way in the World reminds me of Joyce, in that the novel recounts the story of its own creation. But Naipaul is telling us obliquely that this book is explicitly not the product he desired, but some sort of meek compromise crafted in the face of failure. Portrait is the proof of its own labor; it insists on its own triumph. A Way in the World insists on its own failure, and necessarily compounds it. It is unflinchingly bland, reticent to tell us that Naipaul's search for identity as a Trinidadian has produce fruit of any kind. With fodder like Raleigh and Miranda, it should have been better, but Naipaul is not comfortable handing his book over to them, perhaps worried that they will consume him. But neither can he give us any convincing account of his own innermost self. He uses dead prose and cheap tricks to keep us strung between the two poles of then and now, not frustrated and bewildered as he seeks to make us, but merely bored.

This is only the second Naipaul book I have read; did he expend all of his creative power in the formation of Mr. Biswas, who outstrips nearly all of his latter-20th-century peers for pathos? The greatest impact of this book is the realization that it is wholly unlike that one, sharing only its setting. It makes me worry that Biswas, who is wonderfully and repeatedly ironic, may present his strangest irony in that he understands more of his origins and more deeply than the author who created him.