Samantha Chase
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Samantha Chase
Essay 2 –Season of Migration to the North
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 3 In Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, the unnamed narrator meets a man named Mustafa Sa’eed, whose story within the larger book serves as a metaphor for the effect of colonial endeavors on African societies. Though they reside in a small farming village, the narrator finds that Mustafa is a cosmopolitan, educated man – he recites poetry in English to the narrator one evening, which prompts the telling of his life story. Mustafa’s story, and its arc within the larger narrative, is indicative of the larger message by Salih in relation to colonialism – the use of Mustafa’s relationships with women is the foundation of this argument, with each woman augmenting a piece of the larger message. Mustafa’s story is one of a predator, whose relationships climax in the murder of his wife. Salih’s choice of women as the foundation for this metaphor becomes muddied through his book though, with the attitudes of the native culture of the narrator and the clear injection of personal emotional complications of his characters. Perhaps the failure of Salih to make a clear and defined statement through the story of each woman (in relation to Sa’eed) is indicative of the complexity of colonialism and his own interpretation and complicated reaction to it. Regardless, use of women individually and as metaphor is venal and misogynistic, and undermines (this may be intentional) an argument against colonization, which perpetuates and justifies the subjugation of women.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 The real problem with this book is not that the female characters are subjected to violence, abuse, and murder. It is in the lack of repudiation against that violence and subjugation from the author that a cognitive dissonance is created – colonization may have positive effects on a society, such as the creation of infrastructure, codified behavior and social standards, legality and systems of justice and order or education, but the delegitimizing and destruction of the native culture is always a major element.
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“Were you the cause of Ann Hammond’s suicide?’
‘ I don’t know.’
‘And Sheila Greenwood?’
‘ I don’t know.’
‘ And Isabella Seymour?’
‘ I don’t know.’
‘Did you kill Jean Morris?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you kill her intentionally?’
‘Yes.’
It was as though his voice came to me from another world. The man continued skillfully to draw a terrible picture of a werewolf who had been the reason for two girls committing suicide, had wrecked the life of a married woman and killed his own wife – an egoist whose whole life had been directed to the quest of pleasure. Once it occurred to me…. That I should stand up and shout at the court, ‘This Mustafa Sa’eed does not exist. He’s an illusion, a lie. I ask of you to rule that the lie should be killed.’ But I remained lifeless as a heap of ashes. Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen continued to draw a distinctive picture of the mind of a genius whose circumstances had driven to killing in a moment of mad passion. He related to them how I had been appointed a lecturer in economics at London University at the age of twenty-four. He told them that Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood were girls who were seeking death by every means and that they would have committed suicide whether they met Mustafa Sa’eed or not. ‘Mustafa Sa’eed, gentlemen of the jury, is a noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.’ It occurred to me that I should stand up and say to them: ‘This is untrue. It was I who killed them. I am the desert of thirst. I am no Othello. I am a lie. Why don’t you sentence me to be hanged and so kill the lie?’ But Professor Foster-Keen turned the trial into a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which I was one of the victims.” (Salih, 28-9)
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 Even on the page before, it is important to note, Sa’eed says, “Everything which happened before my meeting her was a premonition; everything I did after I killed her was an apology, not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life.” (26) Salih is grappling with a very large problem through Mustafa – an African man, intelligent, a genius by his own account, who has a great independence and ambition. He decides as a child to go to school and succeeds in every facet of his life. He lives in European culture, as he says, in a lie. He uses the ignorance of the European women to enhance his novelty and attractiveness, colonizing their minds and capturing them through their weaknesses – both an openness and freedom, but also a naivety. He promises them love and marriage and then abandons them. This of course has an obvious parallel to that of a colonial country; they enter with promises, they build and create dependence on the part of their colonized host, and abandon them. Mustafa also serves as a symbol of countries who have vital resources and the same basic foundation of what they offer, and Salih makes a statement about the value of those countries prior to their colonization, or in his case, corruption.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Abandonment is an issue that is addressed subtly, if not poorly, in this book though – many countries fought hard for their independence, while each suicide is used as evidence of the ultimate consequence of failure for a country to thrive after colonization. None of the women wanted to be free from Mustafa, they all wanted to cultivate a life with him and loves him – if this is a statement about countries who have been invaded, and it is incomplete by all accounts. The loss of life and rebellion against even the positive elements of colonialism (such as infrastructure being bombed, etc) is not taken into account, nor the success of any country to begin to lay the groundwork for a new society after independence.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 The only different narrative is the story of Jean, who Mustafa kills. She is grateful in her spite of him to be murdered by him in their passionate sex, which is extremely disturbing, but also fails to make a clear point about the effect of colonization. Salih seems to be raising the question of whether countries who are colonized should be grateful to their invaders, as though the demise of their own culture and freedom is somehow freeing in itself. Even if the argument were to be made that countries who were colonized should be grateful for what they receive through invasion, her inability to live beyond that moment is a statement as well. The only clear argument made by Salih in relation to Jean’s murder is Mustafa’s reaction, in that “everything I did after I killed her was an apology, not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life” (supra) – this is a clear statement about the countries perpetrating colonization. Not that they felt remorse for taking the lives and cultures of the communities they subjugated, but that their esoteric and “elevated” culture is a lie because of what they did in pursuit of profit. The noble causes espoused by those on missions in each country were falsehoods perpetuated to justify the use of force and violence, and each act of rape and terrorism or destruction in its name was excusable.
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This fallacy of nobility is a fair and clear statement from Salih, explored in another section, on page 50:
“The white man, merely because he has ruled us for a period of our history, will for a long time continue to have for us that feeling of contempt the strong have for the weak. Mustafa Sa’eed said to them, ‘I have come to you as a conqueror.’ A melodramatic phrase certainly. But their own coming too was not a tragedy as we imagine, nor yet a blessing as they imagine. It was a melodramatic act with which the passage of time will change into a mighty myth. I heard Mansour say to Richard, ‘You transmitted to us the disease of your capitalist economy…’ Richard said to him, ‘all this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism. It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable to you as air or water.’ They were not angry, they said such things to each other as they laughed, a stone’s throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical chasm separating the two of them.”
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Salih clearly has a nuanced opinion on the results of colonialism as well as the economics of what each county evolves to become. The question returns then to interpreting the murder of Jean, as well as the suicide of Hosna, the widow of Mustafa in the village the narrator resides in.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 1 The community views the loss of Mustafa as “irreparable” (84), though they may not all know what crimes he has committed. Hosna is required to marry the village womanizer, Wad Rayyes, to replace Mustafa. She is vocal in her objection to this arrangement and clearly states that she will violently rebel against it, yet it is foisted upon her. There is no ally to her, and when Wad forces consummation of their forced arrangement on her, she kills him and herself. She is vilified by the entire village and dishonored. If this narrative is poetic justice for Jean or the other women who have been colonized by Mustafa, as a statement that nativism is no better than acceptance of colonization, this is not only incredibly bleak as a worldview, but also weak and passive. It seems that as stated in the passage above, this may be the case: the tragedy and majesty are all false, simply the passage of time will determine the outcome. The small rebellion and personal justice of Hosna in the murder of Wad may also be a metaphor for those countries who fought for independence; their fight and their victory are irrelevant in that the ghost of colonialism and what is left as far as capitalist economics remains, and they are powerless to escape this fate.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 1 Again, where the metaphor is muddied is that Hosna is a woman and her representation in the community is forever disgraced by her fight for independence. She is not free, and Salih seems to be saying she will never be free and it is pointless to fight. A country fighting for its independence as a parallel to this seems to be a fatalist statement, but does not suffer the same degradation as women in this book. Jean is grateful to Mustafa for killing her – she says she loves him as he stabs her to death, she says, “Darling, I thought you would never do this, I almost gave up on you.” (136) As a female character, this is self-hatred, a desire to be destroyed, and a psychotic relationship with what love is and how it manifests. The idea that she almost gave up on Mustafa shows that this was her intention and desire, and puts him in a position of being goaded into stabbing her to death – he is blameless, she has tempted him and manipulated him. First, this representation and narrative of a woman “asking for it” in every culture is a pathetic and glib explanation from those that seek to obfuscate their responsibility to restrain themselves. Second, it is completely unnecessary to the point of the metaphor and the scene itself is gratuitous and unrealistic. Salih uses melodrama to create the scene itself at the expense of a concise point that fits with his narrative. Mustafa too, in this role as colonizer and the excused man, is not disparaged, is sought to be understood, his violence too complex to condemn. This book justifies the oppression of women and violence against them through a fatalist narrative about the inevitability of lands being conquered, as well as the violence and oppression of countries who are not the stronger and able to capitalize on others as their own fault. It is the ultimate excuse of human and male behavior as a book in its entirety, which is trite and makes the entire exercise in criticism or praise completely moot.
[the clear injection of personal emotional complications of his characters]
You may want to specify what you mean here. While I think it’s clear that Salih writes from a perspective colored by “the attitudes of the native culture of the narrator,” I’m not so sure what you mean by “emotional complications.”
[ Regardless, use of women individually and as metaphor is venal and misogynistic, and undermines (this may be intentional) an argument against colonization, which perpetuates and justifies the subjugation of women.]
There remains a lot of work to be done to support this final part of your argument. I think your reaction to the book is a fantastic jumping off point for an essay. But I want you to focus more specifically on how the metaphor for colonialism, as you suggest, undermines any true moral perspective. Rather than make this claim in your introduction, you might save it for a conclusion. If you make the case well enough, the moral shortcomings of the book will be evident by then.
[ a metaphor for the effect of colonial endeavors on African societies.]
Your reading of the book deserves to be spelled out in more detail, I think. That means working out exactly how you see this guiding metaphor about colonialism functioning. Perhaps you can replace some of the summary currently in your introduction with a more detailed description of the metaphor, as you see it. You might even explicitly make the subject of your essay an explication of this metaphor about colonialism – and how it “becomes muddied” and, perhaps, suggests a bleak and apathetic perspective on injustice.
The ambiguity of the terms of the metaphor you describe seems problematic to me. In other words, you suggest that both Mustafa and his victims are somehow representative of the colonized. Perhaps it would be simpler to say that the sort of relationships being described are metaphorical representations of the relations between colonizer and colonized. Some clarification of the components of the metaphor seems necessary to me.
In any case, your reading of the larger structural metaphor is going to be your best bet for convincing readers that the narrative perpetuates and justifies the kind of sexism the narrator quite explicitly criticizes. I think you should focus on it.