Season of Migration to the North

TAYEB
SALIH

SEASON
OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH

TRANSLATED
BY DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

INTRODUCTION
BY WAIL S. HASSAN

INTRODUCTION

The
back cover of the first Heinemann edition of this novel, published in English
translation in 1969, featured the following statement by Edward W Said, one of
the most influential literary and cultural critics of the second half of the
twentieth century:

‘
Season
of Migration to the North
is among the six finest novels to be written in
modern Arabic literature.’ Almost two decades earlier, another critic, Albert Guerard,
wrote in his introduction to the 1950 New American Library edition of Joseph
Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
that it was ‘among the half-dozen greatest
short novels in the English language’. In praising Salih’s novel, Said was
quoting almost verbatim Guerard’s famous appraisal of Conrad’s classic. Said
was himself an expert on Conrad, having published a book on him in 1966, so
what he wrote about Salih’s novel was calculated to equate its importance to
that of Conrad’s within their respective literary traditions: just as
Heart
of Darkness
is a masterpieces of English literature, so is
Season of
Migration to the North
an equally great classic of modern Arabic
literature.

Later on, in his major book
Culture and Imperialism
(1993),
Said argued that Salih’s novel reverses the trajectory of
Heart of Darkness
and
in effect rewrites it from an Arab African perspective. If Conrad’s story of
European colonialism in Africa describes the protagonist’s voyage south to the
Congo, and along the way projects Europeans’ fears, desires, and moral dilemmas
upon what they called the ‘Dark Continent’, Salih’s novel depicts the journey
north from Sudan, another place in Africa, to the colonial metropolis of
London, and voices the colonised’s fascination with, and anger at, the coloniser.
Both voyages involve the violent conquest of one place by the natives of
another: Kurtz is the unscrupulous white man who exploits Africa in the name of
the civilising mission, while Mustafa Sa’eed is the opportunist black man who
destroys European women in the name of the freedom fight. Both novels also
depict a ‘secret sharer’ or a double — Marlow in Conrad’s tale and the unnamed
narrator in Salih’s — who are at once obsessed and repulsed by Kurtz and
Mustafa Sa’eed, respectively.

This way of reading novels from former European colonies as
counter-narratives to colonial texts is one of the strategies of postcolonial
literary criticism. Postcolonial critics have argued that narratives of
conquest by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, Ryder Haggard, Joseph
Conrad, E.M. Forster, Joyce Cary and others are crucial to understanding
British culture. Even the seemingly insular and domestic world of Jane Austen’s
Mansfield
Park
depends for its sustenance,
according to Said, on the existence of the British Empire in general, and on
slave labour in Antigua in particular. Postcolonial critics also emphasise
those literary texts from formerly colonised countries that portray the ravages
of imperialism and directly challenge the authority and the claims of colonial
discourse. In some instances, postcolonial writers have done so by rewriting
canonical texts of conquest. In
A Tempest
, for example, Aimé Césaire
rewrote Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
from the perspective of Caliban; J.M. Coetzee’s
Foe
is an alternative version to Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
; and
several writers, including Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, V.S. Naipaul and Tayeb
Salih have responded in various ways to Conrad’s novels, especially
Heart of
Darkness
, which has emerged as the single most important, controversial and
influential narrative of empire, in addition to being a key text of British
modernist fiction. Of the novels that rewrite
Heart of Darkness
,
Season
of Migration to the North
is the most structurally and thematically
complex, and the most haunting.

If postcolonial criticism, a phenomenon that emerged in
American and British universities in the 1980s, has enhanced the reputation of Salih’s
novel in its English translation, the Arabic original,
Mawsim al-hijira ila
al-shamal
, became an instant classic as soon as it was published in Beirut
in 1966. Although this was not Salih’s first novel, he was still relatively
unknown at the time. The impact of the novel on the Arab literary field was
such that in 1976, a group of leading critics compiled a collection of essays
in which they hailed Salih as
abqari al-riwayya al-rabiyya
(genius of
the Arabic novel). The novel appealed to its Arab readers, first of all,
because of its aesthetic qualities — its complex structure, skilful narration,
unforgettable cast of characters, and its spellbinding style which evokes the
wide range of intense emotions displayed by the characters as it moves
gracefully from lyricism to bawdy humor to searing naturalism and the uncanny
horror of nightmares, and from the rhythms of everyday Sudanese speech
(captured in literary Arabic rather than in the Sudanese dialect as in some of Salih’s
other works) to poetic condensation, and from popular song to classical poetry
and the lofty idiom of the Qur’an. Indeed, Salih remains one of the best Arabic
stylists today, a quality inevitably lost to non-Arabic speakers, although Denys
Johnson-Davies’s English translation is outstanding.

The second reason for which the novel created such a stir on
the Arabic literary scene in the mid-sixties was the radical way in which it
responded to Arab liberal discourse on Europe. That discourse began with a
movement called the
Nahda
(revival or renaissance) that sought, from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards, to rebuild Arab civilisation after centuries of
decay under the Ottoman Empire and to confront the threat of European
imperialism. The
Nahda
attempted to weld together two elements: Arab
Islamic heritage on the one hand, and modern European civilisation, especially
its scientific and technological achievements, on the other. Far from
conceiving the two as contradictory or incompatible, the second seemed to
Nahda
intellectuals to be the natural extension of the first, in view of the
great advances in scientific and humanistic knowledge that medieval Arab civilisation
had produced, and which contributed in no small measure to the European
renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Therefore, the project of
the
Nahda
consisted in selectively synthesising the material advances of
modern Europe and the spiritual and moral world view of Islam.

However, this conciliatory vision became more difficult to
sustain as Europe began to colonise parts of the Arab world in the late
nineteenth century and especially after the First World War. Arabs had joined
forces with the Allies against the Ottomans in exchange for the promise of
independence, a promise that was broken after the war. Moreover, the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 promising the establishment of a jewish national home on
Arab land and European support for the State of Israel deepened Arab
resentment. Thus by the 1950s, the secular ideology of pan-Arab nationalism
became dominant, and the
Nahda’
s vision of cultural synthesis gave way
to an antagonistic stance toward the West. The collapse of that ideology in the
1967 war with Israel spelled a profound identity crisis that resonated at all
levels of Arab consciousness and called for new ways of conceptualising the
past, present, and future, even while it further solidified essentialised
notions of Self and Other, East and West. Not surprisingly it was during the
following decade that the militant ideology of Islamic fundamentalism emerged
to fill the void.

Begun in 1962 and published in 1966, the novel diagnosed the
Arab predicament during that turbulent decade by stressing the violence of the
colonial past, of which Mustafa Sa’eed is a product; announcing the demise of
the liberal project of the
Nahda
, championed by Western-educated
intellectuals like the narrator who failed to account for imperialism in their vision
of cultural synthesis; condemning the corruption of postcolonial governments;
and declaring the bankruptcy of traditionalist conservatism hostile to reform,
represented by the village elders. The final scene of the novel, and especially
its last words, forecasts the state of existential loss and ideological
confusion that many in the Arab world would feel in the wake of the 1967 war.

Tayeb Salih was born in 1929 in the village of Debba in
northern Sudan. He attended schools in Debba, Port Sudan, and Umm Durman,
before going to Khartoum University to study biology. He then taught at an
intermediate school in Rafa’a and a teacher training college in Bakht al-Rida.
In 1953, he went to London to work in the Arabic section of the BBC, and during
the 1970s he worked in Qatar’s Ministry of Information, then at UNESCO in Paris.
Since then, he has lived in London.

Salih’s enormous reputation rests on relatively few works of
fiction. In addition to
Season of Migration to the North
, he has written
a novella,
‘Urs al-Zayn
(1962, in English
The Wedding of Zein
),
another novel,
Bandarshah
(first published in Arabic in two parts,
Dau
al-Beit
in 1971 and
Meryoud
in 1976), and nine short stories, two of
which appear in the Heinemann edition of
The Wedding of Zein and Other
Stories
(1969). In 1988, he began writing a column in the London-based
Arabic weekly magazine
Al-Majallah
; those articles on literary cultural
and political topics were collected under the title of
Mukhtarat
(Selections)
and published in nine volumes in Beirut in 2004-05.

As a Sudanese, Salih came from a liminal place where the Arab
world merges with black Africa, and he wrote as an immigrant in London. His
fictional village of Wad Hamid in northern Sudan represents the complexities of
that location: situated between the fertile Nile valley and the desert,
inhabited by peasants but a frequent stop for nomadic tribes, it is a meeting
place for several cultures. Its religion, ‘popu1ar Islam’, is a mixture of
orthodox Islamic, Sufi, and animist beliefs. The village is beset by tensions
that have defined Arab modernity since the nineteenth century: between old and
new, science and faith, tradition and innovation. Because he was an immigrant, Salih
could write about the colonial metropolis from a vantage point inaccessible to
Levantine Arab intellectuals of his and earlier generations, even those among
them who had studied in Europe for a while then returned home, often dazzled.
He also felt the predicament of the native there more intensely than they did,
both as an African and as an Arab. Such a unique perspective ensured that his
enormous talent would produce the most powerful representation of colonial
relations yet in Arabic literature.