Following a Metaphor:
Season of Migration to the North

April 26, 2006

During my Arabic study in Egypt I was force-fed a number of modern Arabic novels, one of them being Season of Migration to the North by the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih. I liked this one more than the others, but I still had some reservations.. I have yet to find the modern Arabic writer whose works I can unreservedly say I enjoy. But that was a couple of years ago now, and as I designed the syllabus for my "Islam and Africa" class (which ended yesterday) I thought maybe this short novel would be worth a return read..

I didn't change my opinion too drastically.. but the process of teaching the novel helped me clarify one method by which a novel gains meaning, and why that meaning can be hard for students to access.

There are two major characters in the short novel. The first is the narrator whose name we never learn; the second Mustafa Sa'eed. The narrator has returned to his small village along the Nile in the Sudan after finishing an advanced degree in England. Mustafa Sa'eed is a mysterious older man who arrived at the village and whose past only slowly opens up for the reader. It is not until the very end that we get an account of the climactic murder of his wife in England. The temptation for the student is to follow the parallel and intertwined personal stories of the narrator and Mustafa Sa'eed.. but then to pass over the broader historical details that accompany these personal stories. I found myself trying to prod the students to explain why certain details about the village or about the colonial past were amplified.. what connection was Tayeb Salih implying between these details and the personal stories concerning the main characters?

One method an author has to draw together the personal and historical is the use of metaphor. This obviates the need for a narrator to step into the text and explain what is happening and why certain elements are included. With the use of repeating metaphors the careful reader is able to align the various layers of the novel and discover meaning that someone just reading for the story will miss.

Tayeb Salih is particularly adept at using a system of metaphors to construct a larger meaning. I found his use of a germs/disease metaphor particularly telling. The first time it occurs is in relation to the horrors of Mustafa Sa'eed's actions in England.. where he serially seduces various women, who die mysteriously. In his trial concerning their deaths, it was stated:

These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa'eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago. [33]

Then in quick succession there are two more occurrences of the metaphor, this time from Mustafa's mouth:

She entered my bedroom a chaste virgin and when she left it she was carrying the germs of self-destruction within her. [35]

...I led her across the short passageway to the bedroom where the smell of burning sandalwood and incense assailed her, filling her lungs with a perfume she little knew was deadly. [42]

Notable in these first instances is the connection to Mustafa Sa'eed as a sexual predator, but then there follows a dramatic widening of the metaphor:

I heard Mansour say to Richard, 'You transmitted to us the disease of your capitalist economy. What did you give us but a handful of capitalist companies that drew off our blood—and still do?' [60]

The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say "Yes" in their language. They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun... the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago. [95]

Everyone who is educated today [in the Sudan] wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots... [119]

With this series of references the reader is encouraged to consider to consider the actions of Mustafa Sa'eed in England in the light of colonial/historical events. The descriptive sections are not there "for kicks", but to lend meaning to the personal story that gradually unfolds.

At the violent conclusion to the novel, people are struck by the arrival of something never before seen in their small village:

...it's the first time anything like this has happened in the village since God created it. What a time of affliction we live in! [124]

What can I or anyone else do if the world's gone crazy. Bint Mahmoud's madness was of a kind never seen before. [132]

The words "disease" is not used, but it is implied: some germ of violence has been caught.

I am not claiming that this germs/disease metaphor is the only metaphor used.. in fact there are a number of others which could be similarly followed. My idea, however, is that an important part of learning to read a novel (or other kinds of works) is to identify the ways that connections are established between different layers, whether narrative or descriptive. In the case of Season of Migration to the North, the ability to allow the layers to comment and inform each other is crucial to understanding the novel.