81 pages • 2 hours read
Tayeb SalihSeason of Migration to the North
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
The narrator fast-forwards ahead several years, to Mustafa Sa’eed’s death. He relays that he received news of the event while in Khartoum: Mustafa had disappeared on a night after the Nile’s flooding, presumably due to drowning or suicide. He thinks back to his response to Mustafa’s tale. After hearing it, he wandered the village at night, wondering if he could have fallen to the same fate. He concludes that he was different then Mustafa—he lived in England “neither loving nor hating” (41) the English.
However, living in Khartoum and working with the Department of Education two years after Mustafa’s death, he finds himself repeatedly confronting Mustafa. Mustafa has named the narrator guardian of his two sons. Moreover, he meets men who knew Mustafa, all of whom are ignorant of his fate. In one conversation, he meets a young Sudanese man as well as an Englishmen working with the Ministry of Finance, and together, they discuss Mustafa and the legacy of colonialism. The young man states that Mustafa helped the English plot their affairs in the Sudan, while the Englishmen shares that he was “not a reliable economist” (48) since his work did not rely on statistics. The narrator shares the details of Mustafa’s death, but his statement is treated as a flight-of-fancy rather than a statement of fact. But he finds himself sympathizing with Mustafa: “[W]hat use are statistics?” (50). They do not make sense of the legacy that colonialism has left in Africa.
Chapter 4 Summary
The narrator relays that, in the years after Mustafa’s death, he returns to his village for two months a year to check on Mustafa’s sons. Now married, his wife and child accompany him. He shares Mustafa’s letter in full, and the man’s voice thus appears in the narrative once again. In it, Mustafa urges the narrator to tell his sons the truth about him, and to shield them from wanderlust. The existence of this letter—Mustafa’s clear sense that his end was coming—is what suggests to the narrator that the man either planned suicide or got from nature what he wanted. In the village, he thinks again of Mustafa’s fate, and the mere seven years he spent in prison for murder. He tries to make his mind off the man, however, concentrating on the bend at the Nile, where “fresh breeze […] comes from the direction of the river like a half-truth amidst a world filled with lies” (58).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 jump ahead several years from the events of Chapters 1 and 2. While the first two chapters dramatically contrast two voices—that of the narrator and that of Mustafa Sa’eed—in these, we see the lasting effects of Mustafa’s story on the narrator. Two years after his death, Mustafa has become both a symbol, as well as a ghost who constantly reemerges in the narrator’s life. Here, we see the narrator’s reaction to Mustafa’s strange tale of seduction, the embrace of colonial stereotypes, and murder. Although he is at first shocked, after Mustafa’s death, he seems to feel a sense of superiority and disdain.
Years later, the narrator has risen to a prominent position in the Sudanese government, and when he hears stories of Mustafa’s fabled intelligence and influence, he is annoyed. It seems that this is in part because of a sense of competitiveness with the dead man—he resents that Mustafa is still imagined to be so brilliant and successful when, in fact, his fate was so pitiable. However, he does not and perhaps cannot share the truth with others when the subject arises. This may be in part because he is guardian of his sons and does not wish to spread new that could bring them harm. However, the narrator also tells us that when the subject arises, he does not see the sense in arguing. In this, the narrator has followed Mustafa: He returns to his home country not to debate the effects of colonialism on the dead and living, but to live out his days as peaceably as possible.
However, it is implied that Mustafa’s continuing presence, and especially his entreaty to care for his two sons, keeps the narrator from experiencing true peace. When he returns to the village, he is able to find the sense of rootedness, purpose, and truth he craves once again. However, now the Nile seems to whisper only a “half-truth” (138) rather than the whole truth. We can deduce that the narrator’s view of the world has been permanently shaped by the story of a brilliant Sudanese man’s gradual descent into depravity, then obscurity, then death.
