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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
The narrator visits his grandfather’s house and walks in on a conversation between his grandfather and his old friends Bint Majzoub, Wad Rayyes, and Bakri. A ribald conversation full of laughter and teasing ensues. Wad Rayyes, a man famed for his many wives and his high sexual appetite, tells the story of making love to a slave girl, thus leading his father to marry him off to his first wife. Bint Majzoub, an elderly widow, teases him—and is teased in return for her eight husbands and equally high appetite for sex. The two discuss whether they will ever wed again, and Bakri asks Wad Rayyes, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for having a wedding every year?” (65). Wad Rayyes becomes angry, but then praises the pleasures of fornication, especially uncircumcised Western women. He asks the narrator about his experience with Western women. When the narrator reveals he has none, Wad Rayyes condemns the men of a younger generation for being “one-woman men” (67), opposed to polygamy.
The group briefly debates the merits of female circumcision, but the conversation quickly turns back to their respective sexual conquests and experiences. After laughing uproariously, each of them asks for God’s forgiveness. As everyone departs, Wad Rayyes invites the narrator to lunch. The narrator’s grandfather then reveals that Wad Rayyes hopes to ask the narrator for permission to marry Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow. Picturing Hosna underneath Wad Rayyes, the narrator is enraged.
Chapter 6 Summary
The following afternoon, the narrator visits Hosna to inform her of Wad Rayyes’s intentions. Their conversation begins awkwardly. As evening falls, he asks her if she loved her husband, realizing just as the words leave his mouth that “the darkness and perfume [are] all but causing [him] to lose control” (75). Hosna does not directly answer but tells the narrator that her husband was a generous man. She also reveals that he had the feeling he was hiding something because he spoke “gibberish” in his sleep—“words like Jeena Jeeny” (77). She also knew that he was anticipating his own death: He arranged his affairs a week in advance. She begins to cry. As the narrator contemplates what to do, Mustafa’s voice comes back to him, and he quotes an as-yet-unincluded segment of man’s confession for several paragraphs. We learn that Mustafa narrated his experience in the courtroom. As a jury of British citizens decided his fate, he had a feeling of superior: He felt himself to be “a colonizer […] the intruder whose fate must be decided” (79). Thinking over the dead man’s words, the narrator tells Hosna she must not cling to the past—that she may decide to accept a suitor some day. She tells him that she will never again marry, adding of Wad Rayyes, “‘If they force me to marry him, I’ll him and kill myself’” (80).
The next morning, Wad Rayyes visits the narrator and is enraged to hear Hosna’s response. The man insists that he will marry her whether or not she is willing. He also accuses the narrator of interfering, stating that there is something between them. The narrator exits the room and visits his friend Mahjoub. Mahjoub reminds the narrator that there is nothing Hosna can do if her father and brother agree to the marriage. He speculates that Wad Rayyes is obsesses with Hosna because she has an air of superiority and culture after her marriage to Mustafa. Eventually, as they discuss the woman and her sons, Mahjoub proposes that the narrator marry her and take her as his second wife. The narrator briefly thinks back to her perfume, and his feeling in the darkness—but laughs it off. However, he leaves his friend knowing that he is in love with Hosna.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
After exploring the effect of Mustafa’s confession on his life in Khartoum as the [Minister of Education] in the previous two chapters, the narrator focuses on Mustafa’s enduring legacy in the village in Chapters 5 and 6. As guardian of the man’s two sons, the narrator is irrevocably tied to him in the minds of his countrymen. When Wad Rayyes develops the desire to marry Hosna, this forces the narrator to again confront his connection to Mustafa.
In Chapter 5, we see a different side of the narrator’s Sudanese village. In previous chapters, Mustafa’s London is a debauched world, full of seduction, sex, and exploitation. When the narrator enters his grandfather’s residence and finds Wad Rayyes, Bint Majzoub, and Bakri discussing their sexual histories, we learn more about how sex and seduction work in this village. Wad Rayyes’s first anecdote about sleeping with a slavery girl seems to narrate a rape, and his later stories show that, as a polygamous Muslim, he marries any woman he hopes to sleep with, divorcing her as soon as he loses interest in her. He looks down on men who only take one wife, or who never remarry after one wife’s death. While his account paints a portrait of a chauvinistic society, Bint Majzoub’s ribald tales suggest that women, too, enjoy this sexual culture—even if they are circumcised.
Although westerners frequently think of Muslim nations as sexually repressed and conservative, these characters’ view the narrator’s monogamy stems from prudish, Western beliefs. When he becomes enraged at the idea of Hosna marrying Wad Rayyes, he must consider at Mahjoub’s urging whether his beliefs truly have a place in his village. Although he quickly realizes that he is in love with Hosna, and although he could marry her and spare her from a forced union, he finds himself unable to.
As he wrestles with this collision of European and African beliefs and values, the narrator once again thinks of Mustafa Sa’eed, including parts of his confession that were not excerpted in Chapter 2. In them, Mustafa reveals that he ultimately felt superior at his trial. He felt that the violence he exacted was merely a result of the “disease” of colonization, something that he had contracted and then inevitably spread. As the narrator grapples with his feelings for Hosna, he must consider what kinds of violence he is willing to enact, and to observe. Furthermore, he must continue to confront the reality that he has in a sense been “infected” not just by colonialism, but by Mustafa’s dark tale.
