Season of Migration to the North

“I preferred not to say the rest that had come to my mind: that just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak.”

When the other villagers question the narrator about his time in Europe, he does not share all their similarities. Here, we see his view of human nature and human commonality. It is not necessarily an optimistic view. He sees life as a futile endeavor that increasingly demands strength to endure.

“I was furious—I won’t disguise the fact from you—when the man laughed unashamedly and said: ‘We have no need of poetry here. It would have been better if you’d studied agriculture or medicine.’ Look at the way he says ‘we’ and does not include me, though he knows that this is my village and that it is he—not I—who is the stranger.”

The narrator describes a moment of conflict with Mustafa Sa’eed. As a student of poetry, he is offended when the man seems to make fun of the topic of his thesis. Moreover, as a native of the village, he resents being excluded from Mustafa Sa’eed’s “we.” This foreshadows the role that poetry will play in their relationship and contributes to the motif of poetry throughout the book.

“I tell you that had the ground suddenly split open and revealed an afreet standing before me, his eyes shooting out flames, I would not have been more terrified. All of a sudden there came to me the ghastly, nightmarish feeling that we—the men grouped together in that room—were not in a reality but merely some illusion.”

When the narrator hears Mustafa Sa’eed drunkenly reciting English poetry, he compares him to an “afreet,” or demon. He is astonished and disturbed by the display: The intrusion of his European past into his Sudanese present seems unreal. This quotation connects to the importance of poetry in the book.

“‘Behind me was a story of spectacular success at school, my sole weapon being that sharp knife inside my skull, while my breast was a hard, cold feeling—as if it had been cast in rock.’”

Mustafa Sa’eed tells the narrator his life story. Here, he displays self-awareness: He knows that his intelligence is not a tool but a weapon, something with which he can defend himself as well as harm others. Moreover, he knows that he lacks the kindness, warmth, and “heart” of other people.

“‘There came a moment when I felt I had been transformed in her eyes into a naked, primitive creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other, hunting elephants and lions in the jungles. This was fine.’”

Mustafa Sa’eed describes the seduction of Isabelle Seymour. He tells her stories of the jungle, the desert, and the Nile, playing upon racist and colonial tropes (many of which are not true to his experience) to seduce her. He knows that in this performance, he transforms himself in her eyes into something he is very much not. However, this is “fine” with him, and even his goal.

“Thousands of people die every day. Were we to pause and consider why each one of them died, and how—what would happen to us, the living? The world goes on whether we choose for it to do so or in defiance of us. And I, like millions of mankind, walk and move, generally by force of habit, in a long caravan that ascends and descends, encamps, and then proceeds on its way. Life in this caravan is not altogether bad.”

The narrator reflects on Mustafa Sa’eed’s death, refusing to find any importance or significance in it. Here, he describes life as a passive endeavor: One is swept along and pushed forward by the actions of others and the force of the mass. It seems he would rather accept this view of life than thinking about Mustafa’s death. This connects to the narrator’s view on passivity and action.

“By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe. He is no towering oak tree with luxuriant branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility, rather he is like bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life.”

Here, we see the narrator’s reverence for Hajj Ahmed. He describes his grandfather as a thorny bush: His sparseness and thorniness allow him to survive for 90 years. Being close to this instinct for survival, this legacy, gives the narrator a feeling of profound contentment.

“I pictured Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow, a woman in her thirties, weeping under seventy-year-old Wad Rayyes. Her weeping would be the subject of one of Wad Rayyes’s famous stories about his many women with which he regales the men of the village. The rage in my breast grew more savage.”

When the narrator hears that Wad Rayyes wishes to wed Hosna, he cannot tolerate the idea of their having sex. He knows that this would not only be unpleasant for her but would also add her to the long list of his humorous sexual exploits. The idea of gossip about Hosna enrages him.

“‘Did you love Mustafa Sa’eed?’ I suddenly asked her. […] Then I realized the darkness and perfume were all but causing me to lose control and that mine was not a question to be asked at such a time and place.”

The narrator begins to realize his feelings for Hosna. After asking her about her deceased husband, he notices that they are in a romantic setting, talking about her emotional past.

“‘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 like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly diseased that struck them more than a thousand years ago.’”

The narrator quotes from Mustafa Sa’eed’s confession two years earlier. As he reflects on his trial, he remembers a feeling of superiority and self-righteousness. Here, he describes colonialism as a disease that spreads violence. His own violent crime is merely the logical conclusion of that disease.

“Man’s mind is not kept in a refrigerator. It is this sun which is unbearable. It melts the brain. It paralyses thought.”

The narrator laments the effect of the desert on the human brain. After discovering his feelings for Hosna, he travels through the desert feeling unable to think clearly. Here again, the Sudan is associated with the sun, although this time the effects of the sun are violent rather than soothing.

“An idea occurred to me; turning it over in my mind, I decided to express it and see what happened. I said to them that she had not killed him but that he had died from sunstroke—just as Isabella Seymour had died, and Sheila Greenwood, Ann Hammond, and Jean Morris. Nothing happened.”

After hearing news via radio that Hosna has killed Wad Rayyes, the narrator contemplates lying to his fellow travelers to convince them that she is not truly guilty of her crime. He tries to take blame away from Hosna just as Mustafa Sa’eed’s lawyer tried to take blame away from his client. His lie is unacknowledged and unchallenged.

“A feast without meaning, a mere desperate act that had sprung up impromptu like the small whirlwinds that rise up in the desert and then die.”

The narrator reflects on the impromptu evening of music and dance that took place in the desert. Although this is a moment of togetherness—travelers and villagers meet, drink, and sing—it now seems meaningless to him. Here, we see the shift in his state of mind and his increasing alienation from Sudanese culture.

“He will not believe the facts about the new rulers of Africa, smooth of face, lupine of mouth, their hands gleaming with rings of previous stones, exuding perfume from their cheeks, in white, blue, black and green suits of fine mohair and expensive silk rippling on their shoulders like the fur of Siamese cats, and with shoes that reflect the light from chandeliers and squeak as they tread on marble.”

The narrator travels with Mahjoub, contemplating whether to tell him about the conference on African education that he has recently attended. He imagines his friends’ shock at African leaders’ decadent embrace of wealth and capitalism, which stands in marked contrast to their rhetoric.

“‘Women, let everyone of you go about her business. Wad Rayyes dug his grave with his own hands, and Bint Mahmoud, God’s blessings be upon her, paid him out in full.’ Then she gave trilling cries of Joy.”

Bint Majzoub repeats the words of Wad Rayyes’s eldest wife upon hearing news of his death. She implies that all the elderly man’s wives hated him for his attitudes towards women. This connects to the theme of misogyny throughout the novel.

“I had to make a great effort not to break into tears. ‘Hosna wasn’t mad,’ I said. ‘She was the sanest woman in the village—it’s you who are mad. She was the sanest woman in the village—and the most beautiful. Hosna wasn’t mad.’”

After Mahjoub states that both Wad Rayyes and Hosna were mad, the narrator becomes extremely upset with his friend. While patriarchal rule and forced marriage are standard in the village, the narrator believes that Hosna’s rejection of the system was completely sane—and that his friend’s callousness is in fact insane.

“Love? Love does not do this. This is hatred. I feel hatred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs must confront him. Even so, there is still in my mind a modicum of sense that is aware of the irony of the situation. I begin from where Mustafa Sa’eed had left off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing.”

After strangling Mahjoub, the narrator wrestles with his motivations. He loves Hosna, but he realizes that he hates something within himself. In this state of internal struggle, he realizes that he has come to the same point that Mustafa Sa’eed must have encountered and then gone beyond when killing Jean. However, he realizes that while Mustafa made a choice—to stay in London, to marry a European woman, to bring a knife into his bed—he has merely been reacting to events beyond his control.

“Good God, the four walls from floor to ceiling were filled, shelf upon shelf, with books and more books and yet more books. […] What a fool he was! Was this the action of a man who had turned over a new leaf?”

The narrator reacts to Mustafa’s locked room. Although the narrator is himself a scholar of literature, he finds Mustafa’s library to be “foolish,” particularly because he was attempting to flee from his past. We might interpret Mustafa’s true mistake not to be the pursuit of knowledge but his tendency towards violence. However, the narrator suggests that continuing attachment to European culture and the pursuit of knowledge is a grievous mistake.

“There is no justice or moderation in the world. I feel bitterness and hatred, for after all those victims he crowned his life with yet another one, Hosna Bint Mahmoud, the only woman I have ever loved. She killed poor Wad Rayyes and killed herself because of Mustafa Sa’eed.”

The narrator considers Hosna to be one of Mustafa’s victims. Sheila, Ann, and Isabella chose suicide after falling in love with Mustafa Sa’eed. If violence is a disease, it seems that Mustafa passed it on to these women, and his wife Hosna too.

“‘Though I realized I was lying, I felt that somehow I meant what I was saying and that she too, despite lying, was telling the truth. It was one of those rare moments of ecstasy for which I would sell my whole life; a moment in which, before your very eyes, lies are turned into truths, history becomes a pimp, and the jester is turned into a sultan.’”

The narrator returns to Mustafa Sa’eed’s confession from two years earlier. Here, Mustafa narrates his first encounter with Ann. When she comes up to him and speaks to him in Arabic, stating that their meeting was fated, they both step into scripted roles. Although these are artificial “lies,” their mutual entrance into this script seems to get at something essentially true.

“I did not […] waste too much time on it, for in any case it is a very poor poem that relies on antithesis and comparisons; it has no true feeling, no genuine emotion. This line of mine is no worse than the rest, so I crossed out the last line of the poem and wrote in its place: Heads humbly bent and faces turned away.”

The narrator continues to follow in Mustafa’s footsteps. As a scholar of poetry, he judges Mustafa’s attempts at poetry. Moreover, he directly intervenes in the text, adding his own ending to the poem. This parallels the greater structure of the novel and relates to the motif of poetry.

“He wants to be discovered, like some historical object of value. There was no doubt of that, and I now know that it was me he had chosen for that role.”

The narrator always assumed that Mustafa made him guardian of his wife and children because he knew his secret. Now, he realizes another layer to the choice: he believes Mustafa intentionally left behind notes and scraps for him to piece together, potentially to shape into a book.

“I pressed the dagger with my chest until it had all disappeared between her breasts. I could feel the hot blood gushing from her chest. I began crushing my chest against her as she called out imploringly, ‘Come with me. Come with me. Don’t let me go alone.’ ‘I love you,’ she said to me, and I believed her. ‘I love you,’ I said to her, and I spoke the truth.”

The narrator returns to Mustafa’s confession for the final time. Here, Mustafa reveals that his murder of Jean Morris was a moment of ecstasy as well as murder. He made love to his wife with a knife between them, and she asked him to kill himself as well. The intermingling of love, obsession, and violence comes to its climax.