Sudan is in turmoil. In October, the military declared a state of emergency and imprisoned Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, leading to massive, violent protests against the coup. Last month, in a climbdown of sorts, the Prime Minister was reinstated, but marches continue in the capital Khartoum against the military’s involvement in politics. After Sudan got independence in the 1950s, shedding a colonial past, conflicts arose between its diverse populations — there was a prolonged civil war too — with South Sudan finally seceding in 2011. Making sense of Sudan’s past and present, Tayeb Salih has written novels and short stories to portray a country pulled in different directions.
His 1966 short novel, Season of Migration to the North , was hailed as one of the finest novels to be written in modern Arabic literature. A novel about crossings in a post-colonial era, Edward Said said it “reverses the trajectory” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . In Conrad’s story, the protagonist journeys south from Europe to the Congo, witnessing an “African nightmare”, and exploiting people in the name of civilising them.
Stranger in the midst
In Salih’s book, a key character, Mustafa Sa’eed, travels north to the heart of the British colonial empire, London, and what follows is a “stubborn confrontation”. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, the novel begins with the narrator stating that he has returned to his village at the bend of the Nile after getting a doctorate in Britain — “a land whose fishes die of the cold” — on an obscure English poet. Waking up to familiar sounds, he listens intently to the wind, “which in our village possessed a merry whispering — the sound of the wind passing through palm trees is different from when it passes through fields of corn.”
But amid known faces, he spots a stranger, Mustafa Sa’eed, who arrived in the village five years ago, bought himself a farm, married a local villager’s daughter and settled down. During an evening of drinking and merry-making, Mustafa inadvertently recites a poem in English. Soon he is telling his secrets to the unnamed narrator about his past in England, where he used his “exotic appeal” to unleash violence on himself and women.
Layers of hierarchy
It’s left to the narrator, who has also returned from England, to make sense of the post-colonial world: “Over there is like here, neither better nor worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in the courtyard of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else’s. The fact that they came to our land I know not why, does that mean that we should poison our present and our future? Sooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories, and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were — ordinary people — and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.”
Mustafa’s seemingly idyllic life unravels and other lives too are destroyed. The shadow of colonialism will not go away easily, but there are shadows cast by the present too. Mustafa’s widow Hosna dies fighting for her rights. In his introduction, Wail Hassan writes that one source of the novel’s power is its dramatisation of the ways in which colonial hegemony is inextricably linked with racial and gender hierarchies.
As a Sudanese, says Hassan, 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.”
Many writers have responded to Conrad’s controversial novel of the empire. Chinua Achebe questioned it deeply, calling it racist. Salih’s elegant novel too is a literary resistance to stereotypes.
The writer looks back at one classic every month.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
