"I Choose Life"

Personal Humanism in Salih's
Season of Migration to the North

It is clear to anyone with one eye on cultural matters that the world is not what it once was. Many of the absolutes that we took for granted have faded away, and we live in a relativist world. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this is our new cognizance of the validity of other cultures--no longer can we blithely assume that we are superior to 'those barbarians' simply because from our point of view they appear primitive. Instead, we have a new mood of equality, an equality that encourages us to attempt to look at ourselves from outside perspectives and realize that we are perhaps equally backward in other cultures' eyes.

However laudable this may be, it is all of a piece with the postmodern mindset. When relativism is embraced as a new paradigm, the word privilege begins to take on nasty connotations. We would be doing a disservice to these egalitarian ideals by favoring cultures not our own when attempting to reduce Europocentrism; it is a similar quandary to that faced by civil rights advocates when dealing with the issue of quotas and affirmative action.

When this matter is transposed to the arena of colonial literature, questions begin to arise regarding matters of interpretation, particularly in the current critical climate. Depending on the particular theory one chooses to apply to a text, vastly differing interpretations may arise. There is an urge to examine texts that grant status to previously ignored groups, such as African-American writers, women writers, or authors from colonized nations. Whether or not there is literary merit in these writers is not really a valid question in some ways, because merit itself is of course subjective and relative, and a text once considered imporant may fall out of favor and come to be regarded as minor.

Interestingly, the same thing happens to cultural conflicts, particularly when seen through the lens of the literature of the area undergoing the conflict. An example is Tayeb Salih's remarkable novel Season of Migration to the North. The novel presents us with a process of crosscultural storytelling--a process whereby events become distorted, magnified, affected and redirected according to the cultural pressures inherent in the colonial enterprise. Throughout the novel we get multiple perspectives on the same events: a technique which is common to literature of all ages, but which came into its own during the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century. This technique illustrates the multiple perspectives that differing cultures impose on an event and thus dramatizes the multicultural conflict. However, the fundamental realization at the heart of Salih's novel is in a sense the most traditional one of all, and a realization that in itself is essentially of the postmodern age: the epiphanic and Nietzschean moment in which the narrator chooses to impose his own perspective on events rather than succumb to a particular culture's interpretation. Call it personal humanism: the understanding that boundaries between human groups, once said groups have been acknowledged peers, are untenable because they have the tendency to create exactly the disparities that cause problems in cultural interface. Salih's version of humanism is one in which a self-definition is paramount, and in which the cultural differences fade in favor of true equality.

Most of the novel is a study in the frictions between differing cultural paradigms. Mustafa is a man who is torn culturally, and whose acts of sexual dominance are defined by him by the sentence, "I have come to you as conqueror." (p. 60) He speaks of engaging in the same invasive colonial enterprise as the British who came to Sudan. Although his work in economics is described as "Fabian" and "leftist," (58) and he thus seems to have sought the role of voice of the Sudanese in Britain, his is not a conciliatory position. Images of violence and war are often associated with his trysts with English women. When describing his trial, Salih makes a point of mentioning that the barristers who accuse and defend him are in fact both arguing positions contrary to their personal beliefs. This reversal is crucial to the understanding of the thrust of Salih's argument. As Mustafa himself said of the lawyers,

...each one of them would rise above himself for the first time in his life, while I felt a sort of feeling of superiority towards them, for the ritual was being held primarily because of me; and I, over and above everything else, am a colonizer, I am the intruder whose fate must be decided.
(p. 94)

Given the general assumptions we now have about the colonial endeavor, it is clear that indeed, the lawyers are rising above themselves--and that Mustafa is falling into the trap of privilege and assuming a superior perspective when none such is warranted. The colonizer is clearly the villain in this text in that those who seek to impose their wills on others are ignoring the relativist dicta regarding the essential equality of all things. Mustafa may perhaps be 'colonizing' as an act of revenge (to put it in negative terms) or as an form of redressing a grievance, but by doing so he is no better than those who hurt the Sudanese by attacking their culture.

It is notable that the negativity of such invasiveness is demonstrated quite clearly by the deaths of those parties who are invaded in this manner: not only the women who kill themselves after liaisons with Mustafa, but also Hosna Bint Mahmoud, who is raped by Wad Rayyes, and metaphorically, the society of rural Sudan itself. "They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun," Mustafa says of the British colonizers--yet he is as guilty of contamination as they. (95) The desire for cultural domination is replicated in instances of sexual domination, a parallel which has greater implications later on.

If both Mustafa and the British are prisoners of the outdated colonialist mentality, we must seek alternative voices in the novel. We find them in unlikely places: the narrator's grandfather; a British man on a train; and most unlikely of all, Jean Morris, the woman who entices Mustafa into a suicide pact that he fails to complete.

Hajj Ahmed, the narrator's grandfather, is a man who is steeped in his culture, yet is willing to accept other cultures into his world by invitation. He relates a story of his youth at one point, revealing that he nearly married an Egyptian woman once. Although the moral of the story is placed in the mouth of his crony Bakri, it is only because Bakri "beat him to it" and not because it does not accord with his belief:

Women are women whether they're in Egypt, the Sudan, Iraq or the land of Mumbo-jumbo. The black, the white, and the red--they're all one and the same.
(p. 82)

If the gender-specific references are removed, this becomes a quintessentially egalitarian and humanist statement. Again, if. For this is the barrier that the grandfather cannot cross: he is incapable of granting women the rights he grants to himself. This is a factor in Islamic culture itself, and he should not be blamed for his succumbing to an externally imposed pattern, as so many others do in the book. Rather, it is illustrative of the continuing parallel between sexual domination and cultural invasion. When Wad Rayyes wishes to marry Hosna Bint Mahmoud, the grandfather tells the narrator, "She listens to what you say... If you were to talk to her she might agree," (86) in effect suggesting a subversion of his role as caretaker in defiance of the woman's wishes.

But it is clear that the grandfather has part of the answer to the dilemma, part of the secret of personal humanism. Mustafa himself says to the narrator, "Your grandfather knows the secret." (11) His part of the answer is an acceptance of the world, a calm when facing its vicissitudes. Although he makes gestures towards true humanistic equality, he falls short in his failure to put himself in a female perspective. But his grandson, the man who will eventually transcend the cultural limitations of both the British and the Sudanese, understands better than he:

I imagined Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa Sa'eed's widow, as being the same woman in both instances: two white, wide-open thighs in London, and a woman groaning before dawn in an obscure village on a bend of the Nile under the weight of the aged Wad Rayyes. If that other thing was evil, this too was evil, and if this was like death and birth, the Nile flood and the wheat harvest, a part of the system of the universe, so too was that.
(p. 87)

This realization, this equivalency, although colored by a certain mystification at the world's workings, is shared by a British man that the narrator meets on a train. While speaking with a Sudanese native and with the Englishman of Mustafa Sa'eed's days in London, the narrator learns a little more about the value of a self-imposed paradigm versus the illegitimacy of any externally applied, forcibly applied definition of the world. Speaking of the liberal whites who condescend to Mustafa and elevate him into a position of privilege (again, the word must carry with it negative connotations) in order to assuage their own consciences, the man says, "this sort of European is no less evil than the madmen who believe in the supremacy of the white man in South Africa and in the southern states of America." (59) What a remarkable statement! While the narrator realizes that the man, named Richard, was trapped in his own illusions as much as anyone, he also sees a fundamental truth in the observation made. He learns to call the colonization of Sudan "a melodramatic act which with the passage of time will change into a mighty myth." (60) We come full circle: the book itself is arguing that its subject matter is relative and that its importance is entirely perspectival. This adds another element to the gradually accreting picture of the world as a fairly incomprehensible, constantly evolving composite picture, in which the only true grounding is the self and one's immediate surroundings: much like Hajj Ahmed's point of view.

The most disturbing image of cultural friction in the novel is undoubtedly Jean Morris, a woman who leads Mustafa along, one who engages him as an equal. The manner of her death, killing herself during coitus and expecting him to do likewise, is emblematic of the perpetual dance that two conquerors cannot help but engage in. For all of Mustafa's boasting of "I'll liberate Africa with my penis," (120) Jean colonizes him just as thoroughly, and what is more, establishes more permanent bases in his soul. It is Jean's name that Mustafa whispers in his sleep years afterwards. (91) Here we have the dual invasive process, the true germ of Verdun and the Somme, leading to its inevitable conclusion of death. In a sense, Mustafa's death is preordained by his having engaged in this affair, and the fact that it is delayed is immaterial; just as nations feel the impact of having been forcibly colonized for years, so do people.

Sexual conquest has thus been firmly linked to the colonial enterprise, which is essentially the imposition of one's values on another. This is not to say that compromise cannot be reached--although the novel does not offer many instances of it. But there are shreds of hope that a mutual exchange of concepts by invitation can work; one thinks of Mahjoub's invitation to the government to put in schools and hospitals--interestingly, not just for boys either, but also for girls, thus undermining the traditional culture and its overt sexism.

The personal humanism which lies at the core of the novel is in a sense an abandonment of the restrictive composite picture of the culture clash that is provided by the contending parties. It is refusing to accept the myth that the narrator realized was the clash in the first place. It is a reliance on self, on defining one's world by criteria which grant equality and respect to everyone. As the one woman who applauds Hosna Bint Mahmoud's killing of Wad Rayyes and subsequent suicide says at the funeral, "It's too bad, but if anyone doesn't like it she can just go drink river water." (129) Literally, this is precisely what both Mustafa (a man who has learned his lesson too late) and the narrator do: they go to the river.

The river is clearly set up as a boundary between north and south, and when the narrator first enters he cannot see either shore clearly. (166) Neither can the people caught in a culture clash, those who carry with them some elements of each society, clearly see the factors that cause them so many problems when attempting to forge a place in world. If a man standing between both cultures cannot see either well, one can picture the inability of North and South to understand each other. In another place the narrator characterizes it as a "bottomless historical chasm" a "stone's throw from the Equator." (60)

However, it is the presence of the river itself, of the boundary, that makes clear sight (and hence understanding) impossible. It is getting caught in this same boundary that endangers people. The river is characterized as "destructive" (168) and as it pulls the narrator down into its depths the whole world loses significance. The myth has been shattered and as yet he has no alternative vision.

And then there is lightning: the epiphany. "The sky settled into place, as did the bank..." (168) and the narrator makes his choice. It is a clearly humanistic one, and just as clearly self-oriented, for he speaks of self and of personal intercourse; of duties, not of giving orders. Witness the way in which Salih gives us the moment of awakening of this man who is caught in such a precarious position between two supposedly disparate worlds:

Though floating on the water I was not part of it. I thought that if I died at that moment, I would have died as I was born--without any volition of mine. All my life I had not chosen, had not decided. Now I am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, I will try to forget. I shall live by force and by cunning. I moved my feet and my arms, violently and with difficulty, until the upper part of my body was above water. Like a comic actor shouting on a stage, I screamed with all my remaining strength, "Help! Help!"
(p. 169)

The various parts of this paragraph add up to a coherent vision for the world, one that springs from within the narrator himself, and is not externally imposed. Taken sentence by sentence is it quite simple. He refuses to be part of the boundary anymore, to engage in the meaningless squabbles of dominance and subjugation. He realizes his past has been marked by his being pulled willy-nilly by the forces and expectations of the culture clash and other societal factors. But he chooses life. Fundamentally, he refuses to engage in the dance of death that Mustafa made his doom, that Jean Morris lived out to her final act. Instead, he summons up the image of peace and understanding, the image of the caravan in the desert at the circumcision of Mahjoub's boy: a moment of harmony where elements of both cultures coexisted. His reasons are simple: just human contact, a desire for friendship, a feeling of obligation. Whether or not he can make sense of the immense incomprehensible construct that the world is is immaterial. Like his grandfather, but transcending him, the narrator will live his own life, and let the world take care of itself. And like Nietzsche's notion of amor fati, he will forgive and forget the fact that he himself is the product of a previous round of imperialism, for to deny any part of his heritage is to deny himself.

So the narrator pushes himself above water--above the conflict--and calls out to other human beings: not to Europeans, or to Sudanese, for this is a matter of life and death. Any helping hand will be welcome. All his life he has been "a comic actor on a stage," (169) yes, and he will continue to be so until his dying day, for all this is a part of that inevitable circle of life and death he saw. But he can acknowledge parts of the circle as evil, and attempt to write his own script.

We know he survives and does write that script, for the book begins with his invocation to his listeners, those who can hear him and understand him. He is choosing life, and his story, which is also the story of Mustafa and of Hosna Bint Mahmoud and of Jean Morris, is here as evidence that it is possible to make contact across the river, to send words across a flood and welcome in a guest without fear of invasion.

All citations taken from Salih, Tayeb, Season of Migration to the North, Heinemann Educational Publishers (Portsmouth: 1991), translated by Denys Johnson-Davis.

"I Choose Life"

Personal Humanism in Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Personal Humanism in Salih's
Season of Migration to the North