Season of Migration to the North

Season of Migration to the North is a 1966 novel by Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, first translated to English in 1969. It has been voted the “Most Important Arab Novel of the 20th century” by a panel of experts. It begins when the unnamed narrator returns from his schooling in London to his native village, Wad Hamid. There, he meets a stranger, Mustafa Sa’eed, who has settled in the village and married Hosna Mahmoud, the daughter of a local man. The book tells the story of these two men’s intertwined fates, both from the narrative’s perspective, and from a long, quoted monologue from Mustafa Sa’eed that begins in Chapter 2 but is not fully revealed until the narrator thinks back to it in Chapter 9.

The narrator returns to his village hoping to find a sense of purpose and belonging after a long period away completing a thesis on an English poet. However, as soon as he sees Mustafa, his sense of stability is troubled. He talks to his trusted friend Mahjoub and his beloved grandfather, Hajj Ahmed, to try and learn the truth about the man and finds only that the villagers highly respect his intellect. However, it is not long before he sees Mustafa drunk at a bar; on this occasion, the man recites English poetry. The narrator becomes disturbed and upset, as well as intent on discovering the truth.

Mustafa confesses himself to the narrator just a day later, revealing that 50 years before, he had grown up in the village of Khartoum before travelling to Egypt and then London to pursue his education. In London, he became a renowned economist and university professor, as well as a profligate seducer of women. He used African stereotypes and orientalist fantasies to draw women into his bed. However, three of his mistresses eventually committed suicide—and he killed his wife, Jean Morris. This resulted in a murder trial that seemed to symbolize the messy collision of colonizer and colonized and led to a seven-year prison sentence.

Two years later, Mustafa has died in the Nile—either by drowning or suicide—and appointed the narrator the guardian of his sons and wife Hosna. He has also left him the key to a locked room in his house. The narrator tries to put the man out of his mind, but his specter keeps returning. Now, the narrator lives in Khartoum and works in the Department of Education, returning to Wad Hamid for only two months a year. However, even when he is away, he runs into men who knew Mustafa Sa’eed, and who believe that he still holds a successful, esteemed position in London. The narrator sometimes wants to tell them the truth, but generally does not. He is not sure there is anything to be gained from Mustafa’s tale—whether it offers a dark lesson about colonialism or is merely a tale of depravity.

The narrator finds himself increasingly drawn back into Mustafa Sa’eed’s tale when his grandfather’s friend Wad Rayyes asks for his permission to marry Hosna. The narrator, having lived in Europe, is unenthusiastic about the practice of polygamy, as well as forced marriages between young brides and old men such as Wad Rayyes. In fact, he finds himself furious at the request. When he goes to share the proposal with Hosna, he realizes that he is in love with her. Hosna claims she will kill Wad Rayyes and herself if she is forced to marry him.

The narrator is thrown into confusion by his feelings for Hosna. His confusion only grows when, one month after his departure from the village, he discovers that Hosna was forced to marry the older man and did indeed kill him and herself. He returns to the village immediately, intent on hearing the whole story. Back in the village, the narrator finds he no longer understands its ways, and he ends up almost strangling his dear friend Mahjoub. His ideas of modernity and ethics now contrast violently with his friends’, and this comes out in a violent act. Afterwards, he finally opens the locked door in Mustafa Sa’eed’s house and discovers a trove of non-Arabic books; pictures and paintings of the man’s deceased wife and girlfriends; and scraps and bits of memoir and poetry. He feels that Mustafa left this for him to find and make sense of.

The narrator is shocked by the man’s hubris, his desire to “be discovered” (127) and commemorated. It is in this state of disgust that he shares with the reader the end of Mustafa Sa’eed’s confession. We finally learn the circumstances of the murder of Jean Morris: After a courtship and marriage defined by incessant combat, an oscillation between love and hate, she invited him to kill her—and asked him to “come with her” (136) into death.

At this point in the novel, Hosna has already unknowingly doubled her deceased husband’s path, murdering her husband just as he did his wife. And the narrator has followed Mustafa’s path as well, falling in love with Hosna and feeling increasing confusion about the relationship between Europe and Africa, modernity and tradition, colonizer and colonized. In the final pages, he follows Mustafa one step further, almost drowning in the Nile. However, just before drowning, he makes the choice to live and cries out for help.