Season of Migration to the North

Season of Migration to the North, novel by Sudanese-born writer al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, first published in 1966. It originally appeared serially in the Arabic-language journal  Hiwar and was translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies in 1969.

The story, set in the 1950s, is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator who has returned to his home village of Wad Hamid in Sudan on the Nile River after several years of study in London. He notices a new resident in town. He makes inquiries, and he learns that the new person’s name is Mustafa Sa’eed and that he has lived there with his wife and children for five years. The narrator’s curiosity is piqued when one day Mustafa recites English-language poetry, though he had not mentioned having lived outside of Sudan. At first reluctant, Mustafa eventually tells his story to the narrator.

Mustafa says that he was born in Khartoum. He was such a gifted student that he was sent to Cairo for secondary school and then to London. He describes his sexual relationship with three women in London, all of whom later commit suicide. At one point in the 1920s, he was living with five different women separately. The women regard Mustafa as exotic, and he plays to this view. He spends three years pursuing a woman named Jean Morris. He marries her. It is a tumultuous marriage that ends when he kills her, for which he is later sentenced to prison.

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Some time after this conversation, Mustafa disappears from Wad Hamid and is presumed drowned in an unusual flood of the Nile. The narrator keeps thinking about Mustafa and occasionally meets people who had known him, adding to the narrator’s knowledge of his life. Before his disappearance, Mustafa had written a letter making the narrator the guardian of Mustafa’s wife and sons and leaving him the key to a secret room in his house. A few years after Mustafa’s disappearance, an older man in the village, Wad Reyyes, tells the narrator that he wishes to wed Mustafa’s widow, Hosna. Hosna tells the narrator that she intends never to marry again. When the narrator tells her of Wad Reyyes’s interest, she says that if she is compelled to marry him, she will kill both him and herself.

The narrator returns to his job in Khartoum. Hosna’s father forces her to marry Wad Reyyes, and she does kill him and herself. Later, the narrator enters Mustafa’s secret room, which is set up as an English sitting room, with walls lined with English-language books and a portrait of Jean Morris over the fireplace. There is also a notebook in which Mustafa describes his relationship with Jean. The notebook describes Jean begging him to stab her to death as a sexual act. The novel ends with the narrator plunging into the Nile. He tries to swim to the other shore, but he feels himself being pulled down in the middle of the river, and, realizing that he wishes to live, shouts for help.

The novel’s presentation of colonial violence through local sexual violence makes Season of Migration to the North a rather uncompromising read, but this relationship yields an extraordinarily disturbing sense of how different kinds of brutality can coalesce in the postcolonial nation. Written in lyrical and rhythmic prose, the novel delves into the lasting moral and spiritual distortions created by colonization in both colonizer and colonized.