Book Review : Enlightening Visit to a Dark Continent

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih; translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (Michael Kesend; distributed by Talman, 150 Fifth Ave., New York 10011: $16.95; 169 pages)

One afternoon years ago, when Beirut was a relatively quiet oasis in the Arab world instead of its deadly cockpit, I sat in a hotel bar next to three prosperous Lebanese.

They were telling stories, at times with a quiet energy, at times in convulsions of laughter. They were speaking Arabic and I was excluded; but there was something in the rhythm, the hilarity and what I might call the delicate ferocity that made me suddenly aware that here was a civilization I would never know unless I mastered the language--and probably not even then.

My world seemed smaller. A wall bisected it and there was life on the other side.

I use such a beginning, anecdotal and perhaps suspect, to explain why I found “Season of Migration to the North” by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih so moving.

Culture Conflict

In some respects, this novel about the encounter between a traditional society and the modern West is crude and wildly melodramatic. But there are moments when it opens up the laughter at the Beirut hotel, along with the silences, the fierceness and the poetry. The wall is breached, if not down. My world seems larger.

The narrator of “Season” is a Sudanese who returns to his village for a visit after having studied literature in Europe and then having taken up a post as an education official in Khartoum.

It is a millennial village on the Upper Nile; the river brings flood and fertility. It flows north, and every once in a while, some gifted youth will board a steamship and follow it north to England or France and the instruction they offer in the achievements of the 20th Century.

These are difficult achievements to bring back. The narrator seems likely to settle for taking his place among the Westernized ruling caste of the capital. It is a deracinated caste that goes to Switzerland to shop and to attend international conferences, where speeches are made denouncing deracination and urging involvement in the real life of Upper Nile villages.

But two different kinds of things happen to the narrator on this and other visits home. They will not change his life, perhaps, but they will change the way he thinks of it.

Ceremonial Visits

One of these is simply the experience of homecoming.

With an exquisitely precise power to evoke, he describes the evenings at home with the narrator’s family sitting around, drinking tea and talking. He describes the narrator’s rambles about the countryside, with a few changes here and there--pumps instead of water wheels--but the same age-old cultivations and cultivators.

“I feel that I am important, that I am continuous and integral,” the narrator reflects.

The values of the village, precarious and so different from what he has seen in Europe, raise a question inside him. A second is raised by his encounter with Mustafa, a farmer who a few years earlier moved into the village, married and prospered.

Mustafa is not what he seems. What he is--as he confides to the narrator and becomes, for a while, a second narrator--is a dark and violently cautionary example. He, too, had been a gifted schoolboy, sent off on a scholarship to London. He did brilliantly there, won an academic post as an economist, was courted by the trendy left and became a prolific and relentless seducer of Englishwomen.

Two of the women killed themselves for him. A third died of heartbreak and cancer. And a fourth, a kind of Anglo-Saxon Lilith, married him and took him on a sado-masochistic binge that ended with his stabbing her to death upon her fervent invitation.

Released from jail seven years later, Mustafa goes back to the Sudan and moves into the village as a stranger. He is a good farmer and his neighbors admire him, but eventually he will be off again, losing himself back in “the north.”

Amid the quiet, precise pastorale of the narrator’s village, Mustafa’s story is a grotesque, self-mocking extravaganza. He is a victim of the anomalous, exploitative and patronizing West; unlike other victims, he takes his revenge.

It is, again, a pulp-fiction revenge: by seduction. In one speech, he proclaims it: “I came as an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected into the blood of my country.”

This kind of bloody fustian, even as satiric parable, is a risky device, and sometimes it is ungovernable.

Ultimately, though, the author makes his point; and he does considerably more. In Mustafa’s comic and awful excess, in the startling poetry of the village scenes, in the audacious glee of three old village men and an old woman recalling their sexual exploits, we travel very far.

It is traveling to a part of the world, a part of the Arab world, that we recognize. Not because we have been there before, but because--the world changing as it does--we realize that we should have been there before.