Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North traces an unnamed narrator as he returns from abroad to his Sudanese village and encounters Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of the novel, with whom he becomes fascinated. Throughout the novel, the narrator learns about Mustafa’s past, complex experience in the Occident, which arose primarily from love affairs based on appeals to Orientalist assumptions. In Orientalism and Season of Migration to the North, Edward Said’s rearticulation of the concept of Orientalism and Tayeb Salih’s presentation of Mustafa’s relationship with Jean Morris highlight how the Orient is enmeshed in institutions of authority in order to demonstrate the cruel impact of European colonialism on Sudanese identity and culture.
In the beginning of the passage, the narrator recalls Mustafa Sa’eed’s trial for the murder of Jean Morris. During the trial, Mustafa is asked if he killed Jean “intentionally,” to which he responds “yes” (Salih 28). Salih uses Mustafa’s confirmation of “yes,” that his actions were “intentional,” to highlight, through his purposeful engagement with murder, how Mustafa’s extended subjugated distorted his character. By believing that he could dominate Jean through death, who unlike his other sexual interests he had not been able to conquer, Mustafa conforms to the institution of the colonizer. Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen, Mustafa’s attorney, proceeds to say that Jean was not killed by Mustafa, but “by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed [her] a thousand years ago” (Salih 29).
Salih critiques how Professor Foster-Keen reduces Mustafa to an Orientalist stereotype by personifying colonialism as an assailing “disease” that caused a division between the East and the West and subsequently the decay of Mustafa’s identity and relationships. After listening to Professor Foster-Keen speak, Mustafa contemplates declaring that the depiction of himself is “untrue, a fabrication. It was [he] who killed them. [He is] no Othello. [He is] a lie” (Salih 29). Mustafa ultimately disengages himself from the “lie,” which refers to the stereotype of Othello, and hopes for its death since the character Othello symbolizes the “untrue” cultural descriptions that have prohibited him from developing an identity outside of the characterizations imposed on him by colonialism.
Through this idea, Salih implies that Mustafa, by perpetuating his initially self-imposed image, will be unable to escape his Oriental position; the stereotypes of Orientalism are not merely descriptive and are perpetuated simply through attention. In his stupor, Mustafa recognizes that his trial had been turned into “a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which [he] was one of the victims” (Salih 29). Here, Salih critiques the concept of reality produced by the Occident by using the words “conflict between two worlds” to demonstrate the struggle of domination between the Orient and the Occident.
The idea that there are fundamental differences between the East and West, and that Europe is more enlightened, is reinforced through Said’s redefinition of Orientalism as a “style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction” (Said 2). Salih’s characterization of Mustafa as a “victim” then augments this distinction since the Occident is able to assume a “flexible positional superiority” and thus retain control over the less powerful Oriental “victims” such as Mustafa (Said 7).
Throughout the novel, Mustafa Sa’eed is able to seduce women by confirming Occidental sterotypes and projecting a fetishizable image of the extoic other. When Jean Morris gives in to Mustafa’s advances, she compares him to “a savage bull that does not weary of the chase” and then asks to marry him (Salih 29). Salih uses Jean’s characterization of Mustafa as a chasing, “savage bull” to highlight how the Occident dehumanizes the colonized as animals rather than treat them as humans. Jean’s impression of the Orient thus reinforces Said’s description of Orientalism as something that deals with the “internal consistency of ideas about the Orient” despite a lack of “correspondence with the real” Orient, since Jean interacts solely with Mustafa’s projected images, and not with the true setting of the Orient (Said 5).
Although Mustafa attempts to destabilize colonial structures by using the stereotypical fear of white women being taken by dark men to his advantage, he is simultaneously used for his own exoticism and consequently perpetuates that Orientalist theme. After marrying Jean, Mustafa finds that his bedroom has become “a theater of war. When [he] grasped [Jean] it was like grasping at clouds,” and glimpsing her unchanged, bitter smile would signal that he had “lost the combat” (Salih 29). Salih uses the metaphor of Mustafa’s bedroom as a “theater of war” and the words “lost the combat” to demonstrate how Mustafa attempts to reverse the roles of colonialism through the combative, “war-”like action of sexually conquering Occidental women like Jean, who subjugates Mustafa through her scorning of him. Salih’s use of the word “theater” highlights how Mustafa’s actions are dramatic and unrealistic, and that he subsequently lacks the power to defy the historical script that he follows.
Additionally, Salih’s simile of Mustafa grasping Jean to “grasping at clouds,” which connotes a sense of the fleeting and unsubstantial, reveals how according to colonial standards, it was unlikely for non-Western or non-White people to enter such relationships. Mustafa’s inability to “grasp” something of substance supports the aforementioned distinction between the Occident and Orient, as well as Said’s definition of Orientalism as a “Western style for dominating the Orient,” since Jean symbolizes the authoritative nature of the Occident by being ungraspable (Said 3). As he finishes recounting his experiences with Jean, Mustafa sees himself as “a slave Shahrayar encountering a Scheherazade amidst the rubble of a city destroyed by plague” (Salih 29).
Salih’s inclusion of “Shahrayar” and “Scheherazade” refers to A Thousand and One Nights, which parallels Season of Migration to the North since both Jean and Scheherazade initially evade the dominance of a womanizer, in order to highlight the recurring “plague” of Mustafa’s relationships and the inverted structure of the world. The comparison of Mustafa to a “slave” also reveals how he is both a slave and a fighter in the novel and how, through those roles, he is trapped in an infinite colonial struggle.
In Orientalism, Edward Said defines the Orient as a “place of Europe’s oldest colonies and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other” (Said 1). The Occident used the existence of an inferior “other” as justification for colonialism and argued that its methods would uplift the colonized. However, colonialism in the Sudan had a pervasive and negative influence, which is demonstrated by Mustafa Sa’eed in Season of Migration to the North while, in an attempt to avenge his position as a colonized person, he perpetuates the Oriental stereotypes that are expected of him.
