Doubles - Myth, Imagery and Selfhood in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Doubles Myth, Imagery and Selfhood in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North Solveig Soliville Kaktus PhD Research Student - Librarianship Aberystwyth University, Wales, United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] Abstract This essay gives a brief introduction to some of the literary analyses of the post-colonial novel Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, mainly postcolonial studies and psychoanalysis, and draws some lines from the perspective of intertextuality and Adriana Cavarero's sense of the narratable self. A synthesis of theories results in an interpretation of the suicides as being triggered by the "colonial discourse" mutating the possibility of the "desired story" to be told; and the protagonist is understood as both constrained and advantaged by Myth.

Keywords: post-colonial; stream-of-consciousness; intertextuality; Othello; the Uncanny; colony; British; Sudan; the Other;

Doubles: Myth, Imagery and Selfhood in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

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DOUBLES

Myth, Imagery and Selfhood in Season of Migration to the North

The novel Season of Migration to the North (original title: Mawsim al-hijrah ilá al-shamal) by

Tayeb Salih was first published in Arabic in the magazine "Hiwar" in 1966, and first appeared

in English in 1969, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies.

In this essay I will outline the use of myth, imagery and narrativeness in the novel Season of

Migration to the North - hereafter Season - from a point of view of 'storytelling and selfhood'.

I will be arguing that there is doubleness in this post-colonial stream-of-consciousness novel,

and that it can be understood in relation to the theories of Julia Kristeva - her intertextuality

and double meaning - and Adriana Cavarero, particularly the desire for one's story(Cavarero,

Relating Narratives). But to start with, I will give a brief overview of some aspects highlighted

by different academics each employing a separate way of reading.

Danielle Tran situates the novel in a historical and generic context, and analyses the text in

relationship to Hulme's definition of colonial discourse: "a derogatory use of linguistically-

based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial

relationships." (Hulme 1986, quoted in Tran 4). As she keenly points out: "For Mustafa and

his European partners, colonial discourse is […] similarly employed as a method to

differentiate oneself from a person of an opposing race, highlighting the inescapability of

racial categorizations during the colonial period." (Tran 4).


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Yahya Ali Abdullah Idriss writes from a Sudanese point of view revealing the dissonances

between ethnic groups within the nation, and the racist connotations that are less accessible

to many western readers: "Racial discrimination as mechanism of constructing non-

Northerners1 as Other is an important political aspect of Season as a story of the nation itself."

(Idriss 122).

Musa al-Halool and A'alaa AlMajnouni emphasize the Uncanny and Alter-Ego notions and

the possible "oneness" of the two protagonists. This oneness of the two means a doubleness

of one, and this is the point what I will start from.

Double

In his psychoanalytical examination of Season, Al-Halool writes of the double:

When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the "double" being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted--a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The "double" has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons. (Freud 1955 in Al-Halool)

And, precisely, tracing the etymology of the word demon, we find that it is closely related to

daimon / daemon, the former meaning "an evil spirit or devil, esp. one thought to possess a

person or act as a tormentor in hell" (New Oxford American Dictionary ), and the latter

1 By “non-Northerners”, the author refers to Sudanese of "black" African descent as opposed to the “Northerners” of Arab descent


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meaning "a divinity or supernatural being of a nature between gods and humans" or "an inner

or attendant spirit or inspiring force" (New Oxford American Dictionary ). In fact each of the

spellings "demon" and "daemon" denote both senses, and they derive from "Greek daimōn

‘deity, genius’" and "Greek daemonion" ('lesser or evil spirit’), "diminutive of daimōn". Just

like the German word heimlich is at once the same as and the opposite of unheimlich

(uncanny), and inspire means both inhale and, its opposite, exhale.

While daimon is positively charged, demon is diminished into evil. And this is what happens

to the narrator, when the narration of "Mustafa Sa'eed" dominates over his selfhood. This

suggests that the Uncanny is a force working against the narratable self.

As Cavarero points out, words denoting life, soul, spirit and breath are often similar to each

other (Cavarero, For More than One Voice 32, 66). Spirit, has its roots in Latin spiritus ‘breath,

spirit,’ from spirare ‘breathe’, and is related to Latin inspirare originally meaning "breathe or

blow into"(Apple Inc. (emphases removed)). "God breathes his breath into man: this is at once

life and mind and language" (Walter Benjamin 1996 in Cavarero, For More than One Voice 21).

The divine connotation is interesting here. Mustafa inspires the narrator in the sense of

blowing his spirit into him, but to the narrator this spirit is a demon. It is therefore not

surprising when he at the end is close to death possessed by Mustafa.

On page 135 (Salih 135) the narrator calls Mustafa his "adversary", a word that beyond

meaning an opponent also recalls opposite and Devil, which brings us back to both demon and

the Uncanny. This mirror scene, which I will discuss in further detail, is the moment in which


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he faces himself in both literal and figurative senses. He is at once the seeing and the seen,

taken back to the origin of the split that he will now reverse.

This obtusity seems to personify the doubleness that Kristeva explains:

[T]he minimal unit of poetic language is at least double, not in the sense of the signifier/signified dyad, but rather, in terms of one and other [...] (Kristeva 1980 quoted / paraphrased in Allen 44)

Graham Allen comments that this poetic language is characterized by "its embodiment of

otherness", is "resistant to (mono)logic", "disruptive" and "revolutionary" (Allen 45). In

Season this doubleness is found on the level of word, sentence, chapter, story and in the

doubleness of the protagonist, and it acts out in a disruptive way challenging both sides of a

colonial conflict, and depicting a psyche torn apart by a binary opposition.

Love / Death

A double that will be transformed into a unity as the story unfolds, is the recurring parallel

between love and death, such as when the narrator passes the cemetery and it reminds him

of his love and bondage to his ancestors: "I know those who inhabit these graves, both those

who died before my father was born and those who have died since my birth", he thinks to

himself (Salih 47).

Three of Mustafa Sa'eed's lovers - "Isabella Seymour", "Ann Hammond" and "Sheila

Greenwood" - suicide because of love, Mustafa kills "Jean Morris" because of love, and

"Hosna bint Mahmoud" kills "Wad Rayyes" and herself because of her love to Mustafa, as well


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as the possible death of the narrator in part due to his love for Hosna (and Jean, as we later

shall see). Also Mustafa's note, supposedly speaking of Jean, forms firm ground for this idea:

"The sensation that, in an instant outside the bounds of time, I have bedded the goddess of

Death and gazed out upon Hell from the aperture of her eyes […]" (Salih 153)

Cavarero's theory can help to understand the relationship between love, death and narration:

The status of existence as co-appearance has precise rules and, in love, rules that are rather cruel. The one who exhibits herself without appearing to the other remains, paradoxically, an unexpressed uniqueness. She remains a what, in front of a who. This is a well-known infelicity, which, on occasion, leads to suicide; in such a way that, in this case, love and death really do go together. The suicide of the unhappy lover is nonetheless a paradoxical figure, or, rather, the figure of a paradoxically unexpressed uniqueness. 'I kill myself because you do not love me and because I do not exist for you,' thinks the unhappy one; after my death, you will understand who loved you and, thus, you will love me. The suicide thus follows the logic of a desperate contradiction. On the one hand, it comes to confirm the death of a who, who died because of the inappearance of her exhibition and - on the other hand - tends to fabricate the posthumous presence of a who, who would gain, thanks to her disappearance, the right of co-appearance [comparizione]. (Cavarero, Relating Narratives 113)

This sheds light on the situation of Mustafa Sa'eed and his lovers. They fail to see each other

as who's. Instead, as Tran highlights, they conceive of each other as Other and in a categorical

manner (Tran 8, 9, 16–17), as symbols of the other culture. The employment of a colonial

discourse prevents the true story from being told, and their narratable selves find no medium,

no source of their desired story. Unlike Mustafa, his lovers are not acting out a role, but truly

exposing themselves. And when this exposition is rejected, they choose to suicide so as to

imprint their who's on Mustafa Sa'eed.

Othello and myth


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In three instances in the text there are references to Othello: Once when Mustafa meets

Isabella Seymour, "'I'm like Othello - Arab-African'" (Salih 38), and twice during the court case

in which he is accused of causing the suicide of three women and for murdering his wife.

"Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen" tries to convince the court that the girls were killed by the

“germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago”, and that Mustafa Sa’eed

was not the cause of their suicide (Salih 33), the fact instead being that he was a victim whose

heart western civilization had broken, and that he had killed “in a moment of mad passion”

(Salih 32). Mustafa considered saying to them that this explanation is a mere fabrication and

that he in fact had killed them; “l am no Othello. I am a lie." He wishes to be sentenced to

hanging so that the lie would die. (Salih 33).

A technique in Arabian literature is to mirror characters, and Salih employs this tool across a

cultural cleavage, something that creates a sense that human beings are the same all over the

world. For example both Jean and Hosna link their love to dying, and "Sir Arthur Higgins" is a

womanizer similar to Wad Rayyes in Sudan. Most significant though is the similarity between

"Bint Majzoub" and Mustafa Sa'eed. Bint Majzoub, "represented as ‘mimic’, one who is

‘almost the same as Northerners, but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994 in Idriss 122), in that she finds

acceptance among some of the most respected people of a community who see themselves

superior based on ethnicity, and Mustafa finding a similar acceptance in England. Both of

them achieve this by storytelling, both of them against the odds positioning themselves in

foreign societies, as Othello. And they both act out the stereotype idea of the Other. Mustafa

actualizes the western idea of the virile "oriental", coming straight from the jungle, and Bint

Majzoub acts out the idea of the immodest "black woman" who seeks sexual pleasure and


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who has no sense of honor. The novel is thus a play with multiple discourses: colonial

discourse (both ways), the discourse of the Arab Sudanese concerning the "black Sudanese",

and an artistic / theatrical discourse (Kaktus 54–55) activated by references to melodrama,

tragedy, farce, theatricality and Othello, examples of the latter being: "Like a comic actor […]"

(Salih 169), "The mysterious call led me to the coast of Dover, to London and tragedy." (Salih

27), and "Mustafa Sa'eed had said to them, 'I have come to you as a conqueror.' A

melodramatic phrase certainly." (Salih 60). These discourses, as well as the transformation of

the characters, and the narrator's selective attention serve to create self-reflexivity and a

sense of contingency, giving rise to narrativeness.

Mustafa, however visionary he looked at himself when wanting to "liberate Africa with his

penis", was used as a myth, as what is revealed in the words of "Richard", an Englishman

working in Khartoum: "It was as though they wanted to say: Look how tolerant and liberal we

are! This African is just like one of us! He has married a daughter of ours and works with us

on an equal footing!" (Salih 59). Gone are the particularities of Mustafa as a unique being with

a story, psyche, complexities, and a self; and exposed are the greatness of the British moral,

their compassion, and their successful "civilizing mission".

At the same time Othello is used as a myth, and here the voice of the author seems more

present. The idea of white supremacy arose during western modernism, hence responding to

these ideas by comparing the colonized with Othello was a powerful point at the time the

book was published - a decade after Sudan's independence. The author foregrounds Mustafa,

and uses Othello as a background of heroism and bravery, as well as Shakespeare’s legend. It

seems like this concept is not only present in the novel, but also in Mustafa himself. It is as if


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he wanted to take revenge on the British by one of their own masterpieces, by their own

pride. He cannot escape the inferiority complex, and therefore, seeing himself through their

gaze, he tries to be a hero, one that is accepted by them. In the Shakespearian drama he finds

harmony, while in real life his two identities can never merge. It seems to him that enacting

Othello is a solution. And so he goes beyond merely achieving the position of lecturer in

Economics at the University of London, by imagining himself as a warrior, and suspecting his

wife Jean of adultery, based on a handkerchief (just like the misplaced handkerchief of

Desdemona). It is when he receives a much-reduced punishment by the British court that

Mustafa learns that he has failed in becoming an Othello.

The narrator / Mustafa

One way that the author indicates the oneness of the two protagonists is by having them use

the same imagery in their respective narratives.

Another of the many examples is that both frequently refer to the Nile and its path from

Victoria Lake and running to the north. When Mustafa first approaches the English coast, he

describes the roofs of the houses there as "vaulted like backs of cows" (Salih 27). In Sudan, he

builds an annex to his house in the same fashion, which is conceived by the narrator as

"triangular, like the back of an ox."

Towards the end of the novel, the narrator resolves to enter this annex, and he thinks to

himself: "I begin from where Mustapha Sa’eed had left off."(Salih 134) To me, this shows that


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he is either becoming Mustafa, or this is his Alter-Ego awakened by the proximity to the

Victorian room (annex).

Now he starts alluding to war, like Mustafa: At sunset he thinks of "the armies of darkness".

Again alluding to war he says: "If only I had told her the truth, perhaps she would not have

acted as she did. I had lost the war because I did not know and did not choose." He is speaking

about Hosna, but it is not clear if he is the narrator or Mustafa.

The most striking indication of oneness happens when the narrator lights a flame in the room:

The light exploded on my eyes and out of the darkness there emerged a frowning face with pursed lips that I knew but could not place. I moved towards it with hate in my heart. It was my adversary Mustafa Sa'eed. The face grew a neck, the neck two shoulders and a chest, then a trunk and two legs, and I found myself standing face to face with myself. This is not Mustafa Sa'eed - it's a picture of me frowning at my face from a mirror. (Salih 135)

The encounter with one self in the mirror is indeed crucial, because it is the way that a person

experiences himself as a sign, for which a view from outside is necessary. This is essential in

the formation of the split mind that sees itself from inside and outside. In the mirror the

narrator sees Mustafa’s gaze, but subsequently realizes that what he saw was himself through

his own gaze, much like when a child sees an unknown baby in the mirror before discovering

that he is that baby. The mirror is mentioned earlier in the book, in connection with Mustafa's

first appearance, and this further recalls the transition from the pre-mirror stage. The man

that the narrator saw the first day "with a mystical smile, like someone talking to himself"

(Salih 4) was his own self, seen through his Sudanese gaze. And, it seems, he continued

throughout the novel to speak to himself.


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The following paragraphs from Cavarero capture the essence of the novel and how Mustafa's

personalities were responses to British and Sudanese gazes, both internalized by him, and

both at once symbolized, exposed and confronted in the mirror scene:

[…] [T]he life-story that memory recounts is not enough for the narratable self. Not so much because the memory proceeds like a voluble and discontinuous narration, or because the demon of self-interpretation produces mythical-biographical texts, but rather because memory claims to have seen that which was instead revealed only through the gaze of another.

And further:

The memory of every human being is indeed characterized by this structural mistake, which makes it untrustworthy. It doubles itself in the eye of the other and claims to have seen the daimon, or the identity of the one who is shown, without that same agent being able either to see, or know, or master who is being exposed to the others' eyes. In this way, as happened with Oedipus, personal memory continues to tell us a false story; that is, a story that, although it has the merit of offering worldly contents to the narratable self, also offers a false perspective. In its silent autobiographical exercise, personal memory turns the narratable self into a Narcissus. […]Like an impossible game of mirrors, the self is indeed here both the actor and the spectator, the narrator and the listener, in a single person” (Cavarero, Relating Narratives 40)

In the beginning their narratives are clearly separated into chapters, but further into the book

and into the end their voices are mixed. This suggests that they are one person who starts out

with a character split into self and gaze / self-interpretation or into north and south.

Until the mirror scene, the narrator had been obsessed by Mustafa, like a Narcissus in love

with his own reflection, but when he learns that he is Mustafa, his love turns into outrage and

hate and he decides to kill himself, the thing that he had wanted, as the Othello he aspired to

be. What he craved for and wanted to assure before committing suicide was his story to be

told to him - narrated by his Alter-Ego - and his life to become literature.


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The bend of the Nile, where it runs from west to east (Salih 62 and several other instances) is

used as a trope for a restful middle way - neither streaming south nor north, and this is why

Mustafa settles there arranging for himself a house with one Sudanese part where he lives

with his Sudanese wife, and one Victorian part where he lives with a painting of his British

wife. But the unforeseen is perhaps that by such an act he is living between life and death,

and that might be what he experiences as the narrator when the forces of the river start

dragging him downward. Mustafa - the narrator thus chooses death so as to join his northern

wife, Jean, as was her wish; "Come with me", she had said while dying (Salih 165). His

experience with the west has turned to a personality split, and failing to merge his two

consciousnesses, the novel closes with an open end. He had been striving for the impossible

middle way and his unity, but this can only be found in the middle of the Nile, between the

south bank and the north bank, between Hosna and Jean, between life and death, and at once

the end and not the end.

Conclusion

These ways of reading shed a light on different sides of the story, which also is reminder of

the polysemy of signs.

Cavarero's idea of the desire for one's story explains aspects of the doubleness in this novel,

and - to me - also forms a counterpart to Norman Holland’s theory of reader response and his

idea that readers use the text as material to recreate their identity themes (Holland); they are

searching for their story to be told.


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By intertextually referring to both real historical events and to a literary character such as

Othello, the author creates a sense of a layered reality. The character is so real that he

participated in the historical summits, even so real that he reads Shakespeare and wants to

live an adapted version of the story of Othello. And all of this is saturated with doubleness.

Thus, while Kristeva's texts become sites of a battle between communication and 'signifiance'

(Kristeva in Allen 34), classified within modern theory, Season becomes a locus of the same

battle, but framed as literature.


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Citations

Al-Halool, Musa. “The Nature of the Uncanny in Season of Migration to the North.” Arab Studies Quarterly (2008): n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2013 . <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The%20nature%20of%20the%20uncanny%20in%20Season%20of%20Migration%20to%20the%20North.-a0181814484>.

Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

AlMajnouni, A’alaa. “Mustapha Sa’eed Vs. Nameless Narrator; A Study of the Possible ‘Oneness’ in Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” A’alaa AlMajnouni 9 June 2011. Web. 9 Feb. 2014 . <http://aalaamj.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/mustapha-sa%e2%80%99eed-vs-nameless-narrator-a-study-of-the-possible-%e2%80%9coneness%e2%80%9d-in-salih%e2%80%99s-season-of-migration-to-the-north/>.

Apple Inc. “New Oxford American Dictionary.” New Oxford American Dictionary 2005 : n. pag. Print.

Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice : Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005. Print.

---. Relating Narratives : Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London: New York, 2000. Print.

Holland, Norman Norwood. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Print.

Idriss, Yahya Ali Abdullah. “Season of Migration to the North and the Story of the Sudanese Nation: Hopes and Impediments (Review).” International Journal of English and Literature 3.6 (2012): 117–24. Web. 10 Feb. 2014 . <http://www.academicjournals.org/journal/IJEL/article-abstract/037154C3086>.

Kaktus, Solveig Soliville. “Passord: 3_i_Nord_&_3_i_Sør : en studie av et utvalg norske og sudanske kvinners konkretiseringer av ‘Trekket mot nord’ av Tayeb Salih.” Master thesis. N. p., 2013. Web. 10 Dec. 2013 . <https://oda.hio.no/jspui/handle/10642/1589?mode=full>.

Salih, Tayeb. Season of migration to the north. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies. London; New York: Penguin, 1969. Print. Modern Classics.

Tran, Danielle. “An Exploration of the Use of Colonial Discourse within Mustafa Sa’eed’s Interracial Relationships in Season of Migration to the North.” eSharp Winter 2010.16 Politics & Aesthetics (2010): n. pag. Web. . <http://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/esharp/issues/16winter2010-politicsaesthetics/>.

Doubles - Myth, Imagery and Selfhood in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

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