“Just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle way?”
The novel, though short and quite poetic in language and tone, especially regarding the beautiful metaphors and similes connecting the characters to nature and the Nile, uses an episodic structure that is initially confusing. The unnamed narrator, returning from England after studying poetry, meets a newcomer in his village along the Nile, Mustafa Sa'eed. The son of an Ababda man and a woman from the south, Mustafa Sa'eed lived his life independently and with an intellectual fervor quite remarkable, winning scholarships to study in Cairo and in England. His presence strikes a curiosity in the narrator, who, after hearing the man recite an English poem, insists on learning his life story. This leads to Mustafa telling an incomplete narrative of his life while leaving clues and pressure after death to ensure that the narrator uncovers the truth of his life for Mustafa's sons and posterity, since Mustafa's ego demands immortality. After Mustafa's death, the narrator receives his letter, a key to a secret room in the house, and guardianship of his sons and wife, a young woman, Hosna, who never uncovered Mustafa's secrets and was not interested in marriage afterwards. The rest of the novel consists of a sort of reversal of Heart of Darkness with the narrator traveling back to Khartoum from his village further north along on the Nile, encountering Bedouin, other drivers and soldiers, and eventually, an entire rural community where everyone breaks into communal feasting, dancing, and merriment. He also uncovers more of Mustafa's history while engaging with the people of the Sudan and discovering that “we shall pull down and we shall build, and we shall humble the sun itself to our will; and somehow we shall defeat poverty” (114).
Despite the misogynistic views held by the men and reinforced or accepted by many women in the narrator's small village, the older woman participating in the discussion openly and unashamedly reveals her love life and which of her past husbands satisfied her the most, indicating the ways in which the environment, though inherently sexist, still allowed room for female autonomy and sexuality, just so much as it was done under the sanction of marriage. This, when added to the spirit and determination of the villagers as well as other poor, rural Sudanese exploited or neglected by the central government in Khartoum, contributes to the narrator feeling that "by the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe” (73). Their ability to persevere, or at least hope as much in the liberation of nightfall from the sun's indefatigable heat, displays an ability to make a decision and stand up for themselves, something the narrator finally does near the novel's conclusion:
“Then
my mind cleared and my relationship to the river was determined. Though
floating on the water, I was not part of it. I thought that if I died
at that moment, I would have died as I was born--without any volition of
mine. All my life I had no chosen, had not decided. Now I am making a
decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are few people I
want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have
duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has
meaning" (168).
Anywho, Season depicts all the strengths and flaws of human nature and Sudanese society while correctly criticizing European colonialism and racism. Furthermore, instead of the racism solidified by Europeans in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this novel shows the reader the other side, where the narrator and Mustafa's travels along the Nile and to England reject racism and assumptions of European supremacy and uncover the natural compulsion toward life and humanity among the people of the Sudan. The novel is also interesting to read because of the masterful use of metaphors and poetic phrasing and makes constant references to poets, such as Abu Nuwas, and Arab folklore, such as the afreet or ifrit spirits. The novel is also quite comedic, despite the horrendous murder and suffering of the characters. Mustafa, "the black Englishman," concocted lies of all sorts to play up to stereotypes of Africa and Arabs to bed as many white women as possible, going to such lengths as organizing his apartment in a harem-like bedroom and deliberately exaggerating and lying about African cultures. His misdirected desire to avenge Africa for European hegemony, manifested in the form of sleeping with various white women and having a disastrous impact on their lives, also causes Mustafa's own downfall after his marriage to Jean Morris. Simple sexual conquests from an invader from the South will not liberate Africa, but only further the conquest and control of female bodies, reinforcing patriarchy and colonialism.
Nevertheless, it's also interesting to see a story set on the Nile's other vast nations beyond Egypt, since the Sudan and Ethiopia have just as much of a claim and dependence on its affluence for sustaining life. Salih's accurate, poetic language conjures images of the desert, the Nile's bountiful waters, it's excesses as it inundates the land, and the mud and mud-brick homes of the villagers. He also depicts the conflicts between north and south, west and central in the novel by the marginalization and enslavement of darker-skinned, non-Arabic speakers from what is now South Sudan. Unfortunately, these dynamics are not fully explored, but Salih remains a constant critic of postcolonial Sudan's government corruption. Moreover, the novel's ambiguous ending for the narrator, in my mind, symbolizes the ambiguities of life and the problem of attaining balance between the north and south banks of the Nile, the West and the East. This duality, always ambiguous in Salih's novel, avoids making a pronounced denunciation of colonialism without likewise criticized local traditions, thereby echoing the crisis of the dichotomy in the lives of the narrator and Mustafa, two educated individuals caught between Sudan and England.
The best part is the structure of the novel fits a frame story, like Arabian Nights. The intertextuality obviously extends to Heart of Darkness as well because of the symbolic importance of the river, Africans going to Europe and during the narrator's own traveling in the Sudan, he encounters the spontaneous celebration with rural peoples, depicted as savage in Europe's projection of barbarity on Africa, but seen as life-affirming by the African narrator. Moreover, Mustafa, while in Europe, finds the worst of himself, the darkness of his heart which Kurtz finds in the Congo. Salih wrote an excellent reverse Heart of Darkness.
Great quotations
We were afraid,’ she said, ‘you’d bring back with you an uncircumcised infield for a wife.’
“Yes, that’s me. My face is Arab like the desert of the Empty Quarter, while my head is African land teems with a mischievous childishness.”
"Yes. Our house is right on the bank of the Nile, so that when I’m lying on my bed at night I put my hand out of the window and idly play with the Nile waters till sleep overtakes me.”
“Over there is like here, neither better nor worse. But I am from here, neither better nor worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in our house and not in anyone else’s. The fact that they came to our land, I know not why, does that mean that we should poison our present and our future? Sooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were--ordinary people--and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.”
“And the river, the river but for which there would have been no beginning and no end, flows northwards, pays heed to nothing; a mountain may stand in its way so it turns eastwards; it may happen upon a deep depression so it turns westwards, but sooner or later it settles down in its irrevocable journey towards the sea in the north.”
“He built quite a legend of sort round himself--the handsome black man courted in Bohemian circles. It seems he was a show-piece exhibited by members of the aristocracy who in the twenties and early thirties were affecting liberalism. It is said he was a friend of Lord-this and Lord-that. He was also one of the darlings of the English left. That was bad luck for him, because it is said he was intelligent. There’s nothing in the whole world worse than leftist economists. Even his academic post--I don’t know exactly what it was--I had the impression he got for reasons of this kind. 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! If you only knew, this sort of European is no less evil than the madmen who believe in the supremacy of the white man in South Africa and in the southern states of America. The same exaggerated emotional energy bears either to the extreme right or to the extreme left. If only he had stuck to academic studies he’d have found real friends of all nationalities, and you’d have heard of him here. He would certainly have returned and benefited with his knowledge this country in which superstitions hold sway. And here you are now believing in superstitions of a new sort: the superstition of industrialization, the superstition of nationalization, the superstition of Arab unity, the superstition of African unity. Like children you believe that in the bowels of the earth lies a treasure you’ll attain by some miracle, and that you’ll solve all your difficulties and set up a Garden of Paradise. Fantasies. Waking dreams. Through facts, figures, and statistics you can accept your reality, live together with it, and attempt to bring about changes within the limits of your potentialities. It was within the capacity of a man like Mustafa Sa’eed to play a not inconsiderable role in furthering this if he had not been transformed into a buffoon at the hands of a small group of idiotic Englishmen.”
“Wad Rayyes, you’re mad. You’re old in years but you’ve got no sense. Women are women whether they’re in Egypt, the Sudan, Iraq or the land of Mumbo-jumbo. The black, the white, and the red-they’re all one and the same."
“I pictured Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow, a woman in her thirties, weeping under seventy-year-old Wad Rayyes. Her weeping would be made the subject of one of Wad Rayyes’s famous stories about his many women with which he regales the men of the village. The rage in my breast grew more savage. Unable to remain, I left; behind me I heart my grandfather calling but I did not turn round.”
“This woman is the offering Wad Rayyes wants to sacrifice at the edge of the grave, with which to bribe death and so gain a respite of a year or two.”
“The blood of the setting sun suddenly spilled out on the western horizon like that of millions of people who have died in some violent war that has broken out between Earth and Heaven.”
“Her perfume and the silence were lost and nothing existed in the whole world except the lamentation of a woman for a husband she did not know, for a man who, spreading his sails, had voyaged off on the ocean in pursuit of a foreign mirage.”
When Mahmoud Wad Ahmed was brought in shackles to Kitchener after his defeat at the Battle of Atbara, Kitchener said to him, “Why have you come to my country to lay waste and plunder?” It was the intruder who said this to the person whose land it was, and the owner of the land bowed his head and said nothing. So let it be with me. In that court I hear the rattles of swords in Carthage and the clatter of the hooves of Allenby’s horses desecrating the ground of Jerusalem. The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say “Yes” in their language. They imported to use the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago. Yes, my dear sirs, I came as an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected into the veins of history. ‘I am no Othello. Othello was a lie.’”
"Ravish me, you African demon. Burn me in the fire of your temple, you black god. Let me twist and turn in your wild and impassioned rites."
“Owing to the monotony of their lives the people in our village make of every happy event however small an excuse for holding a sort of wedding party."
“Packets of cigarettes and boxes of sweets were passed round, and the bedouin women sang and danced, the night and the desert resounding with the echoes of a great feast, as though we were some tribe of genies. A feast without meaning, a mere desperate act that had sprung up impromptu like the small whirlwinds that rise up in the desert and then die.”
“He will not believe the facts about the new rulers of Africa, smooth of face, lupine of mouth, their hands gleaming with rings of precious stones, exuding perfume from their cheeks, in white, blue, black, and green suits of fine mohair and expensive silk rippling on their shoulders like the fur of Siamese cats, and with shoes that reflect the light from chandeliers and squeak as they tread on marble.”
"Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life, which is more dangerous to the future of Africa than imperialism itself.”
"And it was all without rhyme or reason. She accepted the stranger--why didn’t she accept Wad Rayyes?”
"There is no justice or moderation in the world. I feel bitterness and hatred, for after all those victims he crowned his life with yet another one, Hosna Bint Mahmound, the only woman I have ever loved.”
“The accused admits he killed his wife, but this does not make him responsible for all the incidents of suicide by women in the British Isles during the past ten years.”
"She was my destiny and in her lay my destruction, yet for me the whole world was not worth a mustard seed in comparison. I was the invader who had come from the South, and this was the icy battlefield from which I would not make a safe return.”
“Then my mind cleared and my relationship to the river was determined. Though floating on the water, I was not part of it. I thought that if I died at that moment, I would have died as I was born--without any volition of mine. All my life I had no chosen, had not decided. Now I am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning.
"Unlike me she yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all hankerings. I am south that yearns for the north and the ice."
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