Lies of Our Own Making: A Book Review of Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Life is a constant dialectic between collective/perceived and personal identity. Societal constructs feed the former while free will feeds the latter. Tayib Salih's 1966 work, Season of Migration to the North, documents this struggle against the twin backdrops of post-Edwardian England and post-Colonial Sudan. It is a tale of self-determination and the defeating of norms. These issues are both encountered and dealt with differently by the narrator and his foil, Mustafa Sa'eed.

A transplant to the narrator's village in Sudan, Sa'eed initially seems to be an upstanding member of the community, respected by his peers and revered by his inferiors. They are those qualities to which the narrator is initially drawn, and it is with this facade that our narrator becomes acquainted after returning from seven years of study in England. The patina is cracked, however, when the narrator is made aware of Mustafa's dark, secret past.

Uncommonly intelligent, Mustafa's prodigality brings him from his home near Khartoum to Cairo, and then to England. Working as an anti-colonial economist and university lecturer, he is held in high regard within liberal circles and his contemporaries rave about him even after his death midway through the book. His private life, however, is rife with deceit and adultery. Mustafa's relationship with women can be seen as anti-colonial revenge. Packed with colonial symbolism as well as an allusive trope of the signifier/signified dichotomy from Shakespeare's Othello, Sa'eed lures British women to his bed by painting absurdly fictionalized scenes of his life in Africa and dominates them with the merciless cruelty matched only by imperialist rule, leading to several suicides and eventually a murder for which he is incarcerated.

Thus ends Sa'eed's first migration. His second is a southerly move to the narrator's village where he, in an almost Hugoesque move, creates a new, purer, penitent life for himself, hiding the past away. He is addled, however, when the narrator learns of his secrets, and summarily commits suicide after sharing his story.