Tayeb Salih (1929–2009)

This is excellent writing and excellent translation, overall quite captivating. I enjoy and appreciate this investigation of identity and colonialism and duality and violence. It is full of critique and also humanity. There's quite a focus on this sort of fracturing, infection, dualities of opposing forces. I found it difficult that at the heart of this fight for men's souls are women suffering violence under, it seems, all circumstances. Certainly these women are more central, more almost show more agentive, almost rounded, almost human, than in so many other books; yet in the end they are still ancillary to the journey and decisions of men. I'm not sure whether that is a part of the critique. I'm not sure. show less

A charming, beautifully written novella, The Wedding of Zein focuses on the reactions of the inhabitants of a small Sudanese village to the unexpected nuptials of Zein, who is regarded as a kind of village idiot. Zein, of course, has more to him than meets the eye: a man born laughing, a heart of gold combined with an infinite capacity to live in the moment. (The latter a quality particularly admired by Sufis; there are strong undercurrents of Sufi mysticism to the story and to Zein's show more characterisation.)

Tayeb Salih has a lovely, recursive style of writing which shifts back and forth in time as we learn new things about characters or events, showing them to us from slightly different angles while not ever becoming confusing.

This edition also contains two solid short stories, "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid" and "A Handful of Dates." show less

eason of Migration to the North (1966) is not the first book I have read from Sudan, but it is unquestionably the most famous one. It is featured in some editions of 1001 Books; it was named as the most important Arabic novel of the 20th Century by the Arab Literary Academy in 2001; and its author Tayeb Salih (1929-2009) was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Given a second life in 2009 when Season of Migration to the North was reissued for the influential NYRB Classics series, the show more novel was first brought to my attention by enticing reviews at Reading Matters, and Intermittences of the Mind, and then it was included in Radio National’s (now defunct) Africa Reading Club. And although it is a difficult book to make sense of, it is well worth reading for those of us who would like to understand more about the culture of the growing Sudanese community in Australia.
When I say that it is a difficult book ‘to make sense of’, I don’t mean that it’s hard to understand what’s happens in the novel. The plot is reasonably straightforward: in the 1960s, in an unsettled period in his home country of Sudan, an unnamed narrator returns home to his village. He has been studying literature in the UK, and he is hoping to make a difference in his newly independent homeland. He expects to find everything much the same in this small village where everyone knows everyone else, and spends his first days at home revisiting the places of his youth, catching up with relations and renewing old friendships. But he soon discovers a recent arrival to the village, an enigmatic stranger called Mustafa Sa’eed, and to his astonishment one day this man starts reciting English war poetry in a perfect English accent. It turns out that he had studied abroad too.
Eventually, in a story within the story, Mustafa comes clean with the dirty secrets of his hidden past. In England he had become a notable economist, destined to help his country emerge into nationhood, but – resentful of the way he was constantly exoticised by women – he pandered to their Oriental fantasies, with disastrous results. Reinforcing the stereotype of the ‘Dangerous Black Man’ he murders one of these women, but he is given only a light sentence in a bizarre trial reminiscent of the trial of Meersault in Camus’ The Outsider. He is not really on trial for what he has done, he is on trial for being disassociated from the culture in which he finds himself, and for his lack of emotion.
No sooner has all this been revealed than Sa’eed abruptly disappears, leaving the narrator confused and angry, because – in a breach of village traditions – Sa’eed has bequeathed responsibility for his wife and two sons to him, rather than to the wife’s father and brothers. This infantilising treatment of a woman is one of many moments in this novel to make a feminist bristle…
There is also a much quoted episode where the men of the village gather together to drink and gossip and boast about their conquests. Women know that many men do this behind our backs but it is always unpleasant to come across it in fiction, because it makes it harder to ignore the fact that this smutty objectification of women happens in real life (and perhaps even among the apparently nice men that we know or have to work with). But this behaviour is not hidden in the novel. It is overt: there is even a token woman present. There is an obvious temptation to interpret this and other misogynistic sequences as indicative of the way a different culture openly treats women with contempt, but the issue os not addressed in the otherwise excellent introduction by Leila Lalami. (Kim calls it out in her review, noting that the line between sexual violence and eroticism does feel blurred in places, and the book, unsurprisingly, has been condemned in the past for being pornographic).
It was not until I listened to the discussion at Radio National that I began to grasp the postcolonial purpose of the misogyny...
To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/01/10/season-of-migration-to-the-north-by-tayeb-sa... show less

Dust rose up behind us, and I watched the bedouin running towards some tattered tents by some bushes southwards of us, where there were diminutive sheep and naked children. Where, O God, is the shade? Such land brings forth nothing but prophets. This drought can be cured only by the sky.

After studying in Europe and having taken a civil servant job in Khartoum, a man returns to his home village on a bend in the Nile only a few times a year. On one visit, he is astonished to meet another show more English-speaking man and is unsure of what to make of a Western-educated man living in a farming village where traditions remain unchanging and education is rare. Mustafa later shares his story, a remarkable one, with the narrator.

This was a remarkable book. Originally published in 1966, it holds many insights about the effects of colonialism that remain relevant today. The narrator allows the customs and traditions of his birthplace commit an injustice, with repercussions that shock everyone. There's a lot going on in this slim novel set in an obscure corner of Sudan and I'm glad to have read it.

The war ended in victory for us all: the stones, the trees, the animals, the iron, while I, lying under this beautiful, compassionate sky, feel that we are all brothers; he who drinks and he who prays and he who steals and he who commits adultery and he who fights and he who kills. The source is the same. No one knows what goes on in the mind of the Divine. Perhaps he doesn't care. Perhaps he is not angry. show less