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Tayeb Salih (1929-2009)

I pursued her for three years. Every day the string of the bow became more taut. It was with air that my waterskins were distended; my caravans were thirsty, and the mirage shimmered before me in the wilderness of longing; the arrow's target had been fixed and it was inevitable that the tragedy would take place.



Though Tayeb Salih spent his working life in London, Doha and Paris (primarily in broadcasting) he clearly never forgot that he was born in a northern Sudanese village on the Nile, for such a village - Wad Hamid - is the setting of most of his texts, including the most famous: Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (1966) available in English translation under the title Season of Migration to the North. Like Salih himself, both the unnamed narrator and the mysterious Mustafa received their university education in England; but they, unlike their author, returned to the Nile's banks where they inevitably meet and Mustafa's story is importuned by the narrator, a story that goes well beyond the expected tale of prejudice against "wogs" in post World War I London.

For while he was a brilliant student of economics at Oxford and then a vaunted academic economist, Mustafa was also a hardened and successful manipulator of women; nothing was out of bounds for him as long as he had his nightly bed partner. He spun for them a web of glances, caresses and words, turning their preconceptions of the "exotic" against them. And, oh, the words! Cataracts of lies and labored figures of speech, but exactly what the women wanted to hear. For some of these women the relationship was fatal, particularly when he met his match and more. This fatality accompanies Mustafa back to quiet Wad Hamid, where clitoral circumcision, forced marriage and silent obedience are already the lot of women.



Bakri Bilal, 1984


And what of the narrator? He had lived in London "superficially, neither loving nor hating them," mentally hastening back to his little Nile village to touch base with reality again. When he is back in Wad Hamid it is with a certain desperation that he re-communes with the sights, sounds and odors of home (which become very present to the reader). The moments when he has the sense that he is floating in a haze of unreality he assures us (and himself) are fleeting, insignificant. In this as in other important matters he is deluding himself.

In only 140 pages Salih makes this northern Sudanese village real to us and populates it with colorful characters we quickly come to care about. More remarkably, this is no simple-minded anticolonialist tract, for every thrust is immediately countered and the political and ideological gives way to the human, the sadly and movingly human, recounted in Salih's quiet but mesmerizing voice.


The world in that instant, brief as the blinking of an eyelid, is made up of countless probabilities, as though Adam and Eve had just fallen from Paradise.