Season of Migration to the North tells the narrative of Mustafa Sa’eed, a prodigy from Sudan who goes to analyze foremost in Cairo and so in London, where he hunts adult females but finally falls for one himself. After a matrimony consummated by force and a prison sentence, he returns to Sudan, traveling to a little small town on the Nile, where he marries once more and has kids. He disappears cryptically in a inundation. Season of Migration to the North is complex, in its framing, in its episodic manner, in its usage of metaphor, and in the assortment of stuff it canvasses. It touches on colonial haughtiness, sexual mores and the position of adult females, the political relations of independent Sudan, and more. There are lyrical fragments with no direct connexion to the narrative, depicting the beat of agribusiness, travel along the Nile, a self-generated dark jubilation by travelers in the desert, and so forth. And there are mentions to European novels about brushs with the alien in Africa and the Middle East. Most of this is merely hinted at, and ne’er elaborated on, but there is plenty here to maintain pupils of post-colonial literature busy for a long clip. Season of Migration to the North is short and immediate, nevertheless, and can be appreciated without any literary theory.
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Most of the remainder of the fresh concerns his remembrances of the extremely unusual narrative that MS tells him – a narrative which hangouts and oppresses, yet besides challenges him in footings of specifying his ain value system in ‘postcolonial ‘ Sudanese society – in the context of “ the new swayers of Africa, smooth of face, lupine of oral cavity, … in suits of all right mohair and expensive silk ” ( 118 ) . The life narrative MS had narrated began with the history of his ( British, colonial ) schooling, which had led him to the find of his ain head, “ like a crisp knife, cutting with cold effectivity ” ( 22 ) . So superb is he that from Khartoum he is sent to Cairo and so to London for advanced survey – here he is nicknamed “ the black Englishman ” ( 54 ) . In British society he becomes a sexual marauder, puting up as his den a room temptingly decorated with substitute ‘African ‘ gear. Englishwomans of a broad scope of categories and ages easy succumb to and are destroyed by him. Three of these adult females are driven to suicide ; while he finally murders the most provocative of them, who had humiliated and taunted him before – and besides during – their stormy matrimony. This act ( a kind of sex-murder ) is in his ain eyes, nevertheless, the expansive consummation of his life:
‘The esthesis that… I have bedded the goddess of Death and gazed out upon Hell from the aperture of her eyes – it ‘s a feeling no adult male can conceive of. The gustatory sensation of that dark stays on in my oral cavity, forestalling me from tasting anything else. ‘ ( 153 )
Elsewhere MS says of this relationship that he “ was the encroacher who had come from the South, and this was the icy battleground from which [ he ] would non do a safe return ” ( 160 ) .
On his return to the small town, the storyteller at last enters a secret room that MS had built following to his place – a reproduction of a British gentleman ‘s drawing room! Pride of topographic point has been given to MS ‘s picture of his ‘white ‘ married woman, Jean Morris. The room besides contains a book, supposedly the “ Life Story ” of MS, dedicated “ To those who see with one oculus… and see things as… either Eastern or Western ” ( 150-151 ) . This brief history can non suit the complicated construction, elusive allusiveness and richly metaphoric manner of this hard text, but may give some indicant of its dry ( or sardonic ) position and of its deep and permanent relevancy to the political and cultural quandary of many Africans. Its presentation of the rough analogues between colonial racism and local sexism confirms that this text is, as Salih himself has stated, “ a supplication for acceptance ” at all degrees. It is an unforgettable work.
hypertext transfer protocol: //www.arabworldbooks.com/Readers2004/articles/tayebsaleh2E.html
That being said, the 2nd plot line, told by ‘Mustafa, ‘ a alien to the small town, revolves around him utilizing weak British adult females for sex and so go forthing them so heart-broken they turn to suicide. While it ‘s easy to read this as a remark more on colonization, I still felt uncomfortable seeing so many adult females reduced to objects or symbols. Since Mustafa was stating the narrative, though, I believe the objectification rested with him and his character, as opposed to Salih. This did n’t needfully do reading it any more pleasant, but it did warrant it, for me at least. Can you feel the fog I feel on this facet of the book? My wrestle with it made my experience of the book less gratifying, but it did n’t decrease the book ‘s worth in my eyes. I did n’t experience a similar interior conflict over the issues of colonization raised in the book. Mustafa is the primary engine of this ; he tells his narrative of being a smart, hapless child from Sudan who ends up traveling foremost to Cairo and so to London to go a ‘famous ‘ economic sciences professor who at the same time seems to pass most of his energy kiping with white British adult females. He fundamentally learns how to turn British biass about the ‘exotic ‘ to his advantage, and he talks about scoring misss with narratives of fanciful animate beings running across the harsh, redolent landscape of his childhood. Throughout his narrative, he ‘s portrayed as missing something vitally human, a sort of heat towards his fellow species that leaves him all cold intellectaˆ¦as a immature male child, he does n’t cognize how to link with his classmates and does n’t even look bothered by his friendlessness. And one time he ‘s an grownup, while he must bask sex ( why else seduce so many adult females? ) , he ne’er feels any emotional fond regard to the adult females, and I do n’t believe he even sees it as a manner to link so much as a manner to utilize and rule. None of the adult females he encounters are of all time shown as existent human existences, although the lone one to defy him does hold more complexness about her than the others. As I mentioned in the above paragraph, it ‘s all excessively easy to read this as a metaphor for colonization. But even while Salih is researching this, he ne’er makes it a black-and-white issueaˆ¦nuances and complexnesss are explored, and he leaves up to the reader to seek to calculate out what ‘s being said
Your remarks on Mustafa ‘s emotional coldness & A ; development of white adult females even as they ‘re besides working him reminds me SO strongly of Ellison ‘s Invisible Man, and the storyteller ‘s conflicted relationship with white adult females in that novel. Like you with Season of Migration to the North, I was ne’er certain how to experience about that facet of the narrative, particularly since I ca n’t assist turn uping the objectification with Ellison every bit good as his storyteller. Complicated material.
During the whole narrative I was expecting a shocking turn at the terminal where we find out that Mustafa Sa’eed and the storyteller are the same individual. At the terminal of the book I noticed the storyteller was swimming in the Nile river when he eventually decides consciously on life, and that Mustafa Sa’eed had dissapeared earlier in the narrative while swimming in the Nile. This suggests perchance that they are the same character, although non clearly plenty to go forth me satisfied with such a decision. Over at wikipedia they must hold had a similar thought, because they described Mustafa Sa’eed as the storyteller ‘s doppelganger. Their account take me to believe that possibly the storyteller had came back so shook from his experience in the West that he did n’t cognize if he wanted to populate any longer, and so he had viewed himself in 3rd individual through the character of Mustafa Saeed and so eventually decided on life while swimming the Nile!
hypertext transfer protocol: //astripedarmchair.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/nyrb-classics-season-of-migration-to-the-north-and-alone-alone/
Font and Edna return to Egypt at the eruption of the Suez crisis, but Ram stays on in Britain, is ejected because his visa has lapsed, and so works for a period in a mill in Germany. He is afraid of seeing Edna once more when he gets back to Cairo and he besides avoids seeing Didi Nackla, a immature Egyptian journalist who had subsequently lived with them in London. There he had turned to Didi, despairing of Edna ‘s feelings for him, and initiated a sexual relationship with her. Self-deprecating as he is, Ram allows us lone glances of the really enormously hazardous political concern he is engaged in. He has been roll uping grounds of the anguish and slaying of political militants in Egyptian gaols, where ( in a pattern typical of this society ) wealthier or higher-class captives will non be subjected to such intervention.
hypertext transfer protocol: //www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi? cmd=cause_dir_news_item & A ; news_id=51970 & A ; cause_id=1270
England is go forthing Egypt, eventually, in 1954. The Egyptian ground forces has overthrown the royal household and instituted a republican system that both embodies the chauvinistic and progressive hope of many Egyptians, and besides becomes progressively inhibitory. The characters, Ram and Font, are Egyptians who are Anglophone and upper category, and so are out of touch with the new order.
Ram is an educated, well-connected Copt, likely in his twentiess. His best friend is Font, another Copt. Ram and Font spent four old ages in England and are obsessed with English civilisation and civilization, but they besides despise British colonialism and lip service and they participated in guerrilla combat against the British during the Suez War. The Egypt of BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB is at a phase of political, economic, and spiritual uncertainness or indecisiveness. One of the cardinal issues of the novel is, “ What is an Egyptian? ” And the same uncertainness or indecisiveness extends to Ram ‘s personal life: what to make with himself, whether or non to populate attached to the purse strings of his rich aunt, whether or non to get married, and who?
hypertext transfer protocol: //www.amazon.com/Beer-Snooker-Twentieth-Century-Lives/dp/0941533816
He has been educated in the British school system in Cairo, and dreaming of the fabulous London of Piccadilly Circus and saloon, he and his best friends, Font and Edna, travel to England to see sexual and political freedom and happen every bit good boringness and beastliness and small-mindedness. There he and his lover, Edna, impetus apart, and he returns to Cairo understanding that England has ‘killed something natural ‘ in him.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
How to be sort? And ideas on Beer in the Snooker Club
It occurs to me that people in England, at least, are starved of chances to be sort, to be utile. If one watches the avidity with which people jump up on the coach when person even nearing old age gets on, and the acuteness with which a alien directs you to the reference you can non happen, or gives unasked advice in a store, so one feels the awful and undeveloped desire to be ‘good ‘ , when so many state of affairss call for one to be misanthropic: critical and uncompromising for fright of being taken advantage of, being laughed at, being ‘unnatural ‘ .
Our intuition is therefore killing something in us, for it reveals to us twenty-four hours in, twenty-four hours out, the atrocious, difficult, at bay animal we have become, with our cognizing faces frozen in a semi-permanent scowl or leer.
On a smothering manager drive, Bath-London, the hulking vehicle turned a hard corner, and I observed from the window an aged adult male doing a signal to the driver that is was clear and safe for him to progress. It was a wholly otiose, foolish act, as red-lights prevented the other autos from progressing into our slowly turning rear terminal, but who amongst us would hold wanted to shout out, “ what are you making old adult male ; there is no demand for your aid. “ ?
After I finished reading Beer in the Snooker Club by Egyptian author Waguih Ghali, I lived for a long clip with that book in my level in Cairo overlooking the cheerless Ministry of the Interior, and rolling the streets of business district, burdened further with the idea of Ghali killing himself in the trim sleeping room of British publishing house, Diana Athill. I felt an huge sorrow that I could non to the full explain by my ain solitariness as a alien.
Subsequently I returned to the novel and considered Ram ‘s function in his ain life, and found it an agonizingly circumscribed and pathetic one. Ram, that storyteller of Beer in the Snooker Club, born to a landowning Coptic Christian household, is the lone boy of the hapless relation: his female parent was widowed immature and now relies upon the generousness – with all its attender duties – of her siblings. He has been educated in the British school system in Cairo, and dreaming of the fabulous London of Piccadilly Circus and saloon, he and his best friends, Font and Edna, travel to England to see sexual and political freedom and happen every bit good boringness and beastliness and small-mindedness. There he and his lover, Edna, impetus apart, and he returns to Cairo understanding that England has ‘killed something natural ‘ in him.
What Ram later fails to make is to move out his compassion, and desire for other people. And this is during a period in Egypt, the late fiftiess, post the 1952 ‘revolution ‘ , when the immature people are traveling out of the infinites and functions once proscribed wholly for them by their parents, a corrupt elite and the British presence. Font – a dogmatic Marxist, scornful of his privileged roots, adopts the attire and position of a street vegetable marketer. Ram, finds this absurdly and depressingly ‘gimmicky ‘ merely as the communism of Edna, an Egyptian Jew, and her ceaseless championing of the fellaheen leaves him cold.
So, he grounds, to move ‘righteously ‘ in the defence of the downtrodden, is to be a lampoon both of oneself and 1s roots, and of those that one is claiming to stand up for ; it is to forbid who and what is genuinely Egyptian and to contemn and reject everything – even one ‘s guiltless childhood – and everyone else that does non take this purge earnestly.
Ram does move briefly – entirely and in secret – to direct exposure to the newspapers that expose maltreatments by the authorities. But he jokes that for his strivings – the existent hazards involved, he prefers the thought of
holding gone to prison, instead than the epic act of really traveling.
His potent hatred of his affluent French-speaking household ‘s disingenuineness, their greed and cowardliness and fake nobility, does non arouse him to move and talk upon any legitimised, public platform against both them and their category. Rather, Ram chooses to expose himself to roast and mere disapproval by executing seemingly infantile buffooneries – forcing his abominable American-educated cousin into the pool, doing a scene at a society party. By doing it impossible for anyone about him to see his protests as serious and legitimate political Acts of the Apostless, he can be riotous and irreverent from within ; but it is a lonely and claustrophobic function which engenders merely greater cynicism and emotional numbness in the immature adult male.
Equally long as Ram divides his clip between his politically committed friends and a perverse and effete elite, he has merely the rare chance to demo kindness, for with the former he feels excessively self-consciously as if he is executing a political or societal function, and with the latter in order to defy the powerful duty upon him to be the good boy, he can merely be light-minded – ‘naughty ‘ and ‘rude ‘ .
hypertext transfer protocol: //madny.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-be-kind-and-thoughts-on-beer-in.html
there is this comparsion of the eastern civilization vs the western civilization that made the fresh intresting to position from one point. pound the storyteller is being confused by the two universes that he has lived with, although he finds himself more with the western civilization instead the eastern.
I do n’t cognize whether or non he intended this, but I enjoyed his terse authorship manner. I besides found it intriguing to larn that Egypt had its ain “ lost coevals. ” Some of the word pictures of Cairo and its society and doubtless still true today, such as Gezeira Club, of which I am a member. hypertext transfer protocol: //www.goodreads.com/book/show/1231621.Beer_in_the_Snooker_Club? page=1
