The narrator has spent much of histime abroad imagining the people andplaces he left behind. Back home, hetries to convince himself that itsdrowsy landscape of riverbanks, palmtrees, and thudding water pumps iswhere he belongs: “I felt not like astorm-swept feather, but like that palmtree, a being with a background, withroots, with a purpose”; and then again,as though reassuring himself, “I amnot a stone thrown into the water butseed sown in a field.” The metaphorsare studied. They suggest a bookishnostalgia—the narrator spent severalof his years in Britain “delving intothe life of an obscure English poet”—rather than real rootedness.Among the crowd that welcomesthe narrator home is a stranger, anolder man with a mysterious smile.This is Mustafa Sa’eed, who arrivedin the village five years earlier, tak-ing a local woman for his wife. Duringa communal drinking session oneevening, the narrator overhears Sa’eedreciting to himself, “with an impec-cable accent,” a poem by Ford MadoxFord. The narrator, who supposedhimself the only English speaker inthis remote village by the Nile, andcertainly the only expert in Britishpoetry, feels his idyll drop away. It isa scene out of Poe, this uncanny recog-nition of oneself in a stranger:
Had the ground suddenly split open andrevealed an afreet standing before me,his eyes shooting out flames, I wouldnot have been more terrified. All of asudden there came to me the ghastly,nightmarish feeling that we—the mengrouped together in that room—werenot a reality but merely some illusion.Leaping up, I stood above the man andshouted at him: What’s this you’re say-ing? What’s this you’re saying?
Sa’eed does eventually tell the nar-rator his story, a fantastical tale-within-a-tale about a great mind put to mur-derous uses. Sa’eed was an intellectualprodigy whose success at school tookhim from Khartoum to Cairo and even-tually to interwar London, still thecynosure of this colonial world. There,he is adopted into the circles of Britain’sbohemian left. He gives lectures onclassical Arabic poetry, fits his roomout like a jewel box à la Delacroix—“There were small electric lights, red,blue, and violet, placed in certain cor-ners; on the walls were large mirrors, sothat when I slept with a woman itwas as if I slept with a whole haremsimultaneously”—and casts himself asa dark-skinned Casanova. His con-quests, all white women, line up forparts in this orientalist charade. ButSa’eed’s adventures have a gruesomefinale. He eventually marries a womanwho taunts him with her infidelities. Hekills her in a fit of passion and is con-victed of murder. (The echoes of Oth-ello are conspicuous.) His sentencecompleted, Sa’eed returns to Sudanhoping to find peace in a village whereno one will know him.Sa’eed disappears soon after tellinghis story, apparently a suicide, and thenarrator spends the rest of the noveltrying to fill the many gaps in Sa’eed’snarrative. He meets with men whowere Sa’eed’s peers at Gordon Collegein Khartoum, or who encountered hislegend at Oxford. Their versions arenot always credible, and some are fla-grantly in contradiction. One schoolfriend remembers him as a stooge of theimperialists, whereas a former studentpaints him as a leader in the anticolo-nial struggle. The narrator claims tohave gathered these stories at random,the fruit of his travels across the coun-try as a schools inspector. “I wouldhope you will not entertain the idea,”he pleads with his readers, “thatMustafa Sa’eed had become an obses-sion that was ever with me.” But of course we do entertain the idea, and itis the mystery of this obsession, at onceobvious and disavowed, that gives Sal-ih’s novel its weird urgency.
D
o you see him? Do you see thestory? Do you see anything? Itseems to me I am trying to tellyou a dream—making a vain attempt,because no relation of a dream can con-vey the dream-sensation, that com-mingling of absurdity, surprise, and be-wilderment in a tremor of strugglingrevolt, that notion of being capturedby the incredible.” This is Marlow, thenarrator of Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,
despairing—with his usual prolixity—over the limits of what words can con-vey. What Marlow wants us to see isthe kernel of his own tale-within-a-tale: the figure of Kurtz, the ivory trad-er who has turned his back on Europeand made himself a savage chieftainin the middle of the Congo. But Kurtzis never quite visible because Marlowcannot make up his mind about him—whether he is “an emissary of pity” and“a remarkable man,” or else an explo-sion of the id, not a man at all but anightmare or a tremor of romance. Asthe latter, the symbolic burden he ismade to bear (“all Europe contributedto the making of Kurtz”) is too great forthe conventions of realism. We can’tsee him clearly because he is indeed afigure of dream.Many critics have noted that
Sea-son of Migration to the North
is in somesense a rewrite of Conrad’s novella,whose symbolic pilgrimage it cleverlyreverses. Rather than following a whiteman traveling upriver into the heartof Africa, where he indulges in a fan-tasy of primitivism, Salih sends MustafaSa’eed down the Nile and into theheart of Europe. There he masters theways of the natives—Fabian econom-ics, but also race-think—the better tosubjugate them. These mirror imagesare ingenious, but it is possible to maketoo much of them. Postcolonial critics,who have set the terms for the recep-tion of Salih’s novel in the English-speaking world, read it as a classic ex-ample of “the empire writing back.”Salih’s inversion of Conrad’s compassis taken to be an act of resistance, acritique of the imperialist perspectivethat
Heart of Darkness
is assumed torepresent. But this reading slights thecomplexity of both works, as well asthe relation between them. It makesConrad’s racism, which is obvious andconventional, the keynote of his fic-tion. And it imputes a narrowly polit-ical agenda to Salih, whose primaryconcerns lie elsewhere. The centraldrama of Salih’s novella is not MustafaSa’eed’s journey to the heart of Europebut the confrontation between Sa’eedand the narrator, who, like Marlow,feels himself “captured by the incredi-ble,” faced with a character too big forthe otherwise realistic fiction he in-habits. It is Salih’s understanding of this dilemma, which is ethical and lit-erary rather than straightforwardly po-litical, that makes his reading of Con-rad distinctive.To appreciate how distinctive it is,we might recall the reading of Conradby Salih’s contemporary V. S. Naipaul.
76HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2009
“
Leave a Comment