Season of Migration to the North Read Free

social reform, political authority and the
status of women, Salih’s fiction vividly portrays those dislocations and
enables a vision of human community based on greater justice, peace and
understanding, rather than rigid boundaries jealously guarded by antagonistic
communities.
     
    Wail  S. Hassan
    Champaign , 2008 

 
    FOR
FURTHER REFERENCE
     
    Amyuni,
Mona Takieddine, ed. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North: A
Casebook (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press: 1985)
     
    Hassan,
Wail S. Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2003)

It
was, gentlemen, after a long absence — seven years to be exact, during
which time I was studying in Europe — that I returned to my people. I learnt
much and much passed me by — but that’s another story. The important thing is
that I returned with a great yearning for my people in that small village at
the bend of the Nile. For seven years I had longed for them, had dreamed of
them, and it was an extraordinary moment when I at last found myself standing
amongst them. They rejoiced at having me back and made a great fuss, and it was
not long before I felt as though a piece of ice were melting inside of me, as
though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone — that life
warmth of the tribe which I had lost for a time in a land ‘whose fishes die of
the cold’. My ears had become used to their voices, my eyes grown accustomed to
their forms. Because of having thought so much about them during my absence,
something rather like fog rose up between them and me the first instant I saw
them. But the fog cleared and I awoke, on the second day of my arrival, in my
familiar bed in the room whose walls had witnessed the trivial incidents of my
life in childhood and the onset of adolescence. I listened intently to the
wind: that indeed was a sound well known to me, a sound which in our village
possessed a merry whispering — the sound of the wind passing through palm trees
is different from when it passes through fields of corn. I heard the cooing of
the turtle-dove, and I looked through the window at the palm tree standing in
the courtyard of our house and I knew that all was still well with life. I
looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down into the
ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I
experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but
like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose.
    My mother brought tea. My father, having finished his prayers
and recitations from the Koran, came along. Then my sister and brothers came
and we all sat down and drank tea and talked, as we have done ever since my
eyes opened on life. Yes, life is good and the world as unchanged as ever.
    Suddenly I recollected having seen a face I did not know
among those who had been there to meet me. I asked about him, described him to
them: a man of medium height, of around fifty or slightly older, his hair thick
and going grey, beardless and with a moustache slightly smaller than those worn
by men in the village; a handsome man.
    ‘That would be Mustafa,’ said my father.
    Mustafa who? Was he one of the villagers who’d gone abroad
and had now returned?
    My father said that Mustafa was not a local man but a
stranger who had come here five years ago, had bought himself a farm, built a
house and married Mahmoud’s daughter — a man who kept himself to himself and
about whom not much was known.
    I do not know what exactly aroused my curiosity but I
remembered that the day of my arrival he was silent. Everyone had put questions
to me and I to them. They had asked me about Europe. Were the people there like
us or were they different? Was life expensive or cheap? What did people do in
winter? They say that the women are unveiled and dance openly with men. ‘Is it
true,’ Wad Rayyes asked me, ‘that they don’t marry but that a