Lies of Our Own Making: A Book Review of Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Life is a constant dialectic between collective/perceived and personal identity. Societal constructs feed the former while free will feeds the latter. Tayib Salih's 1966 work, Season of Migration to the North, documents this struggle against the twin backdrops of post-Edwardian England and post-Colonial Sudan. It is a tale of self-determination and the defeating of norms. These issues are both encountered and dealt with differently by the narrator and his foil, Mustafa Sa'eed.

A transplant to the narrator's village in Sudan, Sa'eed initially seems to be an upstanding member of the community, respected by his peers and revered by his inferiors. They are those qualities to which the narrator is initially drawn, and it is with this facade that our narrator becomes acquainted after returning from seven years of study in England. The patina is cracked, however, when the narrator is made aware of Mustafa's dark, secret past.

Uncommonly intelligent, Mustafa's prodigality brings him from his home near Khartoum to Cairo, and then to England. Working as an anti-colonial economist and university lecturer, he is held in high regard within liberal circles and his contemporaries rave about him even after his death midway through the book. His private life, however, is rife with deceit and adultery. Mustafa's relationship with women can be seen as anti-colonial revenge. Packed with colonial symbolism as well as an allusive trope of the signifier/signified dichotomy from Shakespeare's Othello, Sa'eed lures British women to his bed by painting absurdly fictionalized scenes of his life in Africa and dominates them with the merciless cruelty matched only by imperialist rule, leading to several suicides and eventually a murder for which he is incarcerated.

Thus ends Sa'eed's first migration. His second is a southerly move to the narrator's village where he, in an almost Hugoesque move, creates a new, purer, penitent life for himself, hiding the past away. He is addled, however, when the narrator learns of his secrets, and summarily commits suicide after sharing his story.

Both of these migrations were initially successful for the same reason. Returning to the struggle between collective and personal identity- Sa'eed became well connected met with success in England partially because of his perceived identity in the Liberal Circles- that of a highly intelligent African- a 'noble Moore,' an Othello. His five-year success after his return owes itself to his ability to wear the façade of the pastoral farmer. Lingering under the surface, however, was his personal identity: the anglicized hedonistic genius. Even in death, his desire for posterity shows through in the room he keeps in his house, each item carefully placed for the narrator to find. Ultimately, his inability to reconcile the differences between his personal and perceived identity leads to his failure and demise.

The same fate nearly befalls the narrator. A perfect foil to Mustafa, the narrator shares a common foreignness, and in Mustafa's death, he questions his own ability to reconcile his perceived identity as an outsider within his community with his personal identity of deep connection to them. The question drives him to violence, and then to an aborted suicide in the river Nile. In this dénouement, the narrator resolves the struggle, realizing that personal identity does not exist outside the individual, that identity is entirely socially constructed, that he "has duties to discharge
Beneath all of this, however, is a larger critique of the modernization of Muslim society, one that parallels the narrator's catharsis. Mustafa's story was one in which all civilization was British, and came complete with British overseers. In the thirty years that separate Mustafa and the narrator's stories, colonialism is ended, and while the rulers are sloughed off, modernity remains. A point of contention for the narrator's friend, Mahjoub- the narrator himself does not see muslim modernity as contentious. The larger issue is not progress, but self-determination and the ability to better construct one's own identity. He writes: "