Review: Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (1966)

If Arabic literature is all about seasons, then sign me up. This is the first book in my class by a writer from somewhere other than Egypt. Salih is from Sudan (now South Sudan), and this is my favorite Arabic work so far.

An innominate narrator returns to his rural Sudanese hometown after an Oxford education in English literature. In spite of his radically new worldview, nothing has changed in the village – except for the presence of a mysterious stranger named Mustafa Sa'eed. Mustafa turns out to know more about English poetry and European cynicism than the narrator, and he soon drops several threads of his past into the narrator's lap, introducing the machinery of cold manipulation and lustful violence into the peaceful village. But before this conceptual disease can take root, Mustafa vanishes and is presumed dead, leaving his estate and family to the young narrator, who spends the rest of the novel in a desperate search for the lost pieces of his own identity as well as the cultural identity of his friends and family.

My professor's complaint about the book is that nothing happens. If you don't like a story that begins at the end and backfills the plot, turn back now. Personally, I don't mind, considering that I'm getting all the information anyway. At its worst, this device is a cheap method of foreshadowing, but Salih avoids that by not being very concerned by plot, either. Take note: you should also turn back if plot is the main thing you're seeking.

In the place of a coherent, cohesive story, Season weaves a philosophic narrative. The difficulty lies in the nonlinear shape of the main event, which arguably takes place over centuries. It's about the disease of humanity, of cultures of cold calculation opposing those of hot passion. It's political without involving nominal politics.

Therein lies the second complaint my class voiced about the novel: it's racist. Many pages are full of description contrasting the ice of Europe with the hot African sun. English go to school and kill each other; Sudanese breed donkeys and have sex. Mustafa is characterized as the ultimate European in an African body. His genius-level intellect and sociopathic unfamiliarity with emotion are what make him a tragedy from the beginning.

I have a specific reason for disagreeing with the assertion of racism here, but it must be supported by the entire narrative, so I'll do my best to support it without spoilers. Essentially, Mustafa is portrayed as the carrier of a metaphorical fatal disease that affects everyone he knows intimately. A soft reading of the text shows this disease to be European civilization, especially in the description of Oxford spires, of frantic student parties, and of steamboats chugging down the Nile. This logic equates his intelligence with the English tradition of colonization, and there are many opportunities to examine the book from a post-colonial critical perspective. In essence, machines are the tools of empire, whereas conquered people, or simply those who keep to themselves, are closer to nature, but duller-witted. For example, the narrator's grandfather has a mud house that blooms with plants every spring, and that dies every harvest season.

However, the point is not to characterize the various races so concerned, but the civilizations. As common as human nature is, you'd be kidding yourself to think that all civilizations across the globe are the same. So many centuries later, it's difficult to see all around us the germ of industrialization that led to colonialism, institutionalism, and Pandora's box of modernisms. Perhaps you can surpass it, but not everyone can. It's the essential distinction between viewing people, including one's self, as objects or viewing them as beings too precious to conceive. Call it love or call it concern for human rights; either way it opposes itself to having a mind of metal and wheels.

Review: The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton (1904)

I was first drawn to this author by my campus minister, who remembers most vividly Chesterton's saying that he would rather be "a toad in a ditch" than be forced to participate in even the most glorious of democracies. Happy election night, U.S.A.!

For the rest of us, this story is set in an ostensibly future England, in an urban world where all wars have ended and everybody praises the single empire under which they live. The king of England is selected randomly to ensure fairness, and the mantle falls to Auberon Quin, an imaginative prankster. He immediately sets about re-hashing the bureaucracy and its ceremonies into increasing self-parodies, and is delighted when nobody cares about how ridiculous they are being made to act. But from the formal chaos rises Adam Wayne, a young firebrand who is completely incapable of seeing the joke for what it really is. King Auberon has divided London into districts and enforced separate nationalism among each of them, and Adam Wayne decides to take his district, Notting Hill, to war against all the others. Wayne's seemingly insane zeal makes him a fearsome military commander, and as he confounds the rich bureaucrats who try to squash him, this Napoleon and his King are brought ever closer to a confrontation over the nature of what it really means to have human value.

Chesterton, to start at the beginning, is one of the most pompous authors ever to speak the English language. For example, this little number is the first line of the book:

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

Self-renowned (that's right) as the anti-Nietzche, Chesterton filled his non-fiction with more one-liners and pithy pieces of wisdom than Groucho and Karl Marx combined. He was staunchly Roman Catholic and had a talent for analyzing people across cultures, usually erasing the difference between anthropologists and the people they study, or between historians and the past they analyze. However, sometimes he sets aside this talent unfortunately; I have to be skeptical when in The Everlasting Man he asserts that everything worth studying has happened relative to the Mediterranean Sea. And easily the biggest drawback of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is that it fails to include even a single woman. Maybe it's a future where men have learned to reproduce asexually and forgotten the feminine thought process. Got any better ideas?

Apart from these concerns, the book is mostly phenomenal. I retain some reservation because there are parts about which I don't have the slightest clue. A large chunk of thought is devoted to humor and the effects of taking something seriously or not. In Chestertonese, this means he's making fun of us, the readers. This is a consolation when you're reading something silly, but not when you find yourself agreeing with a philosophical point only to realize that you've been set up.

Here lies the main piece of brilliance of the novel. In terms of popular culture, Adam Wayne and King Auberon are closest to Batman and the Joker, respectively, but Chesterton did it first. The unstoppable, devoted idealist is going to triumph in the short term, but the prankster has removed all the rules from the game. It's a psychological contest, with each losing on the other's terms, and neither compromises. To top it all off, the two rely on each other: firm belief needs to be taken more seriously than anything else, and humor must have something taken seriously to subvert. So entrenched are Wayne's certitudes that, in a post-apocalyptic scene, the most poignant moment of the book, he is able to acknowledge this co-dependence without being able to let go of it.

This book is tricky to apply to life and literature, but it's worth it. The central theme is how seriously to take things, and as an English major in a liberal arts college, I've seen otherwise intelligent people damn themselves and dam their thoughts by taking this very question too seriously, never noticing the irony. They become parodies of self-awareness. Know that there are things worth involving yourself in, but always be able to put something down or take a step back. That goes for reading, thinking, and analyzing, so that you can go on living.