81 pages • 2 hours read
Season of Migration to the North
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Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The narrator begins his story with his return to his home, a “small village at the bend of the Nile” (3) after seven years studying in Europe. He had “longed” for his fellow villagers, but upon arriving, he feels a strange sense of separation that does not clear until the next morning. Just as he begins to feel rooted in his new reality, he recalls that a man he had never met was present at his arrival. He learns from his father that the man is Mustafa Sa’eed, a foreigner who has married Mahmoud’s daughter Hosna. Unsettled, he continues to search for a sense of stability and goes to his grandfather, who is able to give him more information about the man. He learns Mustafa is from Khartoum and well respected within the village.
The narrator’s next two months send him into frequent contact with the stranger: First, Mustafa visits him at home, laughing when he learns the narrator completed his thesis on an English poet and thus earning the narrator’s ire. The narrator dines at Mustafa’s home and notes his intelligence at a meeting of the Agricultural Project Committee. He remains suspicious of the man but is utterly stunned when he encounters him at a bar. There, their mutual friend Mahjoub pressures Mustafa to drink, and once very drunk, he begins to recite poetry in English. The narrator is terrified, suddenly feeling that his world is surreal and illusory. He confronts Mustafa in the fields the next day, but the man claims he was merely speaking gibberish. The next evening, Mustafa goes to the narrator’s house and promises to tell his tale so that the narrator’s mind does not run away from him. He presents a birth certificate and two passports: One is British.
Chapter 2 Summary
The second chapter, narrated by Mustafa, appears entirely between quotations marks. He reveals that he was born in Khartoum and grew up fatherless. He was distant from his mother and decided to go to school on his own. There, he discovered he had a sharp mind: He learned to write in two weeks, and from there, his brain “continued […] biting and crushing like the teeth of a plough” (21). After three years, he continued schooling in Cairo. He never saw his mother again but felt little remorse at the time. In Cairo, Mr. and Mrs. Robinson cared him for. He felt little affection for them, observing, that his sole tool was “that sharp knife inside [his] skull” (24), and that he had no feeling in his heart. He states that at 15, the mysterious call towards England led him “to the world of Jean Morris” (24).
From here on, his story is heavy with foreshadowing: He repeatedly tells the narrator that his meeting with Jean was fated, stating that everything in his life led him to killing the woman who was for three years his object of desire, later his wife, and finally his victim. After arriving in London, he had begun to seduce women, turning his bedroom into an elaborately staged “operating theatre” (27) decorated with African artifacts. As a renowned economist and university professor, he had a prestigious position—he calculatedly used this as well as stereotypes of Africa and the jungle to present himself as “a symbol rather than reality” (37), a caricature of the Other. Ann Hammond was a young student with a penchant for “the South”; Sheila Greenwood was a waitress; and Isabella Seymour was a married woman: All fell for him, and then committed suicide. After Mustafa killed Jean Morris, the women’s deaths were used against him at her murder trial. This chapter does not contain his account of Jean’s murder but does narrate his seduction of Isabella Seymour at length. As she fell in love with him, a “weak voice from the depths of [his] consciousness” (37) urged him to stop his seduction, but he did not.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first two chapters introduce two voices, that of the narrator and that of Mustafa Sa’eed. We learn that the men have much in common: Both were viewed as the smartest boys in their villages; both pursued higher education, living and travelling in Europe; and both now live in the same small village at the bend of the Nile. However, they have returned under different circumstances, and these chapters suggest that their different paths will form the crux of the narrative. After meeting, both these characters must reevaluate the ways in which their two worlds—African and European—come into contact and conflict.
When the narrator returns to his Wad Hamid, he hopes that he will find a sense of purpose and belonging. Upon arriving, he feels that a part of himself that had been “frozen” (3) in Europe begins to melt. However, this experience is also accompanied by ambivalence. As he wanders about the village, he searches for familiar sights and sounds that will make him feel fully connected to the world around him. He has some success, but Mustafa Sa’eed presence is from the outset a source of bother and concern. Even before he learns that Mustafa is a fellow migrant, the mere presence of a stranger—a man he does not know, and who does not know him—makes his world feel less real. Therefore, when Mustafa begins to recite poetry in English, his world is upended. He says that he is as shocked by this sight as he would have been by an “afreet” (14), or demon. His two worlds collide unexpectedly in this moment.
As we encounter Mustafa’s voice in the second chapter, we learn that he is a murderer, although these pages do not reveal the details of how he came to kill his wife Jean Morris. Although his path parallels the narrator’s in some ways—he receives a doctorate and is admired for his mind—it differs in others. In particular, whereas the narrator longs to return home, Mustafa is content to live in London, trafficking in African stereotypes to seduce women. His background is not a source of nostalgia and contentment, but a tool for manipulating others to his will. To his lawyers and the European audience, his case represents the collision of two cultures and two worlds. It is a test case for Europe’s “civilizing mission” (78), and its outcome will seemingly reveal whether Europeans and Africans can ever live together harmoniously. Mustafa serves seven years and then returns to Sudan, telling no one his tale.
English poetry takes on a special significance in these pages: Mustafa tells the narrator that it has no use and no place in Sudan. However, he himself begins reciting it when drunk. With his inhibitions lowered, he outs himself as a poetry enthusiast. The collision of worlds strikes fear into the narrator’s heart. Mustafa decides to tell his story because he is afraid that the narrator, as a poet, might let his imagination run away from him.
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