International Journal ofArabic-English Studies

Vol.l. No.1 June 2000

TAYEB SALIH AND JOSEPH CONRAD RE-

VISITED: SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH
AND HEART-OF DARKNESS

May Maalouf
Lebanese University-i-Branch II

The topic of influence has always been a controversial one. The proximity
of meaning between "influence" and "imitation" tends to put the reader,
the author, and even the text on the alert since it could be understood as
diminutive of the author's originality, and yet it could be the only means
of 'discovering and appreciating that originality. A major obstacle in the
assessment of one author's influence over another is the presumption that
Text A (the influencer) is supposedly a great work against which Text B
(the influenced) must prove itself. Hence, while this battle between.texts
may take the form of sibling or Oedipal rivalry' in works of the same
culture (even if of different nationalities) or language, it becomes a very
complex one when Texts A and B are not only of different cultures, but
also of opposite ones such as East and West. The task gets even more
problematic when Text A belongs to one of the most powerful literatures
in the West (British) and Text B belongs to a relatively nascent literature
in the East (Sudanese) and which has been colonized by the political
svstem of the former.
..,!
From this nersnective the study of Joseph
.!. ..!. -- -~.

Conrad's influence on AI-Tayeb Salih becomes fraught' with many

pitfalls: political, cultural, and even literary.

However, the abundant similarities between Salih's Season ofMigration

to the North and Conrad's Heart ofDarkness render a comparative study
of these two novelists rather inevitable. What makes such a study more
inviting is that both Conrad and Salih share dual cultures and come from
countries that had suffered colonization: Conrad is Polish and British and
Poland was colonized by the Russians and Salih is both African and an

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Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

Arab and Sudan was colonized by the British2 . Moreover, both novelists
address the East/West conflict and the impact of colonization on the
protagonists of their works. However, the difference in the dramatization
of these issues is what distinguishes Salih from Conrad.

Most of the studies on Conrad and Salih have.focused on the similarities

between these two novelists and have overlooked the differences, which
give Season its unique importance in postcolonial literature'. Brief
references that relate Salih to Conrad appear in Muhammad Siddiq's
Jungian analysis of Season in "The Process of Individuation in Al-Tayyeb
Salih's Novel Season/" in Nabil Matar's "Tayeb Salih's Season:Circles
of Deceit," and in Peter Nazareth's "The Narrator as Artist and the Reader
as Critic in Season." Elad-Bouskila's "Shaping the Cast of Characters:
The Case of AI-Tayyib Salih" gives a closer look at the similarities in the
narrative technique between Conrad and Salih. However, the most
extensive and focused study on Salih's Season and Conrad's Heart of
Darkness is Mohammad Shaheen's(1985) "Tayeb Salih and Conrad."
Shaheen's article, enlightening as it may be in pointing out the obvious
and the many subtle correspondences between the two works, stands as a
case in point to the erroneous presumption raised at the beginning of this
paper.

The serious problem with Shaheen's thesis is that it implies that.an

author's impact on another necessitates a replica or an "imitation" of Text
A in Text B; that the influence of Conrad on Salih should result in exact
correspondences and even emulation of Heart of Darkness in Season.
This dangerous assumption leads Shaheen to conclude that Salih fails, and
sometimes even miserably, "to produce a similar profound effect" as that
of Heart ofDarkness (160). Overlooking the cultural, political and even
the literary specificities of Salih's work, Shaheen takes the Conradian
mode of narrative presentation, which has been criticized by many critics,
most notable of whom are E. M. Forster and F. R. Leavis, as the canonical
one against which Salih's literary prowess should be measured. Shaheen
even goes so far in his admiration of Conrad to say that it was Salih' s bad
luck to "draw upon Conrad whose original and complex mind is difficult
to grasp" (169)-as though capturing the mind of Conrad is the ultimate
test for Salih' s literary competence as an author! The faultiness of such
an assumption needs no illustration-suffice it to point out two great
literary figures who drew on sources for thematic and structural purposes
without adhering to exact correspondences with their original texts:
Shakespeare and Joyce. Shakespeare draws on multiple sources for his

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 IJABS Vo1.1, NO.1 June 2000

dramas without limiting his genius to the exact details of the source, and
so does Joyce, whose appropriation of Homer's The Odyssey in Ulysses is
a prime example of Text B's freedom in using a model and manipulating
it to create its own individuality as a text.

The purpose of this paper is not to vindicate Salih' s originality-it does

not need any. Rather it is to show that Salih's "misreading" of Conrad's
Heart of Darkness in Season is intentional and is what endows it with its
significant and crucial contribution to the ongoing East/West debate. In a
speech in 1980, Salih rejects the romanticized image of the East, to which
both the West and the East have fallen victim, and perceives" the so-
called EastfWest relationship as essentially one of conflict"(Amyuni,
1985: 16). In Season, Salih subverts the one-dimensional conflict of
EastlWest of Heart of Darkness into a multi-dimensional one that not
only dramatizes the misconceptions both cultures have of each other, but
also exposes the illusion of a self-sufficient, insular culture.

Ope can clearly detect the structural correspondences between Season and
H~art ofDarkness. Although Salih does not take his characters on a river
journey as Conrad does, yet the Nile is ever present whether in the
physical environment of the narrator or in the consciousness of Mustafa
Sa' eed. Accordingly, the river in both novels is a major force with which
the characters have to contend". Whether it is the Thames, the Congo or
the Nile, these rivers not only represent the amoral aspect of nature which
while it liberates the individual from his/her cultural boundaries, it
releases the two basic instincts of eros and thanatos." More importantly,
the rivers are also emblems of their geographical cultures. Both Kurtz
and Mustafa commit a satanic transgression when they appropriate their
respective rivers, along with their cultures, in order to pose as gods. To
Kurtz and Mustafa the river is a "snake" that tempts them to their amoral
and primitive existence. They answer the call and glorify in their usurped
divinity irrespective of the consequences. Kurtz invades the East with his
colonial capitalistic culture and claims the ivory and the river Congo as
his own. Addressing his listeners, Marlow reports Kurtz's claiming: "My
Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my-" (Conrad 70). On his
part, Mustafa Sa' eed rapes the West with an eroticized image of his Nile
which he prostitutes in order to become the Casanova of the West. Thus,
he becomes "the Nile, that snake god," (Salih 39) that preys on helpless,
sickly women and thrives on the pretentious liberals of the West. But
poisoned by that which has nourished their monumental egotism, they
both end up the victims of their own rivers.

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Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

Moreover, the journey motif in Season can be divided into the three
phases or stations of Heart ofDarkness: the Outer, the Central and the
Inner-which Marlow has to cover before he meets his alter ego.
Although Salih is not as explicit as Conrad in structuring his narrative, yet
the narrator of Season passes through similar phases as Marlow. The
three stations in Season could be outlined as follows: the outer station till
the death of Mustafa Sa'eed; the central till the death of Mustafa's widow,
Hosna; and the inner station is Mustafa Sa'eed's private room:
Heart ofDarkness Season
Outer Station 1-46 (Sa'eed's death)
--Manager:the cool and The efficient and
level-headed Accountant realistic Mahjoub

Central Station 46 - 105 (Hosna's death)

--Manager: the physically-fit The sexually potent Wade
manager Rayyess

--jungle initiation desert initiation

the blood of the cannibal the caravanserai
helmsman
Inner Station 134-165 (Sa'eed's private room)
--Manager: Kurtz Mustafa Sa' eed

A. The Outer Station:

In this phase both narrators give a rather sentimental and poetic

description of their surroundings. What first attracts our attention are the
major flaws in the narrators which render them more dangerous than a
Kurtz or a Mustafa Sa' eed. First of all, Marlow and the narrator suffer
from a severe myopic vision of their surroundings. Although they
introduce themselves as being aware of the EastlWest dialectic, neither of
them addresses it seriously and yet, ironically, they tell us that they are
the enlightened ones. At the beginning of his tale, Marlow refers to the
Roman invasion of England and says that the Romans "were men enough
to face the darkness" (Conrad 9). This statement not only affiliates him
with them, since he too was "man enough to face the darkness" of the
jungle and was charmed by the snake-like river of the Congo (Conrad 12),
but also underlines his colonial tendencies. Yet once he is well on his
journey, he drops this theme, and focuses on his existential struggle with
the inner and outer darkness represented by the jungle and Kurtz.
Marlow's pretentious attitude is clear in his inability to humanize the

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 IJABS VoLl, No.1 June 2000

natives. Throughout his journey he gives the reader accounts of the

impact of the jungle on him, an account that is rendered in an
impressionistic and ambiguous language that disguises his unwillingness
to accept the reality of the natives. Several critics, especially Chinua
Achebe," have pointed out Marlow's impressionistic and biased account
of the natives. Although Marlow expresses his anti-colonialism before he
embarks on his journey, his attitude towards the natives is a very
contradictory one. His attempt at a sympathetic description of the blacks
fails, as his reaction to what he sees does not go beyond the physical
level. Thus, they appear to him as "raw matter" (Conrad 23), as
"unearthly black shapes" (Conrad 24), and they are like the vegetation
around them, their age cannot be figured out because "with them it's hard
to tell"(Conrad 25). But in an attempt to exonerate himself from any
colonial or racist tendencies, Marlow performs a charitable act of offering
one of the natives "one of [his] good Swede's ship's biscuits" but,
ironically, is extremely puzzled as to the significance of the white worsted
on the neck of this unearthly figure (Conrad 25).

As for the narrator in Season, he too seems oblivious of the reality of the
cultural implications of his surroundings. His nocturnal walks in the
streets of the village are merely a context for his poetic effusions and a
chance to give us examples of his poetic prowess, which stands in
complete ironic contrast to the referential language of the villagers,
especially his grandfather's friends. Furthermore, the narrator's
preoccupation with playing the role of a detective blinds him to the
impending tragedy ofHosna and Wad Rayyess. It is extremely ironic that
while the narrator sees himself as fixedly rooted in his background like
the palm tree and that his village never left him even while he was away,
yet he seems to have forgotten all about his culture when he naively
expects Hosna to have the power against her patriarchal society.

Moreover, inasmuch as Marlow misses the import of what he sees, the

narrator in Season is equally simplistic in his view of his country. After
seven years of absence in the \1[ est, his nostalgia for his people does not
exceed the physical aspects of the village. The palm trees, the cooing of
the turtledoves and the water pumps are enough indicators to tell him that
"all was still well with life" and that he is "not like a storm-swept feather
but like [the] palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a
purpose" (Salih 2).

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Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

Second, it is in this stage that both narrators are introduced to and are
intrigued by the enigmatic figures' of Kurtz and Sa' eed. However, their
first inquiry about them reveals nothing more than their great
qualifications as business people, and yet the narrators' nightmares begin
when this image starts to take a different shape as they get to know more
about Kurtz and Mustafa.

B: The Central Station:

In the second phase Marlow's and the narrator's spiritual kinship to their
respective alter egos increases as they get bombarded with conflicting
reports and rumors from different sources on Kurtz and Mustafa. While
Marlow hears of rumors about Kurtz's illness (Conrad 32) and of his
being a "special being," "an emissary of pity, and science, and progress"
(Conrad 36) and then of him as being a "scoundrel" (Conrad 46), the
narrator in Season also hears contradictory reports.about Mustafa. The
Mamur describes him as an "arrogant and isolated" fellow who inspired
both "envy and admiration" (Salih 53). In Khartoum, the narrator gets
two other reports on Sa'eed, one from a Sudanese who claims that
Mustafa was a spy for the British and that he is a millionaire, and the
other from a Britisher who describes him as an unreliable economist and
as a "show piece exhibited" by affectatious liberals (Salih 58).

Concurrent with the increasing conflicting reports on Kurtz and Mustafa;

both narrators become more and more confused about themselves and
their surroundings. Within an impressionistic style, Marlow and the
narrator find themselves drawn to a big lie, embodied in Kurtz and
Mustafa. "I went for him near enough to a lie ... I became in an instant
as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims' (Conrad 39),
says Marlow. After Sa' eed described himself to the narrator as "a lie",
the narrator sees himself, too, as a lie: "was it likely that what had
happened to Mustafa Sa'eed could've happened to me? He said that he
was a lie, so was I a lie? " (Salih 49). Yet, a bit later he is mistaken for
Sa'eed's son (Salih 56).

Furthermore, as both narrators start to feel their proximity to their alter

egos, they both try to deny any interest in their subject of attention. At
one point during his waiting for the rivets needed to continue his journey
to the Inner Station, Marlow says,

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 IJABS YoU, No.1 June 2000

I had plenty of time for meditation, and now and then I

would give some thoughts to Kurtz. I wasn't interested
in him. No. Still I was curious to see whether this man,
who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some
sort would climb to the top after all and how he would
set about his work when there. (Conrad 44)

Likewise, the narrator in Season addresses his audience saying, "But I

would hope you will not entertain the idea, dear sirs, that Mustafa Sa' eed
had become an obsession that ever was with me in my comings and
goings" (Salih 61). But a couple of pages later he, too, expresses great
puzzlement regarding Sa'eed's moral equipment: "Mustafa Saeed used
regularly to attend prayers in the mosque. Why did he exaggerate in the
way he acted out his comic role?" (Salih 65)

C: Inner Station:

Prior to their entry into the inner station, into Kurtz's quarters and
Mustafa's private room, the narrators undergo a ritualistic initiation that
prepares them for their close encounter with their dark selves. In this
phase, the narrators relate the relentless hostility and incomprehensibility
of nature around them. In Heart of Darkness, and as the steamer
approaches the Inner Station, Marlow describes his travelling up the river
like "travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world" (Conrad 48),
along a labyrinthine route that is full of "trees, trees, millions of trees,
massive, immense, running up high" which "made you feel very small,
very lost, yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling" (Conrad 50).
"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings," says
Marlow, "we glided past like phantoms, wandering and secretly appalled.
. . . We could not understand because we were travelling in the night of
first ages, of these ages that are gone, having hardly a sign-and no
memories," and "what thrilled you was just the thought of your remote
kinship with this wild and passionate up"(Conrad 51).

While Marlow is overwhelmed with the thickness, the density and the
darkness of the jungle, the narrator in Season is almost hypnotized with
the naked brightnesss of the desert. The rhythmic repetition of the
narrator's description ofthe scorching sun and the seeming endlessness of (
the road echoes Marlow's reaction: "There's no shelter from the sun ...",
says the narrator, "its rays spilling out on the ground as though there
existed an old blood feud between it and the people of the earth ...A

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 Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

monotonous road rises and falls with nothing to entice the eye: scattered
bushes in the desert, all thorns and leafless, miserable trees that are
neither alive nor dead" (Salih 105). "No taste. No smell. Nothing of good.
Nothing of evil" (Salih 111).

As though to intensify the confusion about Kurtz -and Mustafa,both

Conrad and Salih introduce yet another report about them. Before the
much-awaited meeting of the doubles, two characters appear in defense of
Kurtz and Mustafa. To the Russian disciple and Mrs. Robinson Kurtz and
Mustafa are great figures who not only have enlightened them, but also
have suffered greatly. The Russian explains that Kurtzhas "enlarged
[his] mind" (Conrad 79) and that he has "suffered too much, [but]
somehow couldn't get away" (Conrad 81). Likewise, Mrs. Robinson's
letter about Moozie (referring to Mustafa) describes him as a "tortured
child" and as someone who played a "great part ... in drawing attention.
. . to the misery in which his countrymen live under our colonial
mandate"(SalihI48). However, both Conrad and Salih undermine these
sympathetic reports by giving the Russian a clownish appearance and
Mrs. Robinson a sentimental and pampered diction.

Reaching the end of their quest, the narrators fall under the spell of their
adversaries whose Faustian ambition attract and repel them. To Marlow
and the narrator, Kurtz and Mustafa Sa' eed represent the tabooed desires
of the id (whether moral or sexual) 9 and thus their much sought encounter,
is transformed into a battle with an image of the self they have been
denying throughout their journey. In Heart ofDarkness, Marlow finds
himself "lumped along with Kurtz" (Conrad 89) and when the pilgrims
buried Kurtz, it was as though "they very nearly buried [him]" (Conrad
100). Similarly, while the narrator is at the threshold of Mustafa's private
. room he becomes "aware of the irony of the situation," for he finds
himself beginning "from where Mustafa Sa' eed had left off' (Salih 134),
and once he is in the room, he mistakes his reflection in the mirror for that
of Mustafa (Salih 135). However, despite the abominable actions of
Kurtz and Mustafa, the narrators admire them for having made their
choice and acted on it. Marlow considers Kurtz as a remarkable man for
"he had made that last stride, while I had been permitted to draw back my
hesitating foot" (Conrad 101). Analogously, the narrator admits that
Mustafa "at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing" (Salih
134).

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 IJAES Vol.1, NO.1 June 2000

With conflicting emotions of admiration and horror, the narrators are

fascinated with the perversities they see in the very heart of the inner
station. Kurtz's house is a pagan temple surrounded with the skulls of
native rebels and Mustafa's private room is a Western microcosm ofjunk
paraphernalia in the midst of the desert. Overwhelmed with their
adversaries' colossal egotism, which reflects their own, both narrators
have the urge to kill them: Marlow by strangling Kurtz and the narrator
by burning Mustafa's room. But they refrain from doing so not out of
moral restraint but because Kurtz and Mustafa represent their id and by
killing them, they kill themselves. Moreover, these dark figures have
offered the narrators a rare chance to have a glimpse into the essence of
their own existence, of their prejudices and their misconceptions of the
self and the Other, a glimpse that while it unveils the lies they have been
living, it reveals Kurtz's and Mustafa Sa'eed's extraordinary
personalities. Both Kurtz and Mustafa have the courage ofjudging
themselves, of admitting the lie and the horror, and thus they win a moral
victory over their narrators, whose enlightenment is probably only
temporary. Although Kurtz and Mustafa Sa'eed appoint Marlow and the
narrator as their trustees, these trustees fail miserably to do them justice:
First, by withholding the truth from the female counterparts of their
10
mentors: Kurtz's Intended and Sa'eed's widow, Hosna . Second, in their
ultimate betrayal of Kurtz and Mustafa Sa'eed, i.e, in their usurping the
narrative of their protagonists, fragmenting it to pieces, in order to justify
their own incompetence as narrators.

Although these correspondences confirm Salih's acknowledgment of the

influence of Heart of Darkness'", yet Salih's achievement lies in his
subversive appropriation of Conrad's depiction of the EastlWest conflict.
Two articles refer to Salih's subversion of Conrad's EastlWest dialectic.
Although John Davidson's (1989) study of Season points out the
Conradian narrative style in Season (385-86), it concludes with a major
difference between Salih and Conrad:

Salih does not present a completely ontimistic picture,

.J. J J. .... - --;J

for . .. the effects of oppression, whether it predates the

coming of the British or developed afterwards, are
visible throughout the Sudan. Salih celebrates the
precolonial culture, but also exposes its evil just as he
sees the potential benefits that comes with the British
gunboats. Conrad's tension invariably devolves into an
existential problem of locating the Western self in a

165
Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

fixed position. . . . The narrator of Season cannot place

himself in such a way, for Salih is calling for tolerance,
not mastery. (Davidson, 1989: 396-97)

Davidson's cautious optimism about the ending of the novel-the

narrator's choice of eros rather than of thanatos and the inevitable change
in the attitude towards women through Hosna' s death (396)-is somehow
reiterated by Makdisi's "The Empire Renarrated." To Makdisi, Season is
a "counternarrative of the same bitter history. Just as Conrad's novel
[Heart ofDarkness] was bound up with Britain's imperialproject, Salih's
[Season] participates (in an oppositional way) in the afterlife of the same
project today, by 'writing back' to the colonial power that once ruled the
Sudan" (805). Salih's Season 'writes back' by "draw[ing] its formal
inspirations from Europe as much as it seeks to distort and undermine
them; it remains, finally, an unstable synthesis of European and Arabic
forms and traditions" (Makdisi, 1992: 815).

The key, however, to Salih's subversive reading of Heart ofDarkness

does not only lie in that it demands an audience that does not exist yet
(Makdisi,1992: 820), or in the author's call for tolerance (Davidson, 1989:
397). A less theoretical argument for Salih's un-Conradian approach is in
the concrete, almost naturalistic, dramatization of the EastlWest conflict
in Season.

Unlike Conrad, Salih does not let his narrator off the hook so easily. By
choosing the narrator's own native land as the geographical matrix of his
narrator's spiritual/psychological journey, Salih exposes the East/West
dialectic which is mystified in Heart ofDarkness. While Salih tests his
narrator's assumptions about his culture and himself in his own village,
Conrad spares his narrator such scrutiny by shipping him off to a foreign
land.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow's experience of the EastlWest issue is

divested of a dramatic interaction between Marlow and the natives and is
sublimated into a metaphysical speculation which Marlow internalizes:
the East is muted, filtered and colored through his western eyes and mind.
Throughout the narrative, Marlow is preoccupied with re-calling his
experience in the Congo in another attempt at fathoming the ever-elusive
meaning of his existence. Before we embark with him on one of his
"inconclusive"(Conrad 10) tales, the frame narrator tells us that the
meaning of Marlow' s story is not typical and that "to him the meaning of

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an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping that tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze" (Conrad 8). Co's
nais, as Watt (1988) succinctly puts it, "essentially impressionist in one
very special way it accepts, and indeed in its very form asserts, the
bounded and ambiguous nature of individual understanding" that has at
its basis "subjective moral impressionism" (316). In other words,
Marlow's experience in Africa is one-dimensional in that its search for
reality is through a dialogue with one's own impressions of the Other,
hoping to understand one's self by figuring out -the meaning of these
impressions. In the process, the natives function for Marlow, who
"assumes that reality is essentially private and individual" (Watt,1988:
316), as mere sounding board and remain not only nameless but also
speechless, and thus, almost non-human'". Salih's West, on the other
hand, is full of real people with real names who exercise their human
right to speak, to voice out their grievances or even their prejudices; in
sum, they have the chance to live out their humanity. (All the women
whom Mustafa victimizes speak out and even curse him.)

Moreover, while in Conrad the Faustian character (Kurtz) is not given the
chance to properly speak for himself (probably because he has become
one of the natives and not a Westerner anymore), his counterpart in
Season (Mustafa Sa'eed) does. By allowing Sa'eed, this example of
cultural mis-integration (Geesey, 1997: 129), to tell his own tale, true or
false as it may be, Salih dramatizes the East/West conflict through a
character whose presence is concretely felt and not just as a voice, or a
metaphysical cry gone mad in the wilderness. Long ago Albert Guerard
has pointed out that "one of the chief contradictions of Heart ofDarkness
is that it suggests and dramatizes evil as an active energy (Kurtz and his
unspeakable lusts) but defines evil as vacancy" (244). In Season,
however, 'evil' is not dramatized at the expense of the natives (the West
in this case), for tile narrator shares with l15 Sa' eed' S diseased mind and
understanding of himself and tells us of the prejudices and oppressions of
his own countrymen.

Indeed, Salih adopts Conrad's narrative structure and characterization

only to deconstruct them and show that Marlow/narrator's (or the
Western) epistemological solipsism is an ineffectual approach for the
understanding of the self and of the Other. In Season, Salih conflates this
subjective experiential paradigm by dispelling some of the haze and mist
that surround Marlow's tale, and gives us a glimpse at what is inside the

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Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

"kernel". He takes us into the heart of the native culture, with all of its
good and bad qualities.

With Salih the conflict between the East and the West is highly
dramatized through the interaction between the narrator and the people of
his village who constantly undermine and challenge" his illusions and
misconception of the East.

Whether in his contact with Mahjoub or Wad Rayyess or even Bint

Majzoub, the narrator's confusion between East and West is concretely
represented. The best example of the narrator's shortsightedness is that
Mustafa, who, though he had lived in the West for over two decades and
in the village for only five years, is capable of seeing through the villagers
while the narrator cannot. When the narrator is browsing in Mustafa's
room, he comes across a number of very expressive paintings of different
figures from the village by Mustafa. But the one that stands out among
them is that of Wad Rayyess which "was more in evidence than the
others" and that there are eight paintings of him. "Why was he [Mustafa]
so interested in Wad Rayyess?" asks the narrator (Salih 151). In fact,
what escapes the narrator is that Mustafa, whom the narrator has
resentfully labeled as a stranger, is more of a native of the village than the
narrator himself Why Wad Rayyess? The connection is very clear:
Mustafa could see in this seventy-year-old man the same
patriarchal/sexual power and oppression which women are victims of',
whether in the West or the East.

Another highly dramatized crucial scene in which Salih answers Conrad's

Victorian ethos is the narrators' encounter with a spiritual wasteland.
Before they reach the inner station, both narrators are summoned into an
experience beyond any moral codes and beliefs. This symbolical
psychological locus cancels the constituents of their acquired identity:
nationality, religion, language, politics, race, etc. For a brief moment, the
two narrators engage in a pagan ritual that connects them with primal
existence away from any cultural differentiation. In Heart ofDarkness,
Conrad dramatizes this encounter by the spilling of the cannibal's blood
over Marlow's shoes and Salih by the caravanserai in which the narrator
participates. In much the same way' that the jungle (and its symbolic
forces) attack Marlow before he meets Kurtz in the Inner Station, the
symbolic forces of the desert attack the narrator before he meets Sa'eed in
his private room. To Marlow the attack comes in the form of his

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 IJABS Vol. 1, NO.1 June 2000

helmsman's death. Marlow's description of the incident is quite reveal ing

in his perception of the Other as menacing and unacceptable:

We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and inquiring
glance enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would
presently put to us some question in an understandable language;
but he died without uttering a limp .. , . I was morbidly anxious to
change my shoes and socks. "He's dead," murmured the fellow,
immensely impressed. "No doubt about it," said I, tugging like
mad at the shoe-laces.... I flung one shoe overboard...the other
shoe went flying unto the devil god of that river. (Conrad 66-67)

Armed with Conrad's Victorian work ethics, Marlow "free[s] [his] eyes
from his [the cannibal's] gaze and attends to the steering" (66). A bit
later Marlow's explanation of his reaction betrays his rejection of any
kinship with the Other. He says that it was "out of sheer nervousness [he]
flung overboard a pair of new shoes! Now I think of it, it is amazing I did
not shed tears. I am, upon the whole, proud of my fortitude" (68).
\

In contrast, the narrator in Season exalts in the desert feast of nothingness.

Despite the hostile, barren surrounding of the desert, a feast of life takes
place where those who pray are alongside with those who drink, where
men and women join in dancing and singing, where all the masks of
discrimination drop:

We became a huge carvanserai of more than a hundred men who

ate and drank and prayed and got drunk ....We clapped, stamped
on the ground, and hummed in unison, making a festival to
nothingness in the heart of the desert. . . . the night and the desert
resounding with the echoes of a great feast, as though we were
some tribe of genies". (Salih 113-114)

In a rare epiphanical moment, the narrator, the sophisticated intellectual

with a Ph.D. from England and who has been searching [or knowledze..
"'-.--" '--.=-" ~-" ..

instinctively celebrates with complete strangers the feast of life.

Answering life's call, "to our hero, living is a matter of healthy instincts
and will, not of sheer reason; it is an affirmation of the here and now, as
they appear and reflect themselves in the heart, not a far truth to seek with (
the intellect" (Khairallah, 1985: 108-109). Throughout the novel, the
narrator has been, like Mustafa Sa'eed, wielding his intellect against his
heart. Although he loves Hosna, and despite the fact that he can have a

169
Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

second wife and, thus, spare her and the village a gruesome tragedy, he
refuses to do help and behaves like a westerner. However, in caravanserai
the narrator joins the natives of the desert (the bedouins) in a ritual of
communality. He becomes one with the bedouins, and one with the
nothingness of the nature, where no questions are asked, where men and
gods are equal.

To further illustrate the importance of this scene which sharply

distinguishes Salih's dramatization of the East/West conflict from that of
Conrad's, one may recall the climactic experience of Mrs. Moore in
Forster's A Passage to India. In this novel, which is also about the clash
of cultures and colonialism, Mrs. Moore is a Christian Britisher whose big
heart and open imagination enable her to connect with the Muslim Indian,
Aziz, and the Hindu Indian, Godbole. She knows that she should take off
her shoes before she enters the mosque and she admires Godbole's wasp.
Up till her visit to the Marabar Caves, which are neither Christian nor
Muslim nor Hindu, Mrs. Moore is very sympathetic towards the natives
and critical of the British behavior in India. Yet Mrs. Moore's Western
notions of the self and the Other fail her tragically in the caves where she
finds herself shoulder to shoulder with the natives and face to face with
their elemental existence that she shares with them:

It was natural enough: she had always suffered from

faintness, and the cave had become too full, because all of
their retinue followed them. Crammed with villagers and
servants, the circular chamber began to smell. She lost Aziz
and Adela in the dark, did not know who touched her,
couldn't breathe, and some vile naked thing struck herface
and settled on her mouth like a pad She tried to regain the
entrance tunnel, but an influx of villagers swept her back.
She hit her head For an instant she went mad, hitting and
gasping like a fanatic. For not only did the crush and
stench alarm her,' there was also a terrifying echo. . .
Whatever it said, the same monotonous noise replies, and
quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed in the
roof "Boum " is the sound asfar as the human alphabet
can express it... Hope, politeness, the blowing ofa nose,
the squeak of a boot, all produce ''Boum''.. Coming at a
moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it [the echoJ
.managed to murmur, "Pathos, piety, courage-they exist,
but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing

170
 IJAES Vol.l, No.1 June 2000

has value." If one had spoken vileness in that place, or

quoted lofty poetry, the comment 'would have been the
same- "ou-boum. " (Chapter 14, 158-59)

Forster's Mrs. Moore achieves an extra step beyond Marlow, yet like him,
and, "out of sheer nervousness" at the close contact with the natives, she
rushes out of the Cave, withdraws into herself and later on dies of heart
failure. Like Marlow, she shares the western notion of exclusion as a
strategy to define one's self.' Accepting the blood of the cannibal or the
Indian echo obliterates the dividing lines that separate British from
African or Indian, Black from White, or East from West. In the
caravanserai episode, however, Salih takes Marlow and Mrs. Moore one
step further to show them that insularity (or exclusion) is a death wish,
whereas inclusion and communality, momentary and transient as they
may be, are a celebration of life, of eros, a source of strength to muster in
the face oflife's destructive forces, the thanatos.

Whether in the jungle or in the desert, this scene symbolizes the merging
of contraries where life and death, black and white, East and West, good
and evil lose boundaries. The acceptance of such experience is an
acceptance of the Other without any preconceived ideas that lock up the
individual not only in a linguistic web but also in an insular culture that
has from within the seeds of its own corruption. More in line with
Blake's "without contraries no progress," Salih redirects Conrad's and
Forster's view of the EastlWest conflict. In Season he undermines the
notions of the insularity or purity of cultures, whether Eastern or Western.
Just like the lemon tree that also produces oranges, the grandfather's
chaotic yet durable house, ana the desert feat of nothingness, life springs
out of contraries and not of isolation.

One of the legacies that Kurtz and Mustafa Sa' eed entrust their narrators
with is their life story. However, both narrators fail to put together the
shattered pieces. Their refusal to do justice to their alter egos is rather
inconsequential because their own narratives have already betrayed them:
Kurtz's and Mustafa's portraits are already drawn by the text: they are a
composite image of the managers of the outer station (the Accountant and
Mahjoub) and those of the Central one (the physically fit manager and the
sexually potent Wad Rayyess)-a composite portrait which only those (
with "two eyes" can see. As Geesey (1997) succinctly points out that
Salih's novel is a "positive message of bicultural, or cultural, grafting as
an antidote to the' germ' of cultural contagion that may be a negative by-

171
Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

product of European colonial endeavors in Africa" (139). The dedication

which Mustafa Sa'eed has for his unwritten biography is an apt
description of Conrad's Marlow, who is one of " those who see with one
eye, speak with one tongue and see things as either black or white, either
as Eastern or Western" (150-151)-and thus have nothing to read!

Notes

1. See Harold Bloom's The Anxiety ofInfluence (London, 1975) which

applies the Oedipal rivalry between poets and their predecessors and
presents the reading of poems (or literature) as a "misreading" or
"misprison" of earlier works in order to appease the anxiety of the
influence.
2. See Davidson (1989) for a brief biographical look at the impact of
Conrad's and Salih's education, 386.
3. For a rather extended list of research done on Salih's works, see Ami
Elad-Bouskila, 59-60.
4. Muhammad Siddiq, "The Process of Individuation in AI-Tayeb
Salih's Novel Season of Migration to the North," Journal ofArabic
Literature. IX, 1978, 67-104.
5. Matars and Nazareth's articles are in Mona Takieddine Arnyuni's
Season of Migration to the North: A Casebook. Beirut: Arnerican U
of Beirut, 1985.
6. Bouskila notes Salih's inversion of the standard symbolic meaning of
the river in that while it serves the narrator as a means of purification,
it serves for Sa' eed as a means of death.
7. From a Freudian point of view, the river may also embody the two
basic instincts: eros (the instinct to live) and thanatos (the urge for
self-destruction or death). This Freudian reading is supported by
Salih in his speech at the American University of Beirut (Amyni 15).
8. Although the debate on Conrad's racist or colonial tendencies is
inconclusive, Achebe's reading has brought about a series of
responses. See Wilson Harris, Frances Singh and CP. Sarvan in the
Norton Critical edition of Heart of Darkness edited by Robert
Kimbrough, 3rd edition 1988. .

172
 IJABS YoU, NO.1 June 2000

9. See Catherine Rising, Darkness at Heart: Fathers and Sons in

Conrad (West Port, CT: Greenwood P, 1990) for a psychoanalytical
study of Conrad's work, especially pp. 40-50 on Heart ofDarkness,
and Siddiq' s article for Salih' s depiction of the struggle between the
ego and the id.
10. Both the Intended and Hosna exhibit unshakeable belief in Kurtz and
Sa' eed, respectively, which further exposes the vacuity of the
narrator's moralizing in their respective narratives.
11. Salih makes a specific reference to Conrad's Heart ofDarkness in
his speech (Amyuni 15).
12. Achebe notes that: "there are two occasions in the book ... when
Conrad . . . confers speech, Even English speech, on the savages"
(255).

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. (1988) "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart

of Darkness." Heart ofDarkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. Norton
Critical Edition. 3rd edition. 251-262.
Amyuni, Takieddine Mona. ed. (1985) Season ofMigration to the North:
A_Casebook. Beirut: American U of Beirut.
Conrad, Joseph. (1981) Heart ofDarkness. New York: Penguin.
Davidson, John. (1989) "In Search of a Middle Point: The Origins of
Oppression in Tayeb Salih's Season ofMigration to the North, "
Research in African Literatures. Vol. 20. No.3, Fall, 386-400.
Elad-Bouskila, Ami.(1998) "Shaping the Cast of Characters: The Case of
Al-Tayeb Salih. " Journal ofArabic Literature. Vol.XIX. NO.2.
July, 59-84.
Forster. E. M. (979) A Passaee to India. Ed. Oliver Stallvbrass.
" , , / ~ J

Cambridge: Penguin.
Geesey, Patricia. (1997 ) "Cultural Hybridity and Contamination in Tayeb
Salih's Mawsim al-hijra ila al-Shamal" Research in African
Literatures. VoL 28, No.3. 128-140.
~-. . . .....,._n ..... A
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A 1h_-4-
t..
111UI;;;1
I'OQO\ "Th_
\.1700) .1 HI;;;
T ............
JVUIUI;;;Y
,.r 'l.T~+h:_"
VV IUUU.
U/JI'I""'.+ fIol'
.1.1I(;LU t
nrn.. I-«.. n ........
UJ L/Uf f\,!tl(;,).' • ..GU.
Drl
rd
Robert Kimbrough.Norton Critical Edition. 3 ed. New York:
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Khairallah, As'ad. (1985) "The Travelling Theater or the Art of
Entertaining a Doomed Caravan with Amusing Stories'' in
Amyuni, 95-111.

173
Maalouf Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-visited

Makdisi, Saree. (1992) "The Empire Renarrated: Season ofMigration to

the North and the Reinvention of the Present," Critical Inquiry.
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174