In Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, a particular scene near the end of the narrative might strike the reader as peculiar and jarring: during the murder of Wad Rayyes, the virile and womanising friend of the narrator’s grandfather, Mabrouka his eldest wife “didn’t wake up at all” (106) and having missed the funeral was found “sitting drinking her morning coffee” (106). The melodrama of sexual violence, juxtaposed with Mabrouka’s indifference, is neither deflated nor inflected with bathos. Its propensity to shock resists any negation by laughter. Instead, the banality of violence evoked by Mabrouka’s response calls attention to the larger patterns of violence and indifference that recur throughout the text, beginning with epistemic violence—of the colonial subject removed from his indigenous origins and baptised into colonial epistemologies, and of the figure of the silenced widow who, as Gayatri Spivak would have it, is shut out from lines of social mobility (102). Epistemic violence reaches its fullest expression in the violent deaths of Hosna and Wad Rayyes, demonstrated visually through the images of “rivulets” (Salih 105) of blood in the room. As if parabolically, the narrative returns to the scene of symbolic violence: the act of unlocking the “iron door” (Salih 112) to enter Mustafa’s locked room repeats the disclosing act of Mustafa’s confidences with the narrator at the beginning of the novel. Yet the event recurs as farce, in which the presence of the English fireplace, in a house in a Sudanese village, is so out-of-place to the point of being “ridiculous” (Salih 113). At the same time, indifference appears as a motif: first as a disavowal (Mustafa, learning about the narrator’s doctorate, says “We have no need of poetry here” (Salih 9)), then as Mabrouka’s categorical denunciation (“Good riddance!” (Salih 106)) after learning about the violent death of her husband. Indifference and violence appear inextricably bound together not only as part of the arsenal of narrative strategies employed in the text, but as the essential vision of the text that invites as well as problematises its own interpretation.
This paper argues that the figure of the subaltern conceptualised by Spivak, and the trope of the English novel in Homi Bhabha’s formulation of “ambivalent” mimicry in colonial discourse, might — in varied and productive ways — open up sites of reading postcolonial resistance into the novel. Yet, these two theoretical interventions do not constitute a framework as much as they do a fretwork—porous, partially obscuring and to some degree ornamental—that ensconces the text and situates it within the critical domain of postcoloniality. These figures allows us to read power and empire into the novel, but ultimately demonstrate a failure to account for the startling patterns of violence and indifference that exceed the critical capabilities which Spivak and Bhabha bring to the text. In suturing this gap, the puzzle of Mabrouka’s indifference might find its own solution. The repetition of and vacillation between violence and indifference, I argue, are not purely incidental to the narrative, but are manifestations of a profound ambivalence at the heart of colonial discourse. This ambivalence—the idea of the double—is constantly prefigured in the novel through narrative form, characterisation, the configuration of space, and mimicry.
Markers of Postcoloniality: Spivak and Bhabha in the Novel
Spivak’s figure of the subaltern, the subject who cannot “know and speak itself” (80), together with Bhabha’s figure of the English novel that appears as “a moment of originality and authority” (“Signs” 29), appears in Salih’s text almost too fortuitously as easy markers of postcoloniality, as sites for a casual interpretation of the novel as postcolonial text.
The figure of the Hosna — Mustafa’s widow who is coerced by custom but also led by the indifference of Mahjoub into marrying Wad Rayyes —is echoed in the female subaltern subject in Spivak’s arguments. For Spivak,
between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernisation. (102)
Similarly, Hosna is aligned closely with the subaltern figure who is envisaged as the subject “caught between” violence, and ensnared between tradition (for example, being bequeathed to the Wad Rayyes) and modernity (in particular, Hosna is criticised for being “an impudent hussy” like one of those “modern women” (Salih 100)). She is also caught between “patriarchy and imperialism” because of her subjugation to patriarchal desire (in Wad Rayye’s sexual advances) and the spectre of empire that underpins her relationship with Mustafa. For example, the “European talk” (Salih 77) that Mustafa mutters in his sleep reifies itself as Mustafa’s locked room in the house—the sign of a repressed European subjectivity that announces its presence in the household through its own negation.
Like the figure of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, who awaited the onset of menstruation before committing suicide (Spivak 103), the violence inflicted by Hosna on Wad Rayyes and herself similarly features a re-writing of a social text (Spivak 103). The symbolic and sexualised violence of patriarchal dominance done against the woman is reversed and used against the man, who is stabbed “between his thighs” (Salih 105)—a physical and symbolic gesture of penetration that radically re-writes male–female relationships in the community. Having been refused participation in hegemonic discourse, signified through the “silence” and “darkness” (Salih 76) that the narrator uses to describe Hosna, the figure of the subaltern as she is redoubled in Season cannot but materialise the symbolic—that which is associated with speech and language—as the violence of bodily mutilation. As with the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, the body of Hosna, which before had already been denied subjectivity in hegemonic discourse, becomes textualised and profuse in its significations.
On the one hand, Spivak makes available the figure of the subaltern, whose appearance in the narrative of Season seems to, in an unfairly positivist way, confirm and universalise a heterogeneous colonial experience in India and in the Sudan. However, Bhabha’s conceptualisation of the “discovery” (“Signs” 29) of the English novel is reflected in the Season of Migration to the North as “both a measure of mimesis and a mode of civil authority and order” (“Signs” 32), where the narrator’s discovery of the book-filled walls in Mustafa’s room leaves him astonished and astounded (Salih 112). The scene of the discovery of the English novel, elaborated by Bhabha, could be used as an interpretive tool to read the narrator’s discovery of Mustafa’s room. Yet Salih’s text exceeds both the figures raised by Spivak and Bhabha in its repetition of violence and indifference.
Violence and Indifference
The novel presents us with complications and patterns of violence and indifference that exceed the theoretical parameters provided by Spivak and Bhabha. On the one hand, the physical and symbolic violence enacted by Hosna on Wad Rayyes might be read as the only means of resistance afforded by the subaltern, and the epistemic violence prefigured in the references to imperial education recurs throughout the novel as a radical reconfiguration of Mustafa’s and the narrator’s subjectivities (or self-identity). On the other, the indifference that the characters display in the midst of this violence issues itself as a “slippage” (Bhabha, “Ambivalence” 126) that cannot be explained solely in the terms furnished by Spivak and Bhabha, and have to be sutured into the discursive field that Bhabha terms the “ambivalence” (“Ambivalence” 126) at the heart of mimicry. For Bhabha, mimicry is “the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualises power” (“Ambivalence” 126). Yet for the colonial subject, it is also a disruption of authority (“Ambivalence” 129), a gesture that has the propensity to liberate—if only for a moment—the subject from an erstwhile homogenously-conceived colonial power, which is rendered ambivalently and erratically (“Ambivalence” 131). Unlike Spivak, who argues that the subaltern is completely denied the possibility of representation in political, linguistic and cultural discourse, Bhabha contends that the subject still wields the possibility of subversive action, whether intentional or unintentional, through the act of mimicry. Here, I posit that the “double articulation” of violence and indifference in Season of Migration to the North needs to be understood in terms of Bhabha’s notion of ambivalent mimicry, and the text performs its own critique by foregrounding a double-sidedness.
While the scenes of Hosna and Wad Rayyes’s deaths and the facetiousness of Mabrouka’s response encapsulate the pattern of violence and indifference at play in the text, several other moments in the novel reveal this pattern. For example, Mustafa’s recitation of the English poem irrupts through the prose of the narrative, and the violence of this textual interruption is again alluded to when the narrator claims that he would not have been more terrified “had the ground suddenly split open and revealed an afreet … his eyes shooting out flames” (Salih 14). Yet this moment of profound revelation, described through the language of violence, is met with the indifference — the ignorance — of Mahjoub too “busy laughing … to notice what had occurred” (Salih 14), and again with Mustafa’s denial of having spoken in English, waving it of as something of “no significance” (Salih 15). Again, towards the end of the novel, the narrator notes that “nothing astonishes these people. They take everything in their stride. They neither rejoice at a birth nor are saddened at a death” (Salih 107). Despite the sequences of extreme physical violence, — not only of the murder but in Mustafa’s accounts of his encounters with women in England — that take place in the text, the constant repetition of this violence, coupled with the sequences of indifference, create an effect of banality. The larger discourses of patriarchal and imperial power, sexual politics and constructions of gender are constantly denied the drama of overwhelming the narrative (recall, in the final scene, the banality of the “violent desire for a cigarette” in the moment of drowning (Salih 139)), and are instead relegated to the position of an ambivalence—a double-sidedness—that performs its own critique of authoritative structures.
Visions of Duplicity and Ambivalence
If the dual trajectories of violence and indifference are read as sites of ambivalence that produce slippages in the text, the trope of duplicity and double-sidedness recur constantly throughout the text in the figure of the double. For Bhabha, the figure of the double is suggested to be “the trace of what is disavowed” that is “not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a hybrid” (“Signs” 34, emphasis in original). Likewise, the text also presents visions of such duplicity, and may be read productively as sites of ambivalence, or textual gestures that foreground an ambivalence.
The form of the novel performs — through structure and narrative voice — the ambivalence central to Bhabha’s formulation of resistance. Both the narrator and Mustafa received a higher education in England, before returning to the village in the Sudan; both are involved in, or are affectively consumed by, a relationship with Hosna. The narrator, for example, almost “breaks into tears” while declaring Hosna “the sanest woman in the village—and also the most beautiful” (Salih 109), and Mustafa is tenderly remembered by Hosna posthumously as “the father of [her] children” (Salih 75). Both characters are the central narrators of the novel, though the main narrative gradually takes on the appearance of becoming a repetition, a mutation, a hybrid, of Mustafa’s narration. Functioning to some extent as “native informants” who might be able to speak for the Other in the presence of the first-world intellectual (Spivak 79), the narrator and Mustafa occupy the same spaces between the subaltern and colonial authority, and have to represent both the Sudanese native and the European intellectual. Tracing how Salih employs duplicity and ambivalence, which are then mapped on the figure of the native informant, we may begin to ask questions about Salih’s narrative agenda as they repose in the structure of the text.
Duplicity is also implicated through the production of colonial spaces in the novel, most prominently in the topos of Mustafa’s room. The image of the English study foregrounds duplicity on two levels: firstly, as a doubled, re-contextualised space, and secondly in its mimicry of colonial epistemology and European intellectual production. As a space that has been removed from its context of English-ness and then re-inscribed on the landscape of the Sudan, the effect it creates is that of the uncanny: in Bhabha’s formulation of mimicry, that which is “almost the same but not quite” (“Ambivalence” 130). In its second signification as the mimicry of European modes of intellectual production, the enumeration of English books and volumes on the human sciences are associated with colonial epistemologies: “Sociology. Anthropology. Psychology. Thomas Hardy. Thomas Mann. G. E. Moore. Thomas Moore. Virginia Woolf. Wittgenstein.” (Salih 113). With “not a single Arab book” (Salih 114) in the room, the space is represented as a domain that appears violent in its purging of the non-European, and its fetishistic embrace of the “English fireplace with all the bits and pieces” (Salih 113). Mustafa’s locked room is thus an ambivalent space insofar as it makes visible the mimicry that lies at the core of colonial discourse (Bhabha 130), and the epistemic violence foregrounded by Mustafa’s collection of books maps itself on the apparent indifference with which the narrator begins to treat the room with: he “became bored with reading the bits of paper” (Salih 127).
Physical and sexual violence also enters the presentation of duplicity, foregrounded primarily through images of the stabbed, mutilated bodies of Hosna and Jean Morris. Hosna is found “with the knife plunged in her heart” (Salih 105), while Jean Morris is stabbed with dagger “between her breasts” (Salih 136). The doubled image signifying femininity, violence, sexuality and death at once calls attention to the nature of ambivalence at the core of the text: mimicry also bears the mark of the death-drive; while the organism is compelled to blend into the environment, it negates its own difference while doing so (Stewart 91). Through sexuality and violence, the redoubled figures of Hosna and Jean Morris demonstrate the same tendencies of self-destruction and self-negation, which, for Salih, are aligned with the ambivalence within colonial discourse, broaching the “twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably” (Bhabha, “Ambivalence” 132).
Having read within the text for ambivalence and mimicry, one has to read outside the text to find its mimicry of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As R. S. Krishnan observes, Season of Migration to the North appropriates the topoi of Conrad’s novel, and also attempts to “resist, reinterpret and revise” Conrad’s text through the lens of the colonial subject—the “colonised Other” (7). For Krishnan, the figure of Mustafa, like the character of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, is cast in “moral terms” (13), and is also presented as a character shrouded in a moral obscurity, and positioned ambiguously and precariously between truth and falsity of character. Salih’s mimicry of Conrad is, therefore, a deliberate strategy of resisting and dismantling colonial authority, prefigured in Conrad’s text. In Bhabha’s words, there is
an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power—hierarchy, normalisation, marginalisation, and so forth. (“Signs” 33)
The “signs of cultural difference” are counteractively raised, for example, in Salih’s presentation of the Nile as “nourishing and life-affirming” (Krishnan 9), as opposed to the threatening visions of the Congo in Heart of Darkness. In doing so, Salih intensifies the ambivalence and calls to attention the reproduction of colonial power through cultural and literary sources.
Conclusion
The recurring patterns of violence and indifference are not incidental to the text, and are not to be read in isolation from the contestations of power and representation that inform a postcolonial reading of the novel. These repetitions of violence and indifference foreground a banality that also reveals the ambivalence at the heart of Salih’s text, and constitutes a force that exceeds the essentialised figures of the subaltern or the discovery of the English book. While these figures appear at first to intuitively map themselves to the figures of Hosna and Mustafa, the idea of the double, which resurfaces in patterns of violence and indifference, needs to be considered alongside Bhabha’s formulations of ambivalence as a form of resistance. In so doing, such a reading of the novel raises attempts to close certain interpretive gaps, while also opening up room for an imaginative and re-constructive postcolonial reading of the text.
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