Read Online Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih - Free Book Online

and the times
of drought when the men forsook the fields and when the fertile land stretching
from the edge of the desert, where the houses stood, to the bank of the Nile
was turned into a barren windswept wilderness. Then came the water pumps,
followed by the cooperative societies, and those men who had migrated came
back; the land returned to its former state, producing maize in summer and
wheat in winter. All this I had been a witness to ever since I opened my eyes
on life, yet I had never seen the village at such a late hour of the night. No
doubt that large, brilliantly blue star was the Morning Star. At such an hour,
just before dawn, the sky seemed nearer to the earth, and the village was
enveloped in a hazy light that gave it the look of being suspended between
earth and sky. As I crossed the patch of sand that separates the house of Wad Rayyes
from that of my grandfather, I remembered the picture that Mustafa Sa’eed had
depicted, remembered it with the same feeling of embarrassment as came to me
when I overheard the love play of Wad Rayyes with his wife: two thighs, opened
wide and white. I reached the door of my grandfather’s house and heard him reading
his collects in preparation for the morning prayers. Doesn’t he ever sleep? My
grandfathers voice praying was the last sound I heard before I went to sleep
and the first I heard on waking. He had been like this for I don’t know how
many years, as though he were something immutable in a dynamic world. Suddenly
I felt my spirits being reinvigorated as sometimes happens after a long period
of depression: my brain cleared and the black thoughts stirred up by the story
of Mustafa Sa’eed were dispersed. Now the village was not suspended between sky
and earth but was stable: the houses were houses, the trees trees, and the sky
was clear and faraway. Was it likely that what had happened to Mustafa Sa’eed
could have happened to me? He had said that he was a lie, so was I also a lie?
I am from here — is not this reality enough? I too had lived with them. But I
had lived with them superficially neither loving nor hating them. I used to
treasure within me the image of this little village, seeing it wherever I went
with the eye of my imagination.
    Sometimes during the summer months in London, after a
downpour of rain, I would breathe in the smell of it, and at odd fleeting
moments before sunset I would see it. At the latter end of the night the
foreign voices would reach my ears as though they were those of my people out
here. I must be one of those birds that exist only in one region of the world. True
I studied poetry; but that means nothing. I could equally well have studied
engineering, agriculture, or medicine; they are all means to earning a living.
I would imagine the faces over there as being brown or black so that they would
look like the faces of people I knew. Over there is like here, neither better
nor worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in the courtyard
of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else’s. The fact that
they came to our land, I know not why does that mean that we should poison our
present and our future? Sooner or later they will leave our country just as
many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships,
hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language
without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be
as we were — ordinary people — and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own
making.
    Such thoughts accompanied me to my bed and thereafter to Khartoum,
where I took up my work in the Department of Education. Mustafa Sa’eed died two
years ago, but I still continue to meet up with him from time to time. I lived
for twenty-five years without having heard of him or seen him; then, all of a
sudden, I find him in a place where the likes of him are not usually
encountered. Thus Mustafa Sa’eed has, against my will, become a