Free Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih Page B

for a period of our
history; will for a long time continue to have for us that feeling of contempt
the strong have for the weak. Mustafa Sa’eed said to them, ‘I have come to you
as a conqueror.’ A melodramatic phrase certainly; But their own coming too was
not a tragedy as we imagine, nor yet a blessing as they imagine. It was a
melodramatic act which with the passage of time will change into a mighty myth.
I heard Mansour say to Richard, ‘You transmitted to us the disease of your
capitalist economy. What did you give us except for a handful of capitalist
companies that drew off our blood — and still do?’ Richard said to him, ‘All
this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain
about colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism.
It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable
to you as air and water.’ They were not angry: they said such things to each
other as they laughed, a stone’s throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical
chasm separating the two of them. 

 
    But
I would hope you will not entertain the idea , dear sirs, that Mustafa Sa’eed
had become an obsession that was ever with me in my comings and goings.
Sometimes months would pass without his crossing my mind. In any case, he had
died, by drowning or by suicide — God alone knows. Thousands of people die
every day. Were we to pause and consider why each one of them died, and how —
what would happen to us, the living? The world goes on whether we choose for it
to do so or in defiance of us. And I, like millions of mankind, walk and move,
generally by force of habit, in a long caravan that ascends and descends,
encamps, and then proceeds on its way. Life in this caravan is not altogether
bad. You no doubt are aware of this. The going may be hard by day, the
wilderness sweeping out before us like shoreless seas; we pour with sweat, our
throats are patched with thirst, and we reach the frontier beyond which we
think we cannot go. Then the sun sets, the air grows cool, and millions of
stars twinkle in the sky. We eat and drink and the singer of the caravan breaks
into song. Some of us pray in a group behind the Sheikh, others form ourselves
into circles to dance and sing and clap. Above us the sky is warm and compassionate.
Sometimes we travel by night for as long as we have a mind to, and when the
white thread is distinguished from the black we say ‘When dawn breaks the travelers
are thankful that they have journeyed by night.’ If occasionally we are
deceived by a mirage, and if our heads, feverish from the action of heat and
thirst, sometimes bubble with ideas devoid of any basis of validity no harm is
done. The spectres of night dissolve with the dawn, the fever of day is cooled
by the night breeze. Is there any alternative?
    Thus I used to spend two months a year in that small village
at the bend of the Nile where the river, after flowing from south to north,
suddenly turns almost at right angles and flows from west to east. It is wide
and deep here and in the middle of the water are little islands of green over
which hover white birds. On both banks are thick plantations of date palms,
with water-wheels turning, and from time to time a water pump. The men are bare-chested;
wearing long under-trousers, they cut or sow and when the steamer passes by
them like a castle floating in the middle of the Nile, they stand up straight
and turn to it for a while and then go back to what they were doing. It passes
this place at midday once a week, and there is still the vestige of the
reflected shadows of the date palms on the water disturbed by the waves set in
motion by the steamer’s engines. A raucous whistle blares out, which will no
doubt be heard by my people as they sit drinking their midday coffee at home. From afar the stopping place comes into view: a white platform with a line of
sycamore trees. On both banks there is activity: people on