Post-Colonial Cultures of Sudan and Egypt - Assignment Example

Text and Traditions: Final Take-Home Examination. Examine how the British/European experience for both Mustafa Sa’eed (of Season) and Ram (of Beer) cements their status as outcasts in their respective post-colonial cultures of Sudan and Egypt. In the various post-colonial cultures of North Africa there are on-going difficulties in negotiating relationships with the former colonial masters in Europe. This is explored in novels of the post 1948 era, in which very often people who stay at home and people who travel out to Europe attempt to redefine this historical relationship. European contact is seen by some as a betrayal, and by others as a means of retaliation. This paper examines the situation of two returning travellers who have experienced extensive work and study in Europe. The experience of close contact with the other culture renders these travellers unable to reintegrate into their home environment. There are some differences in the cultural origins between Mustafa Sa’eed in Season of Migration to the North1 and Ram in Beer in the Snooker Club.2. Mustafa Sa’eed grew up in a rural part of the Sudan, and his idea of home is a small, traditional village with palm trees around an oasis, and the men of the village talking together in the sunshine. Ram was a city boy, brought up mainly by women and dependent on women for his financial support. His home is the multi-cultural and relatively liberal society of Cairo where he has friends from a variety of different racial and economic backgrounds. Apart from these initial starting points, their early lives have quite a lot of similarities Both received education locally through British colonial teachers, and then later by travelling to Britain and studying at British universities. They both were quite privileged, therefore, in comparison with most of the local youths. They engaged in amorous affairs with different women who were not from a Muslim family. It is not surprising that when they return home after their travels, there is great interest in what they did and what kind of men they have become. Critics have pointed out that novels from Arabic speaking writers in North Africa after 1948 cannot avoid dealing with issues of colonialism and national identity. The way that these men engage with Northern European culture is bound to be influenced by the past history of their respective homelands with former colonial oppressors. The characters in their books journey to Europe with very mixed feelings, angry about the atrocities of the past and yet drawn to the cultural attractions of wealth and learning in northern Europe. This journey, however, is not perceived nor presented as a classical European heroic journey towards great adventure and the destiny that follows. The journey is, to use Salih’s word “a migration” and this implies that they will leave for a while, only to return again in a circular motion to the place where they began. In the vast continent of Africa seasonal migration is a necessary pattern for animals and for many humans too. Tsaaior calls this kind of African journey “episodic and circuitous… an existential metaphor”3 On a philosophical level, there is a resistance to Western European notions of linear history: “The novelist, artist, poet, or intellectual of the Global South – based on an intimate regional experience with colonialism/imperialism – is positioned to view very critically indeed the Hegelian concept of History as a linear, causal, teleological affirmation of European supremacy and to search for an alternative structure as a vehicle for expression.”4 The attitude of villagers towards Mustafa at the start of his great journey is somewhat mixed and this information is provided by the unnamed narrator, who was his schoolmate for a time: “Mustapha Saeed covered his period of education in the Sudan at one bound – as if he were having a race with time. While we remained on at Gordon College, he was sent on a scholarship to Cairo and later to London. He was the first Sudanese to be sent on a scholarship abroad. He was the spoilt child of the English and we all envied him and expected he would achieve great things."5 This envy is tinged also with some criticism: “We nicknamed him the black Englishman”6 As the novel progresses, the reader finds out more and more about Sa’eed’s murky past, and the death of so many women who had the misfortune to have been in love with him. Salih cleverly reveals this information through the filter of the unnamed narrator, who is sufficiently educated in British language and culture to understand the significance of what Mustafa tells him, but also sufficiently tied into his family and his small village society, so that the reader can see a big contrast in morals and in attitudes. The patient and sober narrator is contrasted with the impetuous Mustafa, and in the end, when Mustafa meets his death, it is the narrator who re-establishes an Islamic sense of justice when he takes over responsibility for Mustafa’s two sons. The question which the novel asks, is what is it about Mustafa that makes him unable to fit back in to his homeland when he returns? Hassan maintains that Mustafa’s aggressive and vengeful attitude has caused him to become corrupted: “Mustafa is a metaphor for colonial violence and a parody of European stereotypes of Africa and the Orient.”7 He has become too much like the culture he despises, and this is particularly exemplified in his treatment of women. Even his widow suffers shame and suicide, because she is left unprotected by her husband and unwilling to be a victim yet again of male violence at the hands of Wad Rayyes8. In comparison with this, Ram is a more attractive character altogether. He establishes loving relationships with women, and though he is obviously a weak and lazy person, dependent on others and lacking in drive or initiative, he has at least learned from his multicultural contacts some possibility of finding positive ways of interacting: “but happiness, to me, is the freedom of two people who love each other to share their lives in circumstances permitting this love to live.”9 The woman he loves turns him down, however, because she has another man, and he enters into a marriage of convenience with an older woman, which seems to prove that he cannot establish the sort of comfortable social connections that he imagines. Part of his problem, and that of his dissolute friend Font, is that he does not speak Arabic properly, and he is too attached to the beer and snooker of the novel’s title. He is without roots and without direction. Honourable characters in this novel are scarce, but there is a hint of them in the Muslim female students who are virtuous and therefore unattainable for the likes of Ram, who is in any case a Copt and not a Muslim. When they return to Egypt Font and Ram are “over-educated and under-employed – alienated from both cultures European and Egyptian”10 Makdisi sees this also as the fate of Mustafa: “Trapped between north and south and east and west, his screams for help are absorbed by the immensity of the Nile”11 In conclusion, therefore, we can see that the “migration” provides only temporary relief for the travellers. In returning to where they started, both Mustapha and Ram are rejected by their countrymen at home, because they have learned only to exist in the no-man’s land between two cultures. They do not fit into the past, and they cannot bring about a future that is acceptable to themselves and their local compatriots. Coldness and oppression in colonial Europe is matched by violence and corruption in their African homeland. They cannot embrace the north, because of their national origins, and they cannot embrace their southern origins, because they have been “civilised” into the caricaturised role of cruel and lazy subjects which Europeans want them to be. They are outcasts because they have been changed, and not for the better, and have not delivered the personal improvement that was expected of them, nor indeed have they brought back any benefits to the land they left behind. All that remains is for the cycle of migration to begin again with the next generation, in the hope that one day the extreme dualities of former colony and former master will be erased, and a new meaning to the journey will emerge, which allows positive interactions and a successful reintegration of the traveller back into his original homeland. Until then the travellers between these two great cultural spheres will always remain outcasts, harbouring resentments and failed ambitions and unable to make use of all the lessons they have learned. References Aboul-Ela, Hosam. “Writer, Text and Context: The Geo-Historical Location of the post-48 Arabic Novel.” Edebiyat 14 (1) and (2), (2003), pp. 5-19. Ghali, W. Beer in the Snooker Club. London: Andre Deutsch, 1964/1987. Hassan, Waïl S. “Gender (and) Imperialism: Structures of Masculinity in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” Men and Masculinities (2003) 5, pp. 309-324. Makdisi, Saree S. “The Empire Renarrated: ‘Season of Migration to the North’ and the Reinvention of the Present.” Critical Inquiry 18 (4) (1992), pp. 804-820. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. New York: NYRB, 2009. Starr, Deborah A. “Drinking, gambling, and making merry: Waguih Ghali’s search for cosmopolitan agency” Middle Eastern Literature 9 (3) (2006), pp. 271-285. Tsaaior, James T. “Geo-spatial politics and the trope of migration in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. Journal of North African Studies 14 (2), (2009), pp. 221-234. Read More