On Season of Migration to the North vs The Grass Is Singing - Essay Example

? On ‘Season of Migration to the North’ and ‘The Grass Is Singing’ Table of Contents Introduction 3 Discussion 3 References 8 Introduction This essayexplores arguments tied to the assertion that in the commitment of the murders, Moses “was driven to kill in a moment of mad passion”, while Mustafa Sa’eed was “fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle”, in the two novels ‘The Grass is Singing’ by Doris Lessing and ‘Season of Migration to the North’ by Tayeb Salih respectively. In the latter novel Mustafa Sa’eed is the enigmatic educated man and the psychological double of the narrator, who was charged with the killing of a lover out of passion, but was acquitted in the English courts. In ‘The Grass is Singing’, meanwhile, the servant Moses killed his master Mary in the end, as a culmination of a lifelong tension and the outcome of years of abuse and mistreatment received by Moses in the hands of his masters (Lessing, 1950; Salih, 1969; Lingan, 2008; Amazon.com, 2013; Goodreads, 2013; Grogan, 2011; Corbett, 2013; Krishnan, 1996). Discussion In Lessing’s ‘The Grass is Singing’ it is easy to see Moses as the representation of the repressed black man, who, in spite of the white man’s need for him, nevertheless is the object of despising and distancing, and much hatred and the systematic repression of his basic human rights, for the economic and social gain of the white man. Moses himself knew, by admitting to the killing of Mary Turner and presenting himself before the law, choosing that over trying to run away and escape, that he was to face further horrors and no justice from a system that had robbed him for life of his freedoms and his basic dignity as a man. He would be hanged. On the other hand, there is something to this act of surrender that may have something to do with the man not having planned the murder at all, but did it in a spur of the moment, in the heat of passion so to speak. It is curious that it is in Lessing that the phrase “fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle” occurs. This phrase, moreover, pertained to Tony, and his moral and intellectual scruples relating to the whole affair of Moses and his destiny with the courts and the looming death sentence (Lessing, 1950, p. 22). On the other hand, the arrangements that led to the murder seemed one where Moses could have had all the motivation and the opportunity to commit a premeditated murder, seeing that Moses had to endure the humiliations and the maltreatment for an extended period of time, and had the access to Mary and his physical body to the degree that, acting out of spite and a premeditated way, he could have murdered the woman. There is a case to be made, in other words, in the buildup of the tension from the maltreatment and the many years of abuse, for Moses to have planned for revenge and the murder in a calculating way. Yet the circumstances too in the novel point to the murder not being planned, but something that was the result of Moses losing his mind for a moment in the heat of passion and in a blind rage so to speak. It is true, after all, that for a long time he was cooperative in the main, and attended to Mary, even though Mary treated him badly. Tony was even witness to this closeness and easy access of Moses to his master in an intimate scene (Lessing, 1950, p. 187): Moses was buttoning up the dress; she was looking in the mirror. The attitude of the native was of an indulgent luxuriousness. When he had finished the buttoning, he stood back, and watched the ,woman brushing her hair. 'Thank you, Moses,' she said in a high commanding voice. Then she turned, and said intimately: 'You had better go now. It is time for the boss to come.' (Lessing, 1950, p. 187) It is difficult therefore to reconcile this image of Moses and Mary together in some kind of peace or at least a kind of truce on the one hand, and the contrary image of a plotting Moses killing his master not out of some premeditated way but in a sudden rush of temporary madness. The killing at the end of the novel, as it is described on the other hand, had the hallmarks of Moses seeming to have done the killing in a way that was planned and carefully plotted. Yet another way of looking at it, too, is that it is plausible for a man to act in a cool and detached passion in spite of the experiences of pain, humiliation, and the deliberate maltreatment heaped on him by his master, all the while also waiting for the right moment to spring the trap and exact his measure of revenge. This is what the final part of the novel seemed to imply. The premeditation can also explain why Moses could have so calmly surrendered himself to the pursuers. Having committed the crime in full possession of his thoughts and faculties, he could surrender too in the same vein and the same spirit of calculating calmness and resignation. A man who killed out of passion would have been less calm afterwards, not having thought of the consequences (Lessing, 1950, p. 208): And this was his final moment of triumph, a moment so perfect and complete that it took the urgency from thoughts of escape, leaving him indifferent. When the dark returned he took his hand from the wall, and walked slowly off through the rain towards the bush. Though what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of his completed revenge, it is impossible to say (Lessing, 1950, p. 208). Having said that and weighing the matter over, there is merit too in finally seeing that Moses did what he did not out of any real long term premeditation, because that seemed to have no basis in the text, but rather that the reason for his wanting to kill Mary was tied to the immediate set of events, even if the hatred that built up was the result of a long period of maltreatment and abuse (Lessing, 1950; Corbett, 2013; Grogan, 2011). On the other hand, it can be implied too, from the very same passage where the phrase “driven to kill in a moment of mad passion”, that there is an argument to be made for Mustafa Sa’eed killing the lover out of a sense of “fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle”, and that is, that the man Sa’eed was embroiled in the raw passions and emotions of his relationship with the killed woman but he was also intellectually aware of the underlying historical and social forces that drove the women to act in the way that they did, almost suicidal, with Sa’eed merely a player or an actor in a larger drama where he has little control. That drama is orchestrated by forces whose seeds, as the professor points out, were planted more than a thousand years ago before Sa’eed and the killing of the woman. It is in this sense that the murder committed by Sa’eed, a product of the intellectual education of the west and deeply immersed and sensitive to its various nuances, is elevated from merely an act of passion, into a more subtle and more nuanced act aware of larger social and cultural forces at work. This, even as Sa’eed himself tries to disprove that he had committed the murder out of a noble and lofty impulse. He viewed himself as someone who had killed out of a mad passion to be sure, not a cultured and noble Othello but an ordinary man subject to the same impulses as everyone else. Yet the professor paints a contrary picture that lends credence to the argument presented in this paper of a man who killed fighting for a principle (Salih, 1969; Lessing, 1950): He told them that Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood were girls who were seeking death by every means and that they would have committed suicide whether they had met Mustafa Sa’eed or not. “Mustafa Sa’eed, gentlemen of the jury; is a noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago” (Salih, 1969). Another way to pursue this line of argument with regard to the motivation for the murder on the part of Sa’eed is through contextualizing the murder within the overall arch of the book itself and the unfolding of the novel. It is clear for one that the narrator tried to depict the character of Sa’eed as complex, intelligent and sophisticated, and this is in part arguably a reflection of what the narrator saw in himself as a man and as a cultured individual returning to his home country armed with the best education from the west. He was able to project, or to see in Sa’eed’s intellectual life, something that is noble and principled in himself. The narrator, after all, was a man of culture too, and viewed the world and his motivations, his value, and his place in his society as something that pivots and starts from the vantage point of his education and his sensibilities. The life to be sure led to the destruction of the lives of others, the women that he seduced and then later left behind, and the English wife that he murdered. On the other hand, having done this, one gets the sense from examining the overall arch of the life of Sa’eed that he was being ruled by a set of loftier principles, at least as he saw and though them, and in this sense one can say that the murder that he committed was done not out of the murderous impulse of an ordinary man, but that of a man of principle operating from a more elevated and nuanced moral and intellectual sphere (Krishnan, 1996; Lingan, 2008; Salih, 1969). References Amazon.com (2013). Editorial and Customer Reviews: The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. Amazon.com, Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452254825 Corbett, B. (2013). The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, Comments. Webster University. Retrieved from http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/lessing-singing.html Goodreads (2013). The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. Goodreads.com. Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/130115.The_Grass_is_Singing Graham, L. (2003). Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (2). Retrieved from http://mfs.uchicago.edu/public/institutes/2012/Disgrace/prereadings/Reading_the_Unspeakable.pdf Grogan, B. (2011). Impurity, Danger and the Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. English Studies in Africa 54 (2).. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/1346324/_Im_Purity_Danger_and_the_Body_in_Doris_Lessings_The_Grass_is_Singing Krishnan, RS (1996). Reinscribing Conrad: Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. The International Fiction Review 23. Retrieved from http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/download/14324/15401 Lessing, D. (1950). The Grass is Singing. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Lingan, J. (2008). Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih: Review. The Quarterly Conversation. Retrieved from http://quarterlyconversation.com/season-of-migration-to-the-north-by-tayeb-salih-review Moody, E. (2012). Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two. Retrieved from http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/doris-lessings-the-grass-is-singing/ Salih, T. (1969). Season of Migration to the North. Johannesburg, South Africa: Heinemann Educational Publishers. Read More