Gender Roles in Season of Migration and Beer in the Snooker Club - Essay Example

How critique gender roles in their novels “Season of Migration” and “Beer in the Snooker Club.” Two novels set in North Africa during the 1950s and 1960s have broadly similar themes. Both books talk about the experiences of young men who leave their homeland to go to London just after World War 2 and then return to North Africa. It is a period of great change in the region, when individual countries achieve independence from their former colonial masters in a series of more or less violent struggles. “Season of Migration” was written by Tayib Salih in 1967 and translated into English two years later, while “Beer in the Snooker Club” was written by Waguih Ghali in English in 1964. Salih writes about characters from poorer parts of northern Sudan while Ghali writes about city people in Egypt. The main characters in both of these books are male. The men in the books also meet a number of women and from time to time there is discussion of gender relations in British society and in their homeland also. Contact with Western society, and with London in particular, makes the authors think about potential changes to local family and social relationships, and especially to gender roles. In the first novel it is quite difficult to work out what the author’s views on the topic of gender are, because the male narrator has quite a different perspective from the other main character, Mustafa Sa’eed. The village in which they meet is rather traditional which means that life runs on the basis of Islamic law. The narrator describes his family, with emphasis on his grandfather who is a good male role model for him. There are also a number of elderly males who make a lot of sexist jokes about women. One of these characters, Wad Rayyes, seems to represent the dominant view : ‘He had been much married and much divorced, taking no heed of anything in a woman except that she was a woman, taking them as they came, and if asked about it replying “A stallion isn’t finicky”.’ (Salih: 66) The narrator observes this behaviour and repeats the animal comparison when he says (Salih: 81) “Wad Rayyes, who charged women as he charged donkeys”. This kind of womanizing behavior is also displayed by Mustafa Sa’eed who goes after several different British women when he is in London. He actually marries Jean Morris and she compares him to “a savage bull that does not weary of the chase” (Salih: 33). The fact that Sa’eed kills Jean Morris and drives several of his lovers to suicide underlines the aggression that this character feels in his romantic relationships. At one point Sa’eed describes his bedroom in London which had a lot of mirrors and colors and says “When I slept with a woman it was as if I slept with a whole harem simultaneously” (Salih: 31). The notion of a “harem” or group of women who have been collected together for the benefit of a shared male partner is an example of an Arab view of gender relations. There is almost no mention of happily married women in the village, but one elderly female character called Bint Majzoub is shown talking with the men in a public place, drinking, smoking, and generally behaving in an un-Islamic way for a woman. Despite these freedoms, she is still very much a product of Islamic society, as for example when she says “We were afraid… you’d bring back with you an uncircumcised infidel for a wife”. Female circumcision was very much a normal practice in the Sudan in the 1950s and 1960s, and Salih is not afraid to show in his book how women, as well as men, promote and sustain this tradition. Bint Mazjoub is a positive character, despite her resistance to wifely stereotyping, because she has a sense of humor. The author does not make any obvious statement of his view of gender roles, but instead he allows his different characters, both European and North African, to play different roles, revealing contradictions in both traditional and Western positions. The only constant in the book is that most of the women die young and at the hands of violent men and this reflects, perhaps the theme of the former colonies who suffered in power struggles with their oppressors. The setting of Ghali’s novel is Cairo and the main characters are all Egyptians, although some have a Coptic background, which is Christian, and some are Jewish. The conservative characters are wealthy natives of Cairo and the main character, Ram, is financially supported by his mother and his wealthy aunt. On the surface, Ram appears to behave much like Salih’s womanizer Mustafa Sa’eed, because he and his friend Font go looking for prostitutes, drinking, and generally behaving in a male chauvinist way towards women. In this book, however, the most powerful figures are wealthy widows. This changes the gender roles significantly and Ram finds that his playboy lifestyle may be sustainable in London, but it becomes boring and ultimately pointless when he finally returns to the rich society of Cairo and has to beg for money from his female relatives. The young women in Egypt are not such easy prey : “I had met too many Egyptian girls at the university who were vehement politicians and who considered a man’s physical approach with contempt so loving Edna silently, I was afraid that she too would find it contemptible if I tried to make love to her. I started to pour some of my passion into politics”. (Ghali: 53) Ram seems to have an idea of romantic love that allows for a fairly equal role for male and female partners, as his declaration to Edna during an intimate moment when he binds her hair makes clear: “… 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.” (Ghali: 183) At that point Edna cuts off her hair, as if to symbolise the impossibility of this romantic ideal, and explains that she cannot marry him because she has already married someone else. It seems that marriage, in Ram’s society, is rarely happy and in most cases it seems to be the women who hold the decision making role. After all, Ram’s mother did not love her husband, and says she married in order to give Ram a respectable father, even though he was born two years after the wedding (Ghali: 126). In the end Ram proposes to the wealthy Didi, and is entirely honest about the fact that her money is the main factor in his wish to marry her. Of the two novelists, Ghali has the more progressive view of gender roles, in theory at least, but his characters talk and talk in the safe confines of the snooker room without being able to live out their ideals in the real world. Salih is the more traditional writer, both in the Arabic structure and language of his work, and in his greater adherence to local cultural norms and gender roles. Above all in the women characters, such as Edna in Ghali’s work, and Hosna, Jean, Isabella and all the others in Salih’s work, the prevailing gender norms are visible, and the one ambivalent but interesting exception is Salih’s loudmouthed character Bint Majzoub who shows an alternative to the norm, but hardly an ideal to be followed. Works Cited Salih, T. (2009) Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. New York: NYRB. Ghali, W. (1964) reprinted 1987. Beer in the Snooker Club. London: Andre Deutsch. Read More