“Imagine:
the height of summer in the month of fateful July; the indifferent river has flooded as never before in thirty years; the
darkness has fused all the elements of nature into one single neutral one,
older than the river itself and more indifferent. In such manner the end of
this hero had to be” (54)
In
class, we played with a lot of theoretical explanations behind the happenings
of Mustafa Saeed’s aberrant life- possibly a post-colonial revenge, a merciless
hunter driven by the taste of flesh, or perhaps an oedipal discharge in the
context of an absent father and an unfeeling mother. However, the alternate
explanation behind the novel’s progression would require us to relinquish an
individuated view of Saeed’s agency playing out in the world. Rather, the idea
of nature (the universe, even culture) as an indifferent phenomenon, one that
dictates human action is pervasive throughout the text and holds much
explanatory power.
For
Saeed himself, his story progresses from one chance encounter to the next, as
he makes his way up the ranks to become the ‘first Sudanese to get an Oxford
education … and marry an Englishwoman’. He expresses this idea himself to the
unnamed narrator:
“This is a
fact in my life: the way chance has
placed in my path people who gave me a helping hand at every stage, people for
whom I had no feelings of gratitude” (19)
In
this way, the narrator unfolds for us the idea that we are all at the mercy of
nature. Saeed, himself, seems to meander into excess by his very nature. He
ascribes qualities of hardness and sharpness (regularly comparing himself to a
knife) as particularly self-evident, emerging not out of a self-conscious
agency that perpetuates it but as a result of a long, impersonal process which
has dictated him to be as such. Mustafa is ultimately unable to live out a
happy, simple life in the village and the narrator himself is unable to burn
down the private room, or commit suicide for that matter, as violence and hatred
run precisely contrary to his nature.
The
counter-argument posed here would reference the ‘free will’ discourse at the
beginning of Saeed’s story- as he voluntarily elects to travel to Cairo for
studies at the mere age of 12. Salih’s fondness for employing the literary technique
of the double partially explains these half-commitments to free will on the one
hand and determinism on the other. However, the end of the work provides a sort
of explanation of Salih’s stance as the narrator fights the river’s force:
“I thought
that if I died at that moment, I would have died as I was born – without any
volition of mine. All my life I had not chosen, had not decided. Now I am
making a decision. I choose life” (133)
Just
as he finds himself submitting to the ‘forces of the river’, a very free desire
(thirst) for a cigarette brings him back. And there’s your resolution!
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