Death during Exile

“A man without a homeland will have no grave in the earth”

These famous lines have been taken from Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. It resonates a recurrent theme in such types of exilic novels that one might read. In Men in the Sun, the characters in the story were migrating to Kuwait for a better life and as a result had given up belonging to a land. The place that they might call home was hundreds of miles of desert land away. As a result, they had no place of belonging at the time of their unfortunate death and hence no grave.

Similarly in the novel, season of migration to the north by Tayeb Saleh, the character Mustafa Saeed is a migrant in the village in Sudan. He starts his travels from a very young age, finding himself emotionally displaced during his stay in England. Later on, during his five year stay in the Sudanese village, he manages to integrate himself into society to only a limited extent. He lives a simple way of life, burying his past in the eyes of the villagers. His untimely death is due to drowning. No corpse is ever found. Mustafa Saeed was as well a Man without a homeland and finds no grave in the earth.