Sunday, 2 March 2014

Hashim Kaleem: Free will

The narrator in the book Seasons of Migration to the North, shows a unique strength of character we might take for granted, the capacity of free will. He decides to go to school at a young age, and even near the end he overcomes his physical exhaustion and decides to live. Colonies are deprived of this most fundamental of human capacities, and when a person is willing to deny the enforcement of thought and rebel against it, then in the case of the narrator, it is almost like a ray of light for the colony; that there does exist an inner force that will disregard the external stimuli that can exhaust you, either physically or mentally. It shows an eventual downfall of the Imperium. The narrator has gone abroad, lived in England, studied their literature, yet there is a certain part of his identity that is ESSENTIALLY limited to his village, his land, his people. He yearns for the life he left behind, and considering that near the end of the book he decides to live, through cunning if need be, seemed to me to be the birthing of a new person, a person who will live as he sees fit. And that is the ultimate threat to any colonizer.

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