Mustafa Saeed; The enigmatic 'black Englishman'

The author’s mention of his varying visas become symbolic of not only his exposure to divergent religions and cultures, but also highlight his desire to find strong roots lie the narrator, to become a ‘palm tree, a being with a background, with roots and a purpose’ rather than the ‘storm-swept feather’ his life has made him. He calls himself ‘something rounded, made of rubber; you throw it in the water and it doesn’t get wet, you throw it on the grass and it bounces back’. Having remained essentially displaced himself, he expresses the wish for his children to “grow up imbued with the air of this village, its smells and colors and history, the faces of its inhabitants and the memory of its floods and harvestings and sowings’; only then would his life have acquired its ‘true perspective’. Despite being fluent in English and possessing a taste for poetry, he resorts to the local customs and language, his lifestyle at death standing in stark contrast to the life he previously led. His comment towards the narrator regarding Anglicism hint at a slight discontent towards the British; his sexual escapades with his ‘easy prey’ become almost symbolic of a desire to conquer colonizing Europe in a form of twisted vengeance (and indeed the suicides and murder of his partners becomes significant in this light). His sexual encounters become ritualistic and mechanistic, devoid of emotion, either he feels as if he is a harem, or it becomes the cold calculated work of a surgeon within a theatre. His regret is evident when he wishes the protection of his children from the ‘pangs of wanderlust’.

His journey becomes symbolic of his displacement; he moves from a disordered world with no authority to the ‘ordered’ world of London ‘the first Sudanese to marry an Englishwoman’, where eventually he feels he does not belong, incurring his return to his area. Indeed, it is his stay in the north that ‘infects him’ and causes all his academic ability to go to waste with the murder of the girl he fails to possess with his southern discourse. Yet, interestingly, he does not return to Khartoum.  It is also interesting, that given his adoption of various identities and lies regarding his childhood during his sexual escapades, he mentions the Nile, a part of his childhood that has clearly remained significant and resonant. Although named the ‘black Englishman’, this tile reflected how despite being accepted in the European community, he could never truly become a part of it. He is also distant from all the villagers, a mysterious man limited to his own life 'the spoilt child of the English', kind yet not as welcoming as the narrator finds the other inhabitants of a land he knows well, become essentially a figure of exile. His marriage is hardly mentioned, nor his family life, and seems to have been one of convenience, or perhaps an attempt to place himself in a land and community he had once willfully walked away from.