North and South, Light and Dark

For me, if seen through a certain perspective, ‘Season of Migration to the North’ seems like a deep exploration of the relationship between the North and the South, and thus a look into how the Self or the Own relates to the Other, whether or not it is formed by the Other. Mustafa Saeed then is the enigma, the relationship of the South with the North, which is mysterious, unknown in full by both sides, simultaneously dangerous and useful, truth and lie.

The Earth is divided into two parts, by the Equator, which is as imaginary as it is real, for it is a real divide that exists within this narrative between the Self and the Other. The Equator is also the threshold, once you cross it, you lose some of the Self, but what is it that you become then? The Other remains so, but you become the Other in the North, the Orient, the exotic, the dangerous, and any contact or any attempt to fully know this mysterious Other by the West, shall be the ‘death of them’ quite literally. At the same time the North is quite in the same way, the exotic place, where morality and sexuality is free:

They say that the women are unveiled and dance openly with men. ‘Is it true,’ Wad Rayyes asked me, ‘that they don’t marry but that a man lives with a woman in sin?’

… They were surprised when I told them that Europeans were, with minor differences, exactly like them…

The question is, are they really exactly like each other? Maybe so. But the fact of the matter remains that once you cross the threshold, you are neither here nor there, you become either a slave or a god to the other, but when and if you return, you are neither a God nor are you a man amongst men, what then, is worse than this form of exile? And what of those who think that the North and South may at the least exist, in themselves and not in opposition to each other? That fundamentally “The Source is the Same”. Yet such a fleeting moment can only occur when “This is the land of poetry and the possible…” In reality, the dark and the light will always be in opposition to each other, for one occurs in the absence of the Other, or one if defined by the Other. Thus light and dark cannot co-exist, which is why Mustafa Saeed may not have existed and could have been a lie:

‘I am no Othello. Othello was a lie.’