Roots and Fruits

“I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down into the ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose.”

The unnamed narrator of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, upon his return home from Europe, surveys the land of his childhood and feels one with the land, which he likens to the rootedness of the palm tree. For the narrator everything has remained unchanged in the years he has been away, and he marvels at that during the opening of the novel. What the narrator fails to do is to try and integrate his experience in the West with his prior knowledge of the homeland due to his inability to understand how contact with both cultures has changed him.

“Some of the branches of this tree produce lemons, others oranges.”

For while he, in his fog-like state, upon returning home is content with the thought of re-assimilating with the land of his roots he forgets that he is now a hybrid of sorts, much like the tree Mustafa Sa’eed shows him, which is unable to produce fruit of one kind. This “hybridity” is important for it is a mutation or disease caused by contact with colonial powers, but the diseased does not understand it and is left floundering without cure or knowledge, a fragmented being, much like the tree.