The Disintegration of Othello- A Larger Colonial Narrative?

After carefully reflecting on Tayeb Salih’s ‘Season of Migration to the North’ one gets a sense of the Moorish cultural and political disintegration in the post-eighteenth century and what it means for our subsequent contextualization of Mustafa Sa’eed’s character. This political metamorphosis from Moorish glory days to cultural deterioration is first portrayed in the scene where there is a transformation of a ‘turban’ into a ‘hat’. In the novel, the British colonizer mocks Sa’eed and says that ‘you’ll wear a hat like this’. In this respect, Othello becomes a representation of a larger Moorish culture that once was and is essentially reinforced by the displacement of the Islamic ‘turban’ with the colonizer’s hat.

Sa’eed not only tries to represent the Shakespearean Othello but seemingly the Muslim Moorish leader who led the Islamic conquest of Hispania in 711. This is highlighted when Sa’eed says that ‘For a moment I imagined to myself the Arab soldiers first meeting with Spain’ and this serves a larger purpose for showing how Sa’eed will conquer Isabella Seymour, a human manifestation of Andalusia. The transfiguration of the feminine body of Seymour to a land previously conquered by Muslims is a means to highlight Sa’eed’s fascination to inject the glory of the Islamic civilization into Europe (particularly London). However, the reader realizes that Sa’eed is neither Othello nor a Moor-warrior but simply a colonized other, who resists the British colonial regime by reliving the glorious Islamic past.

Similarly, the love between Isabella Seymour and Mustafa Sa’eed was not likened to that portrayed in Shakespeare’s Othello between Othello and Desdemona. Isabella Seymour is not interested in the personal side of Sa’eed but is more enticed by his cultural, oriental and exotic background: ‘There came a moment when I felt I had been transformed in her eyes into a naked, primitive, creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other’. Thus, in our understanding of what it means to be Salih’s created Othello, Sa’eed becomes an orient who needs to utilize this western knowledge to serve oriental communities and that his love is more a result of the oriental mysteries than ‘real love’.  Unlike the Shakespearean Othelo, Sa’eed is unable to change or morph the West in ways that he wanted to.

The Othello created by Salih becomes a symbol for a greater narrative- that unlike the Renaissance Shakespearean Othello, Sa’eed is unable to lead or change the West and Sa’eed expresses his deficiency to carve the path to prominent change: ‘I seek not glory, for the likes of me do not seek glory’. 

The Arab Othello has no Desdemona and has the intellectual arsenal yet feels thwarted in his ability to Islamize the West. Ultimately, he falls prey to an ‘under siege’ mentality, one that manifests in his memories and motives throughout the course of the story.