No tent pegs

Despite seven years abroad, the homecoming that Salih stages for his narrator depicts no love lost. This return is accentuated by powerful metaphorical references drawn from nature itself to emblematize stability that homeland brings; ‘a palm tree’, ‘with roots’, ‘I am continuous…not a stone thrown in water but a seed sown’.

The opening sequence devotes significant attention to details stressing the narrator’s familial and social ties. In a marked contrast, Salih extracts from vestiges of memory the image of a fatherless child mature beyond his years who recalls his relationship with his mother to be that of ‘two human beings who had walked along the same street and then each had gone his way’. This absence of ‘tent pegs’ or ‘a particular domain’ which Mustafa held analogous to 'freedom' stresses the exilic stirrings of 'wanderlust' which later lay claim to his life.

Salih paints the unnamed narrator as a perfect foil to Mustafa: while the former journeys South to home, the latter stripped of societal ties journeys North to whet his intellect after being told that ‘this country hasn’t got the scope for that brain of yours’. The notion of individual freedom though present is defined as per the colonial context. Read even as a national allegory with post-colonial Sudan’s struggle with identity, characters’ pursuits are differentially marked per context: narrator representing the emerging national elite while Mustafa, ‘the Black Englishman’ represents post-colonial battle for agency; slave to ‘wanderlust’ while exacting revenge on European women, analogous to cities, hence exploited.  

The most interesting interchange between characters occurs went the Mustafa’s locked room is opened. The two are literally presented as mirror images in the haunting setting while the narrator borders on the edge of dilemma. Also, the ending sequence drags the narrator out to river reincarnating the setting of Mustafa’s death. However, in a moment almost cathartic, the narrator emerges as a perfect foil and chooses not to end up like Mustafa and at the brink of life and death chooses life as opposed to the frenzied pursuit of post-colonial revenge which claimed Mustafa.