Continuity - Season of Migration (Late blog)

In Season of Migration the idea of 'home' appears to be grounded in the notion of continuity. Returning to the sounds, scents and images of his village, endows the narrator with "a sense of stability" and makes him feel "continuous and integral." He describes his perception of his grandfather as “something immutable in a dynamic world” and hearing the voice of his grandfather praying before falling asleep and as soon as he wakes up works to strengthen his feelings of security when residing in the village. In essence, he views his village as a place where “the world was as unchanged as ever” and the familiarity of its faces and places provide the basis for his sense of belonging.

Thus, the visions and aromas that the narrator perceives as having remained steadfast since his childhood and that consequently make him feel "not like a stone thrown into the water but seed sown in a field" reveal that his ideas of identity and feelings of belonging are inextricably tied into this idea of constancy. 

I feel like it is this very link that has a major role to play in the exilic and conflicted condition of the narrator as well as his double, Mustafa Saeed. This is because the notion of constancy is idyllic and the novel works to establish the inevitability of change. The landscape itself, which is deemed to be the basis of this idea of continuity that the narrator cherishes, is susceptible to the effect of time and though the nile manages to remain its defining feature, the bank was “contracting at one place and expanding at another.” Even the waterwheels had “disappeared to be replaced on the bank of the nile by pumps.”

The village, outside the mind of the narrator, can thus be seen to be exposed to the ‘disease’ of western influence or modernity and the change that comes with it. The new face of Mustafa Saeed amidst the crowd of familiar faces, the altered state of his own idenitity and consciousness due to western exposure and the other changes the village has seen thus serve to dismantle the narrators “feeling of assurance” at the beginging of the novel and leave him in the end as a conflicted figure stripped of his sense of being “like a storm-swept feather" rather than "that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose.”