by: Willy Wibamanto
cover image: Rachel Juay
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North centers on Mustafa Sa’eed, a brilliant Sudanese student turned economist living in England. Despite a natural intellect that brought him academic and professional successes, Mustafa remained an outsider in England due to his Sudanese origin. In the novel, Mustafa compensates his frustration of not fitting into the predominantly white society by pursuing relationships with Englishwomen as a form of revenge. This idea of a colonised man’s vengeful pursuit of white women was pioneered by Frantz Fanon, a point Salih openly acknowledges. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon retells René Maran’s story of Jean Veneuse, a French Antillean intellectual who took revenge on Frenchwomen for the degrading ostracism he endured in France. Fanon theorizes that the vengeful behavior of Veneuse is an effect of the emasculation he suffered as a colonized man. Fanon’s theory gave meaningful perspective on the psychological impact of colonization on its subjects, which was a motif of great relevance in Salih's text. Hence, in this blogpost, I will show how Fanon’s theory on the emasculation of colonized men first elucidated in Jean Veneuse is then portrayed in Salih’s text through the character Mustafa.
The parallel between Veneuse and Mustafa is most obvious in their vengeful pursuit of relationships with white women. Veneuse describes his desire to marry a white woman as “not so much out of love as for the satisfaction of being the master of a European woman” (Fanon 1952, 50). This signifies that first, Veneuse's actions are driven by his hunger for power; second, it is likely that Veneuse is compensating for the feelings of inferiority that the colonizers have instilled on him. Similarly, Mustafa deliberately overplays his African exoticism to attract Englishwomen into him. This is evident in the meticulous burning of incense and sandalwood in his bedroom (Salih 1966, 28) and the fabricated stories of growing up close to the Nile (Salih 1965, 32). Mustafa purposefully crafted his actions to satisfy white women who yearn for the tropics. As a result, Mustafa gains a feeling of superiority over white women who worship him like a foreign idol. Hence, both Mustafa and Veneuse are examples of colonized men who have escaped the territories of their colonized land yet are still trapped under an inescapable clout of inferiority.
Moreover, it is worth questioning what the sources behind these feelings of inferiority are. Venuese describes the motivation of his pursuit as “attempting to revenge myself on a European woman for everything that her ancestors have inflicted on mine throughout the centuries” (Fanon 1952, 50). This shows that the feelings of vengeance are manifestations of the psychological impacts of colonization on its subjects. Fanon furthers this claim by asserting against Mannoni that inferiority is not an anticipation of colonialism (Fanon 1952, 62) which suggests that the feelings of inferiority were not inherent within the colonized until the colonizers made them apparent through their ideology. Salih channeled this idea through the claim, “How ironic! Just because a man has created on the Equator some mad man regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle way?” (Salih 1965, 70) In his claim, the narrator suggests that the discrepancies made by the colonizers are arbitrary since they contradict one another. An example is the way Isabella Seymour treats Mustafa like a foreign god while Jean Morris scorns him. Thus, the arbitrary and inherent nature of their inferiority make it likely that these feelings are embedded from the North to the South during colonization. As such, both Fanon and Salih confirm that colonialism is the cause of the feelings of inferiority among colonized subjects.
Nonetheless, the reason why engaging in relationships with a white woman is the best way to resolve a colonised man's feelings of inferiority suggests that the inferiority is predominantly a form of emasculation. In describing Veneuse’s way of thinking, Fanon claims, “Above all, he wants to prove to others that he is a man, their equal” (Fanon 1952, 47). This claim suggests that the inferiority of colonised men is most apparent when they are pitted against their white colonisers. Since white men lie atop the sexual hierarchy because they are able to attain a woman of any race, colonised men interpret entering into relationships with white women as a ladder up the sexual hierarchy that initiates them into authentic manhood. This is echoed by Salih in Mustafa’s relationship with Jean Morris. Their tumultuous marriage, which was marked by the constant desire to subdue one another, ended when Mustafa killed Jean Morris under her consent (Salih 1954, 100). The immense shame and guilt that Mustafa felt after killing her can be partially attributed to the fact that he had dedicated his life on mimicking the North and yet he was unable to master his English wife unless she commands him to do so. Here, Salih paints the reality that colonization has inevitable implications on the sexual hierarchy. This justifies that at the very least, a colonised man’s feelings of inferiority can be attributed to a form of emasculation. As such, the reason why Veneuse and Mustafa resolve their feelings of inferiority by pursuing relationships with white women is that they are suffering from the emasculation of colonization.
Hence, Fanon’s theory on the emasculation of the colonized men, which he first explained through the character of Jean Veneuse in Black Skin, White Masks is artfully elucidated by Tayeb Salih through the character of Mustafa Sa’eed in Season of Migration to the North.
References:
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952.
Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. 1966.
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