eJournals REAL 33/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
2017
331

The North and the Desert: Tayeb Salih’s Poetics of the Anthropocene

2017
Sarah Fekadu
S ARAH F EKADU The North and the Desert: Tayeb Salih’s Poetics of the Anthropocene Postcolonial, Posthuman: Historical Thinking in the Anthropocene With the planetary crisis of climate change now being a matter of wide recognition and concern, human life is not what it used to be. As the term ‘Anthropocene’ implies, the earth has entered a geological period in which humans, at the latest from the age of the Industrial Revolution onwards, have become a force able to change the climatological and chemical makeup of the planet. This fact profoundly challenges our received understanding of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the cultural, and the historical and the non-historical. 1 Various scholars in the humanities, especially in the historical fields such as postcolonial studies, have expressed in very personal terms how the Anthropocene challenges the way they were trained to think. Dipesh Chakrabarty frankly admits that “all my readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, […] had really not prepared me for making sense of this planetary juncture within which humanity finds itself today” (Chakrabarty, “Climate” 199). Ian Baucom writes that “until very recently it would not have occurred to me that postcolonial study, critical theory, or the humanities disciplines in general needed to periodize in relation not only to capital but to carbon, not only in modernities and postmodernities but in parts-per-million, not only in dates but in degrees Celsius” (Baucom, “History 4°” 125). As this quotation illustrates, the Anthropocene requires the humanities to take into account historical and geological scales that at once include but also surpass the human by far. The challenge for the humanities, especially the more historically oriented ones, is to think of the human as “belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 14). This also includes a rethinking of the relationship between human and nonhuman life: extending human agen- 1 The neologism ‘Anthropocene’ was coined by chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer in the Global Change Newsletter in 2000, but has only recently gained wide attention across the disciplines, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” being the watershed text for a consideration of the Anthropocene in the humanities. S ARAH F EKADU 256 cy beyond a realm that can be apprehended, represented or controlled. The Anthropocene also asks us to take into account the agency of the nonhuman in order to position humanity in a multidimensional planetarity. 2 In other words, the postcolonial interest in tracing how modernity is shaped by the movements of humans, in processes of diaspora and hybridization, has to be put in conversation with phenomena that cannot be reduced to human scales. Mark McGurl illustrates the paradigm change in the reflection of the human by juxtaposing the image of the ‘tree’ and the ‘rock’: In its long-limbed, humanoid verticality, the tree has made a perfect poster child for ‘nature’ in the discourse of liberal environmentalism. Here one instead finds the obdurate rock, the dead-cold stone taking center stage as an image of the nonhuman thing, the thing that simply does not care, and has been not-caring for longer than anyone can remember - in fact, longer than there has been such a thing as memory. (384) More than ever before, the new geological epoch demands that the human be thought of alongside scales to which humans are incidental but that yet engulf and affect human life. It prompts us to take into account, according to McGurl, “the bizarrely humiliating length of geologic time, the staggering vastness and complexity of the known universe, the relative puniness in the play of fundamental and evolutionary forces” (380-381). Or as Heather Houser puts it: “[…] the range of time concepts keyed to human phenomenological experience will not suffice for apprehending environmental crises” (145). This, of course, poses serious methodological challenges to a body of critical thinking that, as Baucom has pointed out, has long understood its vocation as both “descriptive” and “transformative” (125). This essay is concerned with modes and possibilities of representing the Anthropocene in a literary genre that has also been defined as potentially descriptive and transformative, committed not only to analyzing histories and discourses but also to changing them: the postcolonial novel. Postcolonial literature and the concomitant studies have habitually been associated with uncovering the workings of history and time rather than with the pursuit of the timeless, with a focus on migration and displacement rather than on place, with the foregrounding of processes of cross-fertilization and hybridization rather than of preservation, and with an interest in political rather than in meteorological climates. 3 The essay takes as its focus Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) in order to show that even a novel from the early days of colonial independence is not only concerned with ‘writing back’ to imperialist discourse but also attempts to articulate a more capacious understanding of the relationship between history and a nonhuman realm whose temporality is withdrawn from human control, thus offer- 2 See also McGurl 384 and Houser 150. 3 See also Nixon 235. The North and the Desert 257 ing an occasion for experiencing the disjunctions that mark the present age in an aesthetic mode. By foregrounding the ways in which the Sudanese people engage with their environment - most prominently, the desert - the novel stages a sustained confrontation between human and nonhuman forms of life. I argue that this confrontation, which has been little regarded up to now, presents a challenge to the dominant theme of intercultural encounters in the novel. The colonial spatial conflicts between East and West and North and South, around which the narrative is structured are gradually superseded by the radically different temporality of the desert, thus pointing the reader to the necessity of imagining what Marc McGurl has called “a new cultural geology”: “[…] a range of theoretical and other initiatives that position culture in a time-frame large enough to crack open the carapace of human selfconcern, exposing it to the idea, and maybe even the fact, of its external ontological preconditions, its ground” (McGurl 380). My analysis will proceed in two steps: The first part of this essay will explore how the novel orchestrates an environmental consciousness that brings into view the particular ecological situation of post-independence Sudan. The second part will focus on how the novel also leaves this particular historical background behind and works towards an entirely different frame of temporal reference. Toward a Sudanese Village Ecology Published in 1966 in Arabic as a serial in the Lebanese magazine Hiwar and, three years later, in the Heinemann African writer series in an English translation by Denys Johnson-Denies done in close collaboration with Salih, Season of Migration to the North is one of the rare examples of a literary work that has received wide critical acclaim in both the fields of Arab and of English literature. While scholars of English literature have read the novel in the context of postcolonial rewritings of colonial fiction, scholars of Arab and/ or Comparative Literature have pointed to the context of the Nahda - the late-nineteenthcentury Arabic literary renaissance (Makdisi 805). I would argue that by staging an intercultural encounter between the West and the East from a retrospective point of view, the novel is indeed both: a rewriting of dominant colonial narratives about the ‘East’ and a modern Arab-African story dealing with the transition of a country into colonial and postcolonial modernity. The intercultural encounter is staged through the trips to England that the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed (both native Sudanese) undertake in order to pursue their studies. In a reversal of the classic ‘quest into the unknown’-motif that characterizes many Africanist tales from the colonial era - most famously Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) - Salih has his two S ARAH F EKADU 258 protagonists travel into the heart of the British Empire, London. Yet, the two have very different ends: While the narrator spends his time “delving into the life of an obscure English poet” (Salih 9), thereby adopting the culture and education of his colonizers rather uncritically, Sa’eed, whom the narrator only meets when returning to the Sudan, embarks on a bizarre enterprise of counter-colonialism: Claiming to “liberate Africa with my penis”(100), he seduces English women by taking on the identity of an exotic Othello, catering to their projections and fantasies of the Oriental man, until he is sentenced for having killed one of these women. At the point the narration sets in, however, these events have already happened. The story begins with the narrator’s return to the Sudanese village he was born in and is heavily concerned with his process of reintegration into a society that has changed during his absence almost as much as he has. Another strand of the narrative, told in flashbacks, tells Sa’eed’s story of departure from the Sudan in the 1910s and his return - until the moment when the narrator finds Sa’eed’s farewell note and realizes that he has drowned himself in the Nile. Consequently, large parts of the novel are concerned with the colonial encounter between Britain and the Sudan and its consequences. 4 In terms of imagery, this is largely transmitted through an extensive evocation of spatial and climate tropes. Just as birds are drawn into certain directions during their migration periods, the protagonists, so the novel suggests, are irresistibly drawn to the North in the late days of colonialism (Sa’eed) and the early days of independence (the narrator). On their journeys the two Northeastern African metropolises Khartoum and Cairo figure as intermediate stations that lure them deeper and deeper into the colonial metropolitan center of London. The relationship between the Sudan and Europe carries deeply erotic connotations, only that - in a reversal of traditional Orientalist accounts - it is mostly the North that is cast in the role of the seducer, with Cairo, where Sa’eed attends secondary school and takes the Englishwoman Mrs. Robinson as his foster mother, figuring as “a European woman just like Mrs Robinson, its arms embracing me, its perfume and the odour of its body filling my nostrils” (23). It is in the metropolitan center of London that the respective desires for the ‘other’ and the imagined corresponding climate finally converge. Sa’eed deliberately takes on the image of the exotic Northern African man that English women impose on him. His first encounter with a woman after his arrival in London substantiates this convergence: 4 The Sudan had been under joint Egyptian-British rule from 1899 to 1955. In 1956, the Sudan gained its independence and inherited its boundaries from Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Since its independence, the Sudan has been plagued by internal conflict, including the First and Second Sudan Civil War, the war in Darfur and the secession of South Sudan in 2011. The North and the Desert 259 What was it that attracted Ann Hammond to me? […] Unlike me, she yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all her hankerings. I am South that yearns for the North and the ice. (Salih 27) This passage illustrates the novel’s masterful employment of spatial tropes quite well. With England, specifically London, figuring as both ‘West’ and ‘North’ and the Sudan as an African country with a mostly Islamic religion and culture figuring as both ‘East’ and ‘South,’ the novel borrows both the cultural as well as the climatic and geographical stereotypes of imperialist discourse in order to explore the logic of the imperial endeavor and its profound consequences for individuals as well as for the Sudan as a whole. Sa’eed posing as “Othello”(33), his London bedroom becoming transformed into a “harem”(27), and his sexuality described as “a wilderness of southern desires” (32) by which numerous English women are hopelessly seduced all belong to the large archive of Orientalist images produced by the West as an act of self-affirmation. 5 The stereotypical images of the geographic ‘North’ and ‘South’ that the novel takes up pertain to a related imperial tradition in which hegemonic demands to colonize a country are justified by an ideology that connects the value and civilizational status of a certain region to its climate. The novel constantly points to the cultural meanings attached to climate and location. It presents itself as highly aware of the fact that, in a colonial context, evocations of climate and landscape are hardly ever innocent. In other words, the material reality is never the point of concern but always already an idea and part of a cultural realization, with a distinct set of values attached to it. Witness, for example, Sa’eed’s first impression of the English landscape and weather after his arrival: I look to right and left, at the dark greenness, at the Saxon villages standing on the fringes of the hills. The red roofs of houses vaulted like the back of cows. A transparent veil of mist is spread above the valleys. What a great amount of water there is here, how vast the greenness! And all those colours! […] this is an ordered world; its houses, fields, and trees are ranged in accordance with a plan. The streams do not follow a zigzag course but flow between artificial banks. (Salih 24) The “greenness” and “water” the narrator alludes to here are not part of a natural but of a cultural formation; they are, in fact, nothing else than a representation of Englishness. Moreover, the natural environment, ordered according to a “plan” and disciplined by human intervention, is presented here as something that is not simply ‘there,’ but that is a practice, in the sense of Robert Burden’s argument: “Space […] is always already a practice. A place (the English countryside) is a spatial practice (as landscape, scenery, 5 These images have been extensively analyzed in Edward Said’s pathbreaking study Orientalism (1978). S ARAH F EKADU 260 farm, theme park) encoded with aesthetic, cultural, and social relations - including those of class and power” (18). The politics of power become apparent in the juxtaposition of the greenness of England and the dryness and barrenness of the ‘South’ - the Sudan - from which apparently no progress can develop; a prejudice that the two narrators in the novel are highly aware of: “By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants […]” (Salih 61). Large parts of the novel are concerned with the uncovering of the asymmetrical construction of the relationship between the North and the South, thus substantiating Said’s view of imperialism as essentially “an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space of the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control” (Said, “Yeats” 77). But the novel does not settle on analyzing the epistemic violence inherent in colonial discourses of landscape and climate, it also attempts to invert the imperialist geo-meteorological ordering of space: with Sa’eed setting up his ‘harem’ in the very center of London and, in a contrary move, his setting up of an English library in the middle of the remote Sudanese village of Wad Hamid, the ‘South’ finally becomes implanted into the ‘North’ and vice versa, thereby proving that what once seemed to be fixed and reliable cultural and geographical markers must also be called into question. Up to this point, the novel might be read as a prototypical postcolonial dissection of the power regimes that structure colonial space and extend far into the postcolonial age. 6 Indeed, the novel has mostly been read within the critical framework of a postcolonial ‘re-writing’ of empire and the hegemonic narratives attached to it. Hence, Saree S. Makdisi notes: If Heart of Darkness narrates the history of modern British imperialism from a position deep within its metropolitan centre, Season of Migration presents itself as the counternarrative of the same bitter history. Just as Conrad’s novel was bound up with Britain’s imperial project, Salih’s participates (in an oppositional way) in the afterlife of the same project today, by ‘writing back’ to the colonial power that once ruled the Sudan. (535) Said and Robert S. Burroughs read Salih’s novels straightforwardly as a rewriting of Heart of Darkness (Said, Culture 34, Burroughs 934). According to Said, “Salih’s hero in Season of Migration to the North does (and is) the reverse of what Kurtz does (and is): the Black man journeys north into white territory” (34). Various other critics have pointed to the stereotypical geographical and directional tropes that Salih employs in order to grasp the difficult relationship between the West and the East, which characterized colonialism and, as the novel illustrates, continues to characterize the postcolonial condition. As Mike Velez has it, “Salih borrows the familiar, the literary, archetyp- 6 Other examples of early post-independence African place writing include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (118) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1967). The North and the Desert 261 al imagery of North and South, in order to reenvision the fraught relations between West and East” (191). In addition, Barbara Harlow has pointed to the various stereotypical images of the ‘East’ the novel highlights by establishing an intertextual relationship between Mustafa Sa’eed and Shakespeare’s iconic tragic hero Othello. However, the exclusive focus on how the novel ‘writes back’ to dominant narratives and hegemonic versions of the relationship between Europe and Africa, the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ and the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ respectively has obscured the ways in which representations of place in the novel can be read as comments on modernity on a larger scale, and not only as comments on the immediate past of European colonialism in Africa. While the colonial and Orientalist implications of the novel’s geographical imagery have been exhaustively analyzed, only little - if any - attention has been paid to the climatological and environmental connotations this imagery also carries. What I want to argue in the following is that a consideration of climate is intrinsic to the novel’s consideration of place, and that this meteorological dimension of place involves a commentary on - and criticism of - modernity itself. 7 The connections between climate and place become already visible in the title of the novel, which features both a geographical term - the ‘North’ - and a meteorological unit - ‘season.’ The imagination of place in the novel is thus closely interwoven with meteorological phenomena. Moreover, place in the novel is predominantly conceived of in terms of environments - the Sudanese desert and its dryness, the lush vegetation of the village close to the Nile, and the urban setting of London. It is tempting to read the multiple references to places and their specific climates solely in metaphorical terms; as a negotiation of the archetypal imagery imperialism has attached to both the North and the South in order to justify the civilizing mission. Yet what becomes clear through a climateconscious reading is that, besides its multiple allusions to stereotypical images of the ‘North’ and the ‘South,’ the novel can also be seen as an archive of Northeast African cultural knowledge about climate, which in the process of Sudanese independence also undergoes significant changes. This becomes especially obvious in depictions of the village Wad Hamid - “that small village at the bend of the Nile” (Salih 3) - which provides the rural counterpart to metropolitan London. Since the novel starts with his return to Wad Hamid after seven years of studying literature at a British University, rather than 7 Deloughrey and Handley have pointed to the fact that “[p]lace has infinite meanings and morphologies: it might be defined geographically, in terms of the expansion of empire; environmentally, in terms of wilderness or urban settings; genealogically, in linking communal ancestry to land; as well as phenomenologically, connecting body to place” (4). S ARAH F EKADU 262 with the narrator’s departure, the village provides an important - if not the most important - setting of the narrative: It is the place where the narrator tries to reconnect to his people, and it is also the place where he meets Mustafa Sa’eed, another returnee from London, who makes him reflect on the consequences of the colonial encounter. When, in a classic scene of homecoming to the mother country after a long period of self-imposed exile in the colonial center, the unnamed narrator-protagonist returns to the Sudanese village he was born in, his realignment with the social environment he has left a long time ago takes place mainly through close observations of his natural surroundings: It was, gentlemen, after a long absence - seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe - that I returned to my people. […] Because of having thought so much about them during my absence, something rather like fog rose up between them and me the first instance I saw them. But the fog cleared and I awoke, on the second day of my arrival, in my familiar bed in the room whose walls had witnessed the trivial incidents of my life in childhood and the onset of adolescence. I listened intently to the wind: that indeed was a sound wellknown to me, a sound which in our village possessed a merry whispering - the sound of the wind passing through palm trees is different from when it passes through fields of corn. I heard the cooing of the turtle-dove, and I looked through the window at the palm tree standing at the courtyard of our house and I knew that all was still well with life. I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down to 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 a palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose. (Salih 3-4) Here, in the narrator’s perception of the narrator, the sensory experience of the wind, the turtle-dove and the palm tree trigger memories of childhood and create a strong sense of home. The material surrounding creates stability and reassurance, making the narrator feel “that all was still well with life” (4). The most prominent symbol for the dwelt-in environment of the rural Sudanese village to which the narrator returns is the palm tree. With its “strong straight trunk,” its “roots,” and its “green branches”, this palm tree not only has a strong physical presence but is also made to stand symbolically for a stable sense of self (”a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose”) that has been threatened by the narrator’s long absence from home and the ensuing fear of alienation from his people. In his perception, then, the palm tree stands for both nature and culture; as a guarantor of the stability of both his physical and cultural surroundings. Yet the atmosphere of wholesome homeliness is interrupted already on the second day after the narrator’s return. He slowly comes to realize that the environment of the village cannot offer a place in which the past is preserved; it cannot offer a refuge from the burden of history since it is itself part The North and the Desert 263 of the political, economic and environmental networks of modernity that the narrator, in his naiveté, located somewhere else, in the metropolitan centers of Europe. Again, processes of cultural transformation manifest themselves in processes of environmental transformation: From my position under the tree I saw the village slowly undergo a change: the water-wheels disappeared to be replaced on the bank of the Nile by pumps, each one doing the work of a hundred water-wheels. I saw the bank retreating year after year in front of the thrustings of the water, while on another part it was the water that retreated. […] I looked at the river - its waters had begun to take on a cloudy look with the alluvial mud brought down by the rains that must have poured in torrents on the hills of Ethiopia - […]. (6) Other than he hoped for, the geographical remoteness of Wad Hamid does not allow the narrator to watch the transformations going on in the rest of the world from a secluded viewpoint, itself untouched by change. On the contrary: modernity, in the form of industrialization and the extraction of natural resources, has found its way even into the remotest parts of the Sudan, thus tempering any attempt to romanticize the natural landscape. What the river Nile also discloses is, to borrow a phrase from Ursula K. Heise, “the imbrication of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in global networks” (210) which even such a presumably remote place as Wad Hamid is involved in. The connection between the Sudan and Ethiopia by way of the Nile, as emphasized in these lines, shows Wad Hamid as inextricably local and transnational. Yet Wad Hamid’s alluvial mud points not only to the essentially transnational nature of climate and environment, but also to a very national concern - the complex water politics that are associated with the Nile and still engender one of the severest conflicts in the region. 8 The novel thus works towards a postcolonial ecology in which nature, rather than simply being a “bystander to human experience” (Deloughrey and Handley 4), turns into an active participant in historical processes, functioning alternatively as a reminder of other (precolonial) times, a memorial of colonial violence, a sig- 8 The Nile water conflict dates back to the earliest days of human settlement along the river. The countries sharing the Nile’s river basin are Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. However, there is no international treaty on how the Nile’s water should be distributed. Egypt, the most populous nation in North Africa, was granted a right to veto upstream water projects in 1929, at the end of British colonial rule. Moreover, ever since an agreement with Sudan in 1959, Egypt has been using 87% of the Nile’s flow for itself, on which it is hugely dependent. This is the only official agreement currently in place. Ethiopia, lying further upstream than Egypt, could only make little use of the Nile’s water in the past but is trying to change that by building a huge dam on the Blue Nile. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam’s construction (short “GERD”) is scheduled to be finished in 2017. From the beginning of the construction works, it has caused heavy controversies, with both Egypt and Sudan fearing that the dam will rob them of large parts of their vital supply of Nile water. See also Knell; and Lienhard and Strzepek. S ARAH F EKADU 264 nifier of modernization processes and a marker of an evolving ecological consciousness. The way Season of Migration to the North engages with this specific ecology could be characterized as a dialogic mode. Since the novel does not feature a narrator who is positioned outside the time and setting of the narrative, the literary negotiation of the relationship between historical and ecological processes in post-independence Sudan is largely carried out by juxtaposing the differing views of the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed. For the narrator, the retreating water banks of the Nile do not pose a threat. Nor do they trigger contemplation on the fraught relationship between local, national, and transnational environmental politics, but rather prompt him to digress into general, quasi-philosophical thoughts on the nature of life. This points to an internal conflict within himself. Swept by his desire for the recuperation of a past Sudan, he tries to ignore the physical signs of change in the village, even to the extent of disavowing the traces of colonialism in the present Sudan. Again, it is the natural surroundings of the village that are made to represent a land outside the relations of violent colonial conquest and appropriation: I am from here, just like the palm tree planted in the courtyard of our house grew in our courtyard and did not grow in some one [sic] else’s. And if [the British] came to our villages, I don’t know why, does this mean that we must poison our present and our future? They will leave our country sooner or later, just as other people have left other countries throughout history. […] Once again we shall be as we were - ordinary people - and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making. (Salih 41) The narrator’s village ecology thus moves along the lines of a bucolic pastoral. It places Wad Hamid outside the relations of colonial appropriation and idealizes the relationship between nature and culture so as to repress the realization that the experience of colonialism cannot simply be reversed or skipped. This idealized version of rural Sudan is corroborated by the narrator’s description of his old grandfather, whom he likens to a specific sort of desert bushes, thus optimistically stressing the robust nature of the Sudanese land and its people and their presumably infinite potential for renewal: “He is no towering oak tree with luxuriant branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility, rather is he like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life” (Salih 61-62). This vision is confronted with the opposing perspective of Mustafa Sa’eed, who negates the possibility of recuperating nature and a precolonial past. Barking at the narrator that “[w]e have no need of poetry here. It would have been better if you’d studied agriculture, engineering or medicine”(9), Sa’eed sharply rejects the view that rejoicing in a bucolic earthiness could provide feasible ways of engaging with the Sudan’s future. Having eagerly picked up a Western education in eco- The North and the Desert 265 nomics (“the first Sudanese to be sent on a scholarship abroad,” 44), he holds that the Sudan can only recover through rigorous modernization: “Knowledge, though, of whatsoever kind is necessary for the advancement of our country” (10). His own contribution lies in cultivating the land as a farmer, working for the village’s agricultural council, and advising his fellow villagers on how to make the best use of technological innovations like the water pumps. By putting these two characters into dialogue, the novel stages its preoccupation with the climatic and soil conditions as a constitutive aspect of postcoloniality. It is important to note that already in 1966 - a time associated with the dawn of modern environmentalism in the U.S. 9 - the novel constructs an ecologic imaginary that is uniquely inspired by and suited to the specific climate of the Northeastern African country of the Sudan whose proximity to the Nile and the Sahara makes it prone to both droughts and floodings. 10 It thus stages an environmental consciousness that focuses, to borrow a definition by Deloughrey and Handley, on “the historical process of nature’s mobility, transplantation, and consumption” (13). 11 In foregrounding processes of rapid agricultural modernization in a transnational context (as becomes evident in the description of the Nile water flow) that radically alter not only the Sudan’s ecology, but also its society, the novel echoes Said’s view of imperialism as a process in which not only the cultural, but also the ecological makeup of a society becomes radically transformed: […] a huge number of plants, animals, and crops as well as building methods gradually turned the colony into a new place, complete with new diseases, environmental imbalances, and traumatic dislocations for the overpowered natives. A changed ecology also introduced a changed political system. (Said, “Yeats” 77) In juxtaposing the narrator’s and Mustafa Sa’eed’s attitudes towards these processes, the novel negotiates the difficulty of newly decolonized nations to come to terms with this colonial legacy. While Sa’eed represents the stance of the ‘cold’ technician who, due to his colonial education, is unable to feel an uncorrupted sense of belonging to his mother country, the romanticized national mythmaking of the narrator, who claims that the Sudanese people entertained an immaculate relationship to nature until the arrival of the colonizers, is also called into question. It is only in the final chapter of the novel 9 See Houser 144, who mentions the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and U.S. legislation acts on clean air, wilderness, and water in the 1960s and 70s as expressions of a new environmental consciousness. 10 Sa’eed, in fact, disappears in a period of severe flooding (Salih 38). 11 The privileging of the Northern hemisphere (especially the U. S.) and concomitant discourses of virgin wilderness in ecocriticism and modern environmentalism has been criticized by many scholars working in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. See Deloughrey and Handley; Nixon; and Huggan and Tiffin. S ARAH F EKADU 266 that the narrator finds a middle ground between the alienating forces of the North and the romantic postcolonial nationalisms of the South and learns to embrace the fact that, while one’s attachment to a particular place or landscape may seem natural, it in the end always depends on historical contingencies. The Poetics of the Desert Up to this point, my reading has been concerned with the ways in which Season of Migration to the North foregrounds the influence of human actions on ecological processes and environmental formations, thus confirming the point made by many critics that the novel as genre is essentially a form which imaginatively records modern forms of human community, empire, and the nation. 12 To this effect, Season of Migration to the North’s engagement with nature illustrates man’s entrapment in the quagmires of history, which, in case of formerly colonized countries and subjects, continues to limit their citizens’ possibilities and determines their lives after independence. And yet, and quite unexpectedly, the novel also stages an engagement with the nonhuman realm, which is here figured by the desert. In a chapter that occurs almost at the end, the narrator, when returning to Khartoum for work after the circumcision celebrations of the two sons Mustafa Sa’eed has left behind, decides to take a lorry, which carries him through the desert. In contrast to the other chapters, in which the narrative proceeds mostly in a realistic manner without stylistic experimentation, the form of this chapter is distinctive in the ways in which it combines the personal voice of the narrator transmitted in the past tense with a poetic, impersonal narrative voice, which interrupts the narrator’s stream of consciousness several times and whose source cannot clearly be determined. This voice proceeds in the present tense, manifesting the merciless conditions of the desert in a repetitious style that seems to imitate the monotonous scenery it evokes: There is no shelter from the sun which rises up into the sky with unhurried steps, its rays spilling out on the ground as though there existed an old blood feud between it and the people on the earth. There is no shelter […]. A monotonous road rises and falls with nothing to entice the eye: scattered bushes in the desert, all thorns and leafless, miserable trees that are neither alive nor dead. […] There is not a single cloud heralding hope in this hot sky which is like the lid of Hell-fire. The day here is something without value. A mere torment suffered by living creatures as they await the night. […] The road is endless, without limit, the sun indefatigable. […] Where, O God, is the shade? Such land brings forth nothing but prophets. This drought can be cured only by the sky. The road is unending and the sun merciless. (Salih 87, 89) 12 See also Anderson. The North and the Desert 267 Clearly, this is not a depiction of the South as the dichotomous counterpart of a water-saturated North in the sense outlined earlier, but a depiction of the desert. The desert becomes the sole agent here, an agent that determines the movement and life rhythm of the humans entering this space. Yet it seems itself completely withdrawn from temporal and spatial relations. Marked by uniformity (“The day here is something without value”) and stasis, which is poetically conveyed in the varied, but essentially repetitive evocation of the “merciless sun,” the desert represents an uncharted and unchartable space, whose vastness resists human designs. The desert is represented here as a space more or less empty (“The lorry travels for hours without our coming across single human being or animal” 87), yet it is also overdetermined and potentially a transcendent space: “such land brings forth nothing but prophets.” The heat that characterizes this place is indifferent to human life, and it has always been like this: The sun is the enemy. Now it is exactly in the liver of the sky, as the Arabs say, What a fiery liver! And thus it will remain for hours without moving - or so it will seem to living creatures when even the stones groan, the trees weep, and iron cries out for help. (Salih 92) The desert heat is imagined here as an excess of atmospheric energy that negates any ideology of human exceptionalism. Living creatures are directly linked to stones, trees, and iron in their reaction to heat. While there might be many travelogues and other accounts in which the Northeast African desert is heroically conquered, 13 the novel focuses on the desert’s general inhospitableness and hostility towards human life. Yet, even though the desert is shown here as a space beyond human exploration, it still affects the ways in which human life understands itself. In the context of the desert, human life is stripped down to the need and will to survive, a cause that unites everyone moving through it. At sunset, when the lorry can stop for the night, the narrator feels connected to both human and nonhuman forces in his fight against the heat. He contends that “the war ended in victory for us all: the stones, the trees, the animals, and the iron.” Moreover, he emphatically feels connected to the humans surrounding him: “I feel that we are all brothers; he who drinks and he who prays and he who steals and he who commits adultery and he who fights and he who kills”(93). This ‘desert condition,’ in which the differences that mark everyday human life become invisible and men are united in their pure will to survive, could be considered a poetical analogue to the Anthropocene requirement to think of humanity as a whole, or as Chakrabarty argues, as a species (Chakrabarty, “Climate” 213). Chakrabarty explains that species is a word 13 Wolfgang Struck mentions Thomas Edward Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922/ 192) as one of the most influential examples (448). S ARAH F EKADU 268 that would never occur in any standard history or socio-political account of globalization. Nevertheless it is necessary because it gives us an idea of the ‘deep history’ of geology and the planet that humanity is part of, at least since becoming the driving force in global warming (ibid.). In his 2012 essay “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” he further elaborates the differences between thinking of the human in a historicallyoriented discipline like Postcolonial Studies and thinking of the human in the Anthropocene. He argues that in the Anthropocene the differential thinking advocated by a postcolonial-postmodern view must be complemented and not substituted by a consideration of humanity as “constitutively one” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 2). The challenge of the Anthropocene, then, is the “necessity of thinking disjunctively about the human,” as Chakrabarty has famously put it (2). Yet, this poses a problem both for the imagination and for representation. As emphasized by other critics and in several chapters in the present volume, the species history can never become part of phenomenological experience. To quote again from Chakrabarty: Even if we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept as indeed would be any other life form. But one never experiences a concept. (“Climate” 220). I would argue that, although written long before any scientific or critical engagement with the Anthropocene, Season of Migration to the North provides a point of departure for imaginatively experiencing the disjunctive histories in which the human is simultaneously embedded, as indicated in Chakrabarty’s reflection on the Anthropocene. By supplementing the North- South binary, which provides an entirely human-centered frame of reference, with the desert, the novel introduces a figure of the non-human that is removed from human colonization but not entirely external to human concerns, thus suturing human history to a more encompassing history of the planet. While the main theme of the novel, concerned with the effects of intercultural affiliation and the struggle of the formerly colonized to become citizens in their own right, is firmly placed on the scale of human life, the desert confronts the human with a supra-human scale, thus reminding the narrator (and us as readers) that the human exists alongside factors that remain irreducibly alien to human concerns. It thus adds a layer of geological time to human history that puts into perspective conventional postcolonial assumptions about historical change, thereby engaging aesthetically with what Baucom has termed “the need […] for a method that will take as its starting point an investigation of the multi-scaled, ontologically plural, simultaneously historical, infra-historical, and supra-historical ‘situation’ in which we find ourselves” (“History 4°” 134), or, in short, the multi-scaled temporality of the Anthropocene. The North and the Desert 269 Conclusion “In relation to the history of organic life on Earth,“ writes a modern biologist, “the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.“ 14 This quotation is not taken from contemporary science fiction writing, but is part of the eighteenth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” dating back to 1940. Expanding the historical sense of modernity to the much larger time frame of the recorded history of homo sapiens, and then reminding the reader that, in relation to organic life on earth, even this expanded time frame of the human is just a blink of the eye, Benjamin enwraps his own biographical time in more encompassing layers of time and history. Considering that Benjamin wrote the “Theses” in 1940 shortly before his flight from Spain to the United States failed and he committed suicide, this reflection on the embeddedness of human history within other histories of a much larger scale also carries an eschatological dimension that points to redemption, thus lending it a decidedly theological orientation. My essay has argued that Season of Migration to the North, in similar ways as suggested by Benjamin, confronts the historical epoch of imperialism - as an epoch of human history - with the much grander histories of the nonhuman embodied by the desert. In doing so, the novel participates in what Baucom has termed a “material turn ‘above’ history - the contemporary supra-historical turn” (“History 4°” 132), through which the nature/ culture and human/ nonhuman dichotomy established by modernity is fundamentally called into question. While I would hesitate to call Season of Migration to the North an ‘Anthropocene novel’ - as the first part of my essay has shown, its negotiation of ecological concerns is still firmly planted in a postcolonial framework -, I contend that the novel makes the Anthropocene readable as precisely a figure of the vexed relationship between the human and the nonhuman. As older texts such as Benjamin’s and Salih’s show, this relationship may always have been vexed, but the current age of anthropogenic global warming reminds us with increased intensity of the volatility of human claims to exceptionalism. One might think that reading the desert as a figure of the non-human lends the novel’s reflection on the complex entanglement of histories that 14 English translation taken from Baucom, “’Moving Centers,’” 145. In the German original, this passage reads: “‘Die kümmerlichen fünf Jahrzehntausende des homo sapiens‘, sagt ein neuerer Biologe, ‘stellen im Verhältnis zur Geschichte des organischen Lebens auf der Erde etwas wie zwei Sekunden am Schluß eines Tages von vierundzwanzig Stunden dar. Die Geschichte der zivilisierten Menschheit vollends würde, in diesen Maßstab eingetragen, ein Fünftel der letzten Sekunde der letzten Stunde füllen.‘“ (Benjamin 703) S ARAH F EKADU 270 proceed on entirely different scales a fatalistic notion: In its essential inhospitality to humans, the desert is imagined as an environment that finally points to mankind’s ineluctable extinction. Seen from this catastrophic endpoint of human history, not only might the colonizers’ atrocities appear downsized but also the outlook of achieving a socially just vision for the future. As a result, the valid remains of postcolonial thinking might be profoundly diminished. 15 While this might manifest a tendency towards atemporality, an analysis of Season of Migration to the North in the context of the Anthropocene sheds another light on the novel. It stresses the motif of the desert as a way of aesthetically engaging with the disjunctive histories of the human and the nonhuman, thus allowing its readers to experience what otherwise fundamentally resists phenomenological experience. It is this capability of poetically condensing radically incommensurate scales of time that makes the novel a performative model of the Anthropocene, thereby providing the - perhaps only - possibility to come to terms with it: in the aesthetic mode. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 2000. 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