Hackneyed phrases: lingual migrations in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

ABSTRACT

Tayeb Salih’s world-literary classic Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl (1966) has served World Literature as the preeminent text of postcolonialism, touching on issues of identity, nationality, culture, hybridity, literature, language, gender, sexuality, historiography, and migration. It has been less understood as a product of translation. This paper looks at Denys Johnson-Davies’ English translation Season of Migration to The North (1969) and the dialogue it produces with Salih’s Arabic text. The paper argues that Arabic cannot be read as the novel’s “original” language and English as secondary. Rather, both English and Arabic are the co-originary languages of the novel, and this play within and across languages embeds Salih’s dramatization of the restless migration between variegated dichotomies that the work explores.

KEYWORDS:

• Tayib Salih
• migration
• hybridity
• postcolonial
• originary
• translingual

Introduction

Scholarship on Tayeb Salih’s world-literary classic Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl (1966), translated as Season of Migration to The North (1969), has largely been situated as postcolonial work.¹ Season, as one scholar succinctly put it, blurs “the line between the West and the rest.”² And in this blurring the novel has furnished scholars with a template for understanding the postcolonial condition as “an anguished affiliation [Said], a diseased hybridity [Bhabha], an indigenization disinherited and in mourning [Appadurai], a delirious and degraded enmeshment [Ramazani], a sadomasochistic relation [Glisant], a matrix of mirrored bedrooms [Bauman], an abject planetarity [Spivak].”³ These questions of belonging are somehow amplified as many of the readers and theorists of Season encounter the work through Denys Johnson-Davies’ famous English translation.

Thus far, thinking about the encounter with Salih’s ideas through the lens of translation has produced a small handful of insights, though most through work on the actual translation. Some, for example, note the sheer Englishness of Johnson-Davies’ text. Given the strategic use of exoticism in the story, this sense of Englishness has been read through Lawrence Venuti’s work, which understands translation as a process of domestication/foreignization. In this vein, Sofia Samatar points to Johnson-Davies translation of the Arabic "amthāl" (proverbs) into the very English term “hackneyed phrases,”⁴ as a prime example of domestication. The phrase first appears in a passage where the protagonist, Sa’eed,⁵ mobilizes language as a weapon as he reflects on the suicide/death of his girlfriend, the waitress Sheila Greenwood: “She died without a single word passing on her lips. My store of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible.”⁶ This domestication—this imposition of Englishness—Samatar argues, amounted to an imposition of colonial discourse on the character of Sa’eed, turning him into a stereotypical Arab African.

Such a reading, however, relies on the notion that translation, in its search for fidelity to the original,⁷ pits an “original” Arabic against the English translation. In the case of Season, such an approach overlooks what the text itself is doing. Here I argue that the idea of colonial domestication (adaptation) and foreignization (the exotic) is already a core feature of Season’s plot, characterization, linguistics, and aesthetics. English was, after all, the language of Salih’s higher education (and that of his protagonists). In fact, Season’s much-praised experimentation in form is the result of Salih’s study of the English classics and his particular interest in Modernism.⁸

Rather than being read within a paradigm of domestication/foreignization, Johnson-Davies’ translation is better interpreted within what Anna Ziajka Stanton describes as “an enhanced degree of verisimilitude,” which relocates “the apparatus of ethical possibility away from mimesis to the affective encounters with Arabic literary form that a translation can make possible for Anglophone readers.”⁹ To interpret the Englishness of Johnson-Davies’ translation, however, we must look further into how the translator deals with a text that plays with domestication/foreignization through its Othello-esque protagonist, its adoption and scathing criticism of intercultural translation. Here the translation is read along the same lines as the text: as a staged clash of two cosmopolitan languages against the backdrop of colonialism’s uneven distribution of power. Analysis suggests that the Arabic itself is a translation of an English discourse and that reading one as original and the other as a translation limits how we understand the text. Both languages are co-originary.¹⁰

Salih’s novel is always already a translation, but not in the sense of modern novels that Rebecca Walkowitz identifies as “born translated,” that is, works that envision and cater to global audiences that use English as lingua franca. In this case, it is fruitful to assume that the Arabic is Salih’s translation from English and that the English translation is like a retrieval of a non-existent original sensed through its uncanny presence. It is impossible, of course, to fully determine the scope of such migratory features in this short analysis, but the examples explored open more serious revisions of existing critical approaches. Since translation as a practice entails migration between different domains, cultures, ideologies, etc. I will employ Stefan Helgesson and Christina Kullberg’s notion of a translingual event, which arises from “the encounter with a literary text” and for this reason “it is not immediately apparent what should count as foreign or familiar.”¹¹ It is this aspect of failing to determine what is foreign and what familiar, depending on the point of view we assume, that I utilize in my close reading. Sections look respectively at three features to demonstrate this relationship between languages. First, a reinterpretation of the well-known interplay between Season, Shakespeare, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness sets the stage for the idea of co-origination and shows Season as a text of and about ontological migration. Next, this paper examines the novel’s translingual events that force the reader to engage with textual ambiguity, throwing into question which language is being spoken or referred to discursively. The final section of the article looks to particular words and phrases that cater to different cultural contexts.

Ontological migration: Shakespeare and Conrad

The number of intertextual readings of Season testifies to the obsession with hauntings of colonial education in the novel.¹² As many scholars have noted, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is paralleled in Salih’s narrative, which similarly follows an unnamed narrator from England to the African continent. For Salih, however, it is a return to Sudan after the protagonist’s years of study in England and not a conquest into an apparent unknown. On his return, Season’s nameless narrator meets the mysterious figure of Mustapha Sa’eed, his hyperbolic mirror image. The themes of conquest and mastery are multidirectional and complex; Sa’eed had mastered English, excelled in the English education system, “conquered” (and possibly killed) a number of English women, and returned to Sudan for reasons that remain quite mysterious and ambiguous.

Sa’eed’s complex relationship to a colonial language is thematized from the beginning. We read how Sa’eed was a brilliant English student in Sudan, but once in England he came to understand that “the language is not my language; I had learnt to be eloquent in it through perseverance.”¹³ As Sa’eed became more “accustomed to their voices”¹⁴ his “brain continued on, biting and cutting like the teeth of a plough.”¹⁵ This suggests an adversarial relationship and pits the English he acquired in Sudan with this somehow different English of England. The relationship between Sa’eed and English came to typify the idea of the colonial hybrid:

I had lived with them superficially, neither loving nor hating them. … Sooner or later they will leave our country … . The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude.¹⁶

Here, as throughout the novel, there is a constant migration between desire for and revenge against the colonizer: their language, their education, their power. Season demands, scholars have noted, “a reception able to hold these contradictory registers within one inclusive response.”¹⁷ This reading begins from an understanding that the play with binaries and contradictions is not a play of dispossession but rather complementarity. Just as Sa’eed has multiple mothers in the story, so there are multicultural narrative forms and the two languages that Salih employs could be seen as surrogate to this text. Simultaneously employing and struggling against domestication and foreignization (exoticism), Salih’s characters exist in an aporetic condition between being and appearing authentic.¹⁸ Often, they aim to mimic the colonizer’s agency not only in action (e.g. Saeed’s conquest of women), but also in the migratory language (proverbs, phrases, metaphors, symbols). Sa’eed’s “escape into a Metaphor”¹⁹ is essentially migration (from the Greek μϵταφορά, move across). Sa’eed himself is language and story (or stories), both firm and volatile, both clear and ambiguous. There is no fixing “his ontological position.”²⁰

Ontological migration is shown through intertextual hauntings by Shakespeare and Conrad and is therefore a matter of textuality and translingualism. In Season, Shakespeare is introduced quite explicitly through the comparisons between Sa’eed and Othello, which Sa’eed himself makes. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is implied in the structure of the text—acting as the text’s subconscious. The different ways these influential texts are invoked is significant and provides a multiple and yet differing notion of “origin” and relationship between English literature/history/colonization and its legacies. As Rajiva rightly argues, Salih’s text challenges “the rational logic of causation,”²¹ and here I argue it provides a relational logic of its own. Emphasis on what has authority by virtue of being the origin plays a big part in establishing the migratory ontology of the novel. To establish a pure linear chain of causation is to give in to the Western mechanical time of modernity that the novel strives to dismantle. For instance, most scholars discuss the novel as if it were originally in English. Laouyene talks about Sa’eed “performing his native dance to the ‘hankering’ eyes of a metropolitan audience,”²² while Maalouf discusses “poetic effusions”²³ in terms of “a sentimental and pampered diction.”²⁴ Makdisi sees this as “an unstable synthesis of European and Arabic forms and traditions.”²⁵ However, the migratory lingualism of the novel is not unstable, but originary. Structure is not primary, movement is, as we shall see.

The text requires a hybrid consciousness, because one needs to be in the shoes of the ambivalent character to fully understand how this complex discourse works. I do not find many readings that operate in this fashion. No scholarship attempts to explain the full scope of implications and ambiguities in Sa’eed’s statement in the English court: “I am the desert of thirst. I am no Othello. I am a lie,”²⁶ as if the meaning is obvious. Did Sa’eed try to be Othello? What specific interpretation of Othello did he have? Was Othello a victim or a perpetrator? Or both? Or neither? In which ways does he think the English discourse perceives Othello? Does he mean he did not manage to live up to Othello’s character, as if Othello was “the truth”? How is the first statement related to the later reversal, “‘I am no Othello. Othello was a lie.’”²⁷ There is a great sense of irony in an assumption that he is or is not Othello.

According to the logic put forth by the novel, Othello is the Other that is supposed to be domesticated. He is a symbol that is digested and therefore, if emulating this symbol, Se’eed can become digestible to the English audiences. It is like his speaking of Abu Nuwas by stating that Abu Nuwas is superior to Omar Khayyam,²⁸ because Khayyam would be familiar to his English audience. Sa’eed needs a recourse to the exotic they are familiar with, and in this case, Othello is such a point of reference. The point of such an explicit intertext is that the Other cannot enter the English discourse as totally Other. But by using pre-digested (hackneyed) symbols, Salih renders the Other as inauthentic, as mere form without substantial content, in other words, a lie.²⁹ The sheer excess of possible interpretations of relationships, as in the case of the Othello reference, shows the instability of familiar signs. This instability illuminates a constant migration at the core of the novel’s logic. Sa’eed is not derivative of Othello; it is not a linear relationship. The Shakespearean intertext precedes Salih’s in temporal terms but does not exercise the authority of an original. For Sa’eed, “Othello” is just a tag, a phrase, a translingual tool.

Salih’s play with two key authors of the English Canon accomplishes an important effect that is not covered in scholarship. The ontological ambiguity of Othello, the question of agency and who one is as a colonial subject, translates into the ambiguous translingual events.

Translingual events

Following Samatar, for whom “[e]very intertext is interference,”³⁰ I now look at the clearest and most significant moment of intertextual engagement, both in terms of plot and character, and a significant meta gesture to Salih’s translingual engagement with the English language: Sa’eed’s recital of Ford Madox Ford’s modernist poem “Antwerp.” Though a significant moment in the novel, it has hitherto drawn little scholarly attention.³¹ The scene takes place in the narrator’s village. Speaking with an inebriated Sa’eed, the narrator is suddenly exposed to a recitation of Ford’s poem in English, which stuns the narrator, simultaneously derailing him and putting him on a path of self-insight:

I tell you that had the ground suddenly split open and revealed an afreet standing before me, his eyes shooting out flames, I would not have been more terrified. All of a sudden there came to me the ghastly, nightmarish feeling that we—the men grouped together in that room—were not a reality but merely some illusion.³²

This is significant not only because the narrator is suddenly “pulled out of his own place and time … toward England, Flanders, invasions, refugees, world wars, empires, the world,”³³ but also because of how this happens. The use of poetry is not only related to “nazm (construction/composition),”³⁴ but it also serves as a metonym of colonial literary heritage’s omnipresence that the characters can never get rid of. The evocations of English places disrupt “the linear progression of time.”³⁵ Indeed,

it is precisely in the interruptions that a new perspective emerges, one that observes context, acknowledges intertext, and identifies hackneyed phrases. Mustafa’s repetitive language and brazen appropriation of colonialist stereotypes draw attention to the proliferation of deadly discourse, the spread of a fatal disease.³⁶

I do not see it in such negative light, rather as the vibrant migratory core that governs the flux of the narrative set against binary discourses. Before I discuss the poem-event, I’ll address two linguistic features.

Firstly, when discussing Sa’eed’s sex with Ann Hammond, a student he met during a lecture he delivered at the University of Oxford, Samatar focuses on Sa’eed’s words that he felt like he “slept with a whole harem simultaneously.”³⁷ Samatar argues the Arabic “underscores this scene of doubling with a pun on ‘Ann’ and ān (moment or time [here: simultaneously, at the same time]).”³⁸ I am inclined to read this as a coincidence because ān is more common in literary contexts than waqt (time), but still, the poetic merge of Ann and ān is an example of beautiful translingualism that requires two cosmopolitan languages to function.

In the second example, I take issue with Samatar’s interpretation of Johnson-Davies translation of Sa’eed’s words: “My storehouse of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible.”³⁹ Samatar complains that “hackneyed phrases” is Johnson-Davies’s unfortunate “rendering of the Arabic amthāl, a word that does not have the negative connotations of the English ‘hackneyed’ (‘lacking in freshness or originality’).”⁴⁰ I agree with Samatar that “amthāl has a positive meaning, suggesting an ideal model or an example used to support an argument the presence of an established tradition upon which Mustafa Sa’eed draws for his own purposes”⁴¹ but her discourse moves into the territory of fidelity in translation, the supremacy of the original, the loss in translation, etc.

Reading some further layers of complexity into the reading deepens it. First, Salih’s is an artistic expression, and the way words and traditional phrases are used depends on the context and not the absolute authority of the dictionary. Second, Sa’eed used these proverbs (amthāl) in England and is only later reflecting on them. What if amthāl is the translation of “hackneyed phrases”? I am twisting things around, assuming amthāl is Sa’eed’s attempt to render in Arabic something he first conceived of in English. In this case, the loss of meaning, moving from negative to positive, gives an originary force to the English discourse. There is more. Except for the poem, which he recites in English, but which the reader of the Arabic text reads in Arabic rather than the original, we can, and perhaps must assume that Sa’eed is always translating his English experience to the narrator in Arabic, though it might have been natural to relate it in English since both were educated in that language. We cannot assume that amthāl is an original that is then ruined in translation, but rather that the text itself is always already a complex set of translations some of which are noticeable in specific phrases and some in large discourses.

In other words, the scenes, especially if we take both language versions into account simultaneously, evoke migration that is not derivative of post-fact cross-cultural interpretation processes. In the context of this example, the choice of “hackneyed” emphasizes an interpretation of Sa’eed’s reference to proverbs as being emptied of their historical, precolonial richness. It bears little import if Sa’eed is speaking to others or brooding on his condition for himself, the use of the proverbs is not for the sake of deeper cultural wisdom but strategic exoticism used as a weapon against the colonizer: “My store of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible. For every occasion, I possess the appropriate garb.”⁴² The word “garb” here suggests shallowness and deception (of the appearances). The ambivalent character of the postcolonial subject shows the inability to access full authority to put signifiers at rest. The proverbs can thus be like Schrödinger’s paradox, both meaningful and empty. In addition, it is even possible to read the character of Sa’eed as someone oscillating/migrating between hackneyed (inauthentic, no agency) and authentic (with agency). The book throws the very question into disarray.

This restless oscillation between languages, originals, and contexts was dramatically introduced when the narrator heard Sa’eed “reciting English poetry in a clear voice and with an impeccable accent.”⁴³ The narrator reacted in the following manner: “‘What an extraordinary thing!’ I said, deliberately speaking English.”⁴⁴After the exchange of shocks (one man shocking the other), it is not clear how long they continue to speak in English or if the rest of their dialogue takes place in Arabic. It is related by the narrator in Arabic, and in Johnson-Davies translation it is related in English. For the rest of the passage, however, readers in both languages are free to imagine the men conversing in either or a mix of both. Salih’s text asks the reader to choose what language is being spoken several times in the novel. The interpretative choice is an active response to a flux of possibilities. These are translingual events, that is, places where one cannot establish with any certainty which language is spoken. The many instances of this help claim Arabic and English as co-originary.

The scene with Ford’s poem has been called an uncanny event that “symbolically foreshadows the feeling of alienation that will haunt the narrator until the end.”⁴⁵ No doubt, Freud’s Das Unheimliche works well within the novel, because it thematically deals with home/homeliness (heimlich) and that which is strange or un-homely (unheimlich). To experience the uncanny is to experience strangeness in the very safe familiarity of home. Sa’eed, a stranger to the narrator, suddenly appears familiar and intimate through the medium of a foreign language whose utterance makes the entire place strange. The narrator is not shaken simply by the strangeness of/at home, but the fact that the supposed stranger was now evoking something deeply familiar, that is, homely.

Ford’s poem is like an immigrant, misplaced in the new environment, and yet also at home, as a remnant of colonial legacies. This migration between being homely and unhomely (uncanny) is what makes the narrator feel as if “the ground suddenly split open and revealed an afreet standing before [him], his eyes shooting out flames.”⁴⁶ Sa’eed is drunk and quotes the poem instinctively. This suggests affection, love, and intimacy with both English and art. The fact that it touches the narrator so deeply makes him realize how much of an “Englishman” he really is and that his semi-nationalist project (he has returned home to Sudan) and the romanticization of the rural life (typical of postcolonial nationalism) is a lie—or is at least more complicated than the logic of linear development would suggest. The event is uncanny exactly because the colonial language and art appear quite homely in a decolonized space. English feels closer to the narrator than his mother tongue Arabic.

The complexity of Salih’s poetics, when observed through a dialogue with the English translation is staggering. Rula Jurdi, working with two language versions (English and Arabic), attempts to show her students the restless translingualism in Salih’s characters. What Jurdi overlooks, however, is that this migration is part and parcel of both the Arabic and the English versions. When discussing the passage about Ann Hammond, one of Sa’eed’s girlfriends who references the poetry of Abu Nuwas (showing her own broad knowledge of Arabic culture as Sa’eed is showing his mastery of English), Jurdi simply wants to educate the reader in the implied complex sexuality of Abu Nuwas, as if he were a Sufi poet, in “the context of the poetics of the Arab literary tradition.”⁴⁷ In other words, she assumes most readers will not understand the subtext and intertextuality and explains how the complexity of Salih’s style is shown through a reference to “Al-Hallaj’s sexual references to death as a virginal, ecstatic experience, and the notion that death is the door to the truth.” If one does not understand the subtext, Jurdi argues, one might miss the “metaphorical and allegorical meaning in the scene of Jean Morris’s [another of Sa’eed’s girlfriends] celebration of her own death in the moment of fulfilled desire” in terms of “[a]nnihilation (fana) … as a path toward universal truth and universal beauty.”⁴⁸ Without explaining the details of the complex plotting, I use this example from Jurdi simply to point out the way scholars of Season operate in terms of “loss in translation” while such subtext is difficult to understand even for specialists. All things being equal, this reading is not different from any reading of Conradian or Shakespearian intertexts. It is not the fault of the translator nor is it a given that Arabic readers automatically understand complex dialogues between different literary traditions. Furthermore, despite the Sufi context, this passage could be in dialogue with Freudian influences, which are far from negligible for someone educated in England.

Of course, every text contains content which has specific cultural connotations. The same word can have different connotations in different localities. Things like “afreet” (a jinn) might be recognizable to English audiences through the pervasiveness of Orientalist texts. Even something like swearing on divorce might be familiar,⁴⁹ but even such a reader will not have access to its wider connotations. Notably, Salih’s book contains cultural connotations that are recognizable in both the Arabic and English contexts, at least to a significant degree. At the same time, other references—to both English and Arabic cultural elements—would only be intelligible in their local cultural domains. Many elements pertaining to the characters’ life in England, for example, would be obscure to Arabic readers even though the book is in Arabic. In the same way, details that pertain to Islam or specifically to Sudanese culture would not be fully understood by Western readers. For instance, in one passage there is the mention of “the age of Aad”⁵⁰ in the poetry of Abu Nuwas, then in another passage the narrator speaks of “Halting at Arafat,”⁵¹ then in a third passage he describes how he and his fellow travelers stop their journey “when the white thread is distinguished from the black,”⁵² all of which only readers of the Qur’an can understand.

As one example, the novel’s extensive discussion of female circumcision through the powerful matriarchal character of Bint Majzoub evokes a discussion of a conflict between religion of Islam (more generally) and local custom: “They practice female circumcision and attribute it to Islam.”⁵³ It is not a coincidence Salih takes up this issue as the general Western critique of Islam and Muslim societies has been related to treatment of women. Female circumcision is still one of the most contentious issues and a perfect example of a topic that creates both a connection and a rift between the East and the West. Salih seems to want to show both to the locals and the Western audience that they need to distinguish between Islam and local custom that has been integrated into the practice of religion. The patriarchal adaptation of Islam is best shown in the passage where the character of Wad Reyyes, the narrator’s antagonist, says, ‘“Women and children are the adornment of life on this earth,’ God said in His noble Book,” to which the narrator answers, “the Koran did not say ‘Women and children’ but ‘Wealth and children.’”⁵⁴ A non-Muslim reader, even if a native speaker of Arabic, will not understand the full gravity of the situation where a man deliberately alters the wording of the holy scripture to suit his patriarchal agenda. This is an extremely charged moment and a critique of the supposed authenticity of the Sudanese. The loss in translation can only be attributed to the readers’ knowledge of the subtext, just as the instances with Shakespeare and Arabic poetry.

Then there are examples that require recourse to varied heritages and multiple languages. This perpetual migration is quite beautifully shown in the passage where the narrator’s friend from school Mahjoub tells him that Sa’eed is “the Prophet El-Khidr” and that “treasures that lie in this room are like those of King Solomon, brought here by genies, and you have the key to that treasure. Open Sesame.”⁵⁵ To unpack, the mysterious figure of El-Khidr, who teaches Moses three life lessons (in the Quranic surah “Al-Kahf”) is meant to create immediate intimacy with one locality and intrigue another. The treasures of King Solomon would speak to all Abrahamic traditions (and wider), which is why Solomon is presented in the translation through his English name, rather than the Arabic Suleyman. Open Sesame is the third element that would be the epitome of the exotic from the Arabian Nights and quite familiar to global audiences. The fourth is the mention of the genies (jinn), which too would be familiar to larger readerships. All four examples are quite exotic in this cross-cultural moment that the text creates. Salih is obviously playing with the audience’s expectations, serving exoticism, like Sa’eed serves hackneyed phrases to his girlfriends to woo them, but always with some dose of irony and (self) mockery.

This interplay is of course difficult to translate. Jurdi notes that characters “especially Saeed, speak a highbrow British English,” which “accentuates Sa’eed’s connection with upper-class society.”⁵⁶ In contrast, Jurdi notes, the Sudanese characters who have not been abroad speak “Standard English. Making these conversations colloquial [an English dialect, i.e. Cockney] would have given them [the characters] a different flavor.”⁵⁷ This insight seems a Venutian drive for foreignization. Using English dialects, or even broken English for the villagers would create a greater contrast and emphasize dichotomies between classes, spaces, histories, etc. To use any English dialect would be confusing as they would sound like English villagers. Sa’eed’s posh English only shows that the English version renders that aspect of his personality better than the Arabic version because that is the language the readers are asked to imagine him using. The Arabic version, even in the Modern Standard Arabic that Salih uses, is an attempt to evoke Sa’eed’s performance of Englishness. These two examples show that Salih’s novel is a text operating in two languages and in conversation with an imagined bilingual audience. Arabic readers know that certain passages are translations of that which the characters would be saying in English, and they experience them as Arabic translations just as certain passages are clearly in Arabic and the English readers are aware they are reading a translation.

Salih’s text draws the readers’ attention to translingualism by leaving much ambiguity. For instance, it is not clear whether the opening sentence of Sa’eed’s notebook⁵⁸ and the poems that the narrator finds in the protagonist’s hidden library, are in Arabic or English. Then there is the letter Sa’eed leaves to the narrator, which could be in Arabic, but equally in English given their previous exchanges.⁵⁹ A third significant scene is when Sheila Greenwood (one of Sa’eed’s aforementioned girlfriends) speaks in Arabic, “You are beautiful beyond description … and the love I have for you is beyond description.”⁶⁰ Sa’eed counters this shallow expression of love by saying he loves her blue eyes. The question is: is this entire conversation in Arabic, or does Sa’eed reply in English? The ambiguity creates a perpetual state of migration. And these are only the most obvious moments that demand a sense of co-origination.

Returning to the translation of “hackneyed phrases,” we see how this relationship within and across language works more deeply. “She died without a single word passing on her lips. My store of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible. For every occasion, I possess the appropriate garb.”⁶¹ Arguing against the notion that Sa’eed’s use of proverb is hackneyed, Jurdi suggests the following translation: “My ammunition of proverbs is inexhaustible. For every occasion, I possess the appropriate garb.”⁶² For Jurdi, Salih's intention with Arabic proverbs is to show Sa’eed’s “extraordinary intelligence” and that his stories “are the source of his power.”⁶³ This is a nuanced reading that draws on the cultural repertoire of the Arabic language and literature.

Given this complexity, it seems useful to read “hackneyed phrases” (itself somewhat hackneyed) only on its surface. I argue that the translation interprets the meaning of amthāl in the light of Sa’eed’s performance. Sa’eed’s message is exactly that historical irony of the colonizer falling into a trap due to exotic sounding phrases. I assume Sa’eed is not simply using proverbs, but pointing out he is using them as a trap. Their original connotations would be entirely lost on the English woman, and she would not be able to notice if he changed them, as he is prone to do. Thus, the proverbs too appear restless. They are historically meaningful gems reduced to exotic shells, which is exactly how Sa’eed is treated. This is a perfect rendition of the postcolonial aporetic condition of Bhabha’s in-between space, the simultaneous neither-nor and either-or, which cannot be properly resolved by external authority. Any resolution is an act of violence if it employs purely materialistic assumptions and ideologically shaped hierarchies, which Salih struggles against. A very early critical response, by Muhammed Siddiq emphasizes such irreconcilable “schism between Mustafa Sa’eed’s consciousness and his unconscious”⁶⁴ in Sa’eed’s statement: “I for one shall continue to express myself in this twisted manner.”⁶⁵

Such an interpretation is in tune with what most scholars understand the book is doing: deconstructing binaries and emphasizing struggle. This is why Sa’eed’s words “How strange! How ironic! Just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle way?”⁶⁶ push Siddiq to claim that “the psychological polarity of conscious/unconscious,” which reflects “the cultural polarity of the icy, rational North and the warm instinctual South” … is prejudice that “Sa’eed exploits and yet is trapped by, while the narrator confronts and finally transcends it through the arduous process of individuation.”⁶⁷ I too see this aporia as a form of resolution of the conflict, while most critics understand it as having no resolution whatsoever. For me the resolution does not entail solving the paradox but understanding how it produces the very disturbing ontology of the postcolonial subject.

Hackneyed phrases

I have used “hackneyed phrases” as the metaphor for the migratory lingual core of the text in relation to a few different aspects of craft. Now I want to stress the fact that the English translation of Salih’s play with familiar phrases and proverbs does not signal the loss of meaning/authenticity in cross-cultural encounters. It is not a simple matter of something deep and meaningful in one language, like a proverb, becoming hackneyed in the target language. Rather, a play with contextual devaluation of language is deployed by the narrator and Sa’eed in encounters defined by their colonial history. The use of proverbs, metaphors, metonyms, and typical phrases is essential to Salih’s aesthetic. Just as he draws the readers’ attention to the indeterminacy of which language is spoken in some situations, the narrator often comments on certain behaviors and diction of Sa’eed as being merely performative/empty: “Sa’eed said to them, ‘I have come to you as a conqueror.’ A melodramatic phrase certainly. … It was a melodramatic act which with the passage of time will change into a mighty myth.”⁶⁸ Once the narrator understands he has been enthralled by Sa’eed he starts interpreting him as a lie: “Sa’eed used regularly to attend prayers on the mosque. Why did he exaggerate in the way he acted out that comic role.”⁶⁹ Since Sa’eed has consistently put on an act for different audiences, he has made it impossible to know when and in what is he authentic, or even if there is such a thing as the authentic Sa’eed. For the narrator, performance itself is a lie, an exaggeration; it is melodramatic and hackneyed. When the narrator finds Sa’eed’s papers, he realizes he was tricked through cheap phrases to look for depth where there is none, and so he decides to burn it all down.⁷⁰ He says: “If Mustafa Sa’eed had chosen his end, then he had undertaken the most melodramatic act in the story of his life.”⁷¹ The frequent repetition of “melodramatic” draws attention to the fact that mīlūdrāmiya is a transliterated loan word which cannot in any way be connected to the Arabic root system.

A few interesting phrases and proverbs stand out in their performative function and sometimes break the fourth wall. When the narrator says, “silent not as the grave but as a ship that has cast anchor in mid-ocean,”⁷² we see how Salih deliberately evokes the hackneyed English phrase “silent as a grave” and changes it to try and access the deeper meaning of her silence. This dead English metaphor is operative culturally but also not quite capable to describe the new situation and it becomes alive in Arabic, but it still is meant to evoke the English for the reader that understand both languages. In this manner Salih questions the usefulness of old phrases in the new postcolonial world which requires new words. The same is true for the moment Wad Reyyes is said to have “changed women as he changed donkeys,”⁷³ which is a play on “change like socks.” The hackneyed construction is the same but adapted to the local setting. It is as if Salih is trying to affect or at least evoke English while writing in Arabic. An alternative is of course that it sounds jarring in Arabic, and not at all local, which too would show certain migration at work.

When the narrator says that the sun “is exactly in the liver of the sky, as the Arabs say,”⁷⁴ we have an example of a very unusual move. Salih adds the source of the phrase as if the text was originally in English and not Arabic. We must assume that such a phrase would be understood by the Arabic readers just as “the apple of my eye” would be by English readers. Furthermore, it contains a reference to what the Arabs used to say historically (thus evoking a migration between precolonial-colonial–postcolonial eras). This additional emphasis shows that the text considers non-Arabic-speaking readers for whom such a phrase would be quite strange. The English discourse delivered in Arabic creates defamiliarization in the reader of the Arabic version because the part “as the Arabs say” is surely superfluous.⁷⁵

Furthermore, I reacted to the translator’s choice of rendering a phrase such as “for the sake of Allah”⁷⁶ and some other similar cases in this manner, instead of the typical/hackneyed “for God’s sake.” This choice makes it more exotic, Venuti’s foreignization, and I cannot see that the text calls for that. In other places Allah is simply rendered as God, as it should be, not to give a sense it is a separate god of Muslims. It is clear from numerous scenes where the characters repeat certain religious phrases, like “There is no power and no strength save in God,”⁷⁷that the narrator considers them to be said by rote, like hackneyed phrases.

In contrast, and quite significant for my thesis, is the fact that the word “hijra” in the title is translated as migration rather than transliterated. This word, especially since it defines the main theme of the novel, has the cultural connotations of the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, which is the starting point of the Hijri calendar, and which would be familiar to Western audiences. This is significant because it places the notion of migration at the core of being Muslim or even human existence in general (we find this omnipresent in the Bible as well). This is why the narrator goes out to travel with the tribes, for instance. Like Sa’eed, he is split between being migratory and sedentary: “I, like millions of mankind, walk and move, generally by force of habit, in a long caravan that ascends and descends, encamps and then proceeds on its way.”⁷⁸ Colonialism and forced movements of populations made migration acquire negative connotations, but originally it is a core idea of human life. It is no surprise then, that we find this core in the novel even at the level of language. Had the translator used “hijra” it would call attention to itself, again like in Venuti’s foreignization, and become entirely opposite of the rather transparent use of “migration,” which is in no way domestication. On the other hand, if the Arabic readers miss the fact that the title draws on the Prophetic heritage, it means that “hijra” too has become devoid of its historical depth like the proverbs Sa’eed uses. Translating it with a word that will sound hackneyed is then quite appropriate, but it also shows that the text really asks to be read in two languages.

Lastly, I want to bring up perhaps the most hackneyed phrase in the history of literature, a phrase that wraps up Sa’eed’s story in that final revelation that employs the end of Othello: “I love you.”⁷⁹ Killing his wife, Sa’eed finds this phrase to be said in absolute truth and brimming with meaning, just like Othello really believed he killed Desdemona out of pure love. However, having conditioned the readers into suspicion, this is wishful thinking. We see how Sa’eed’s infatuation emptied him of proper agency. What precedes the murder is the marriage scene which unsettles the ground: “I Jean Winfried Morris accept this man Mustafa Sa’eed Othman as my lawfully wedded husband, for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.”⁸⁰ It is clear that the reader is reading the Arabic translation of the prescribed phrases of the marital vows, which have a deep meaning, and yet these phrases must be said regardless of whether one means them. In other words, these too are hackneyed phrases. Salih shows this when Jean cries violently to persuade the Registrar she is deeply in love with Sa’eed, but immediately upon exiting the court she laughs and says, “What a farce.”⁸¹ She is entirely ambiguous, and like him, can be both-and and neither-nor: “betray both anger and a smile.”⁸² This is exactly how the narrator sees Sa’eed, as simultaneously the most unique and authentic individual and the most inauthentic exotic image which Anna names ‘“Moozie’ as a pet name.”⁸³ In other words, Salih leaves it up to the reader to decide if Sa’eed was like deep amthāl or just another hackneyed phrase.

Conclusion

I have argued that Tayeb Salih’s world-literary classic Season of Migration to the North is a text that not only exhibits features of postcolonial hybridity in terms of its content, characterization, and setting, but also in terms of its formal features, intertextual hauntings and language. Putting the Arabic text into dialogue with Johnson-Davies’ English translation reveals a unique set of lingual migrations. I argued that one cannot regard the Arabic text as original and English as secondary. Rather, English and Arabic are co-originary languages of this novel, which seems the most natural way of expressing the postcolonial nervous conditions of the ambivalent characters of the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed. I employed “hackneyed phrases” as a metaphor for such lingual migrations which are sometimes presented as deliberate postcolonial strategies while also being something that could be considered as part and parcel of the postcolonial unconscious, the uncanny. For this reason, I have argued that this restless migration between dichotomies produced by colonial history constitutes the core of the novel.

Furthermore, I have shown the importance of this feature as being a unique strategy embedded in the language and the aesthetics of the colonized, employed instead of the typical creolization of the colonial language prevalent in modern postcolonial writings. In other words, the writing back is not a simple vector, an arrow targeted at the former colonizer. Rather it is a multidirectional struggle, moving simultaneously between different targets/locations. This is why, to repeat one of the examples, both the Arabic and the English texts contain not only strong features of both languages, but also long passages which discursively may or may not be translations. This technique forces the readers to engage more actively with the abovementioned migrations and be aware of the processes of cross-cultural translation.

More broadly, this analysis opens new possibilities of reading not only postcolonial literature, but also new forms of world literature that is increasingly shaped by globalization and in particular by the world’s lingua franca, English. It calls for considerations of translingual writing beyond the notions of domestication and foreignization in old literature as well as new world literary ecologies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All textual references will be to Johnson-Davis’ translation. In some instances, where it is important, I will provide the Arabic text.

2 Samatar, “Verticality and Vertigo,” 37.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., 29.

5 In this article I will refer to all the characters using the spelling of their names in the English translation, rather than transliterating the Arabic.

6 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 35.

 .(38) “ ذخيرتي من الأمثال لا تنفد ”

7 By fidelity translation studies often mean “semantic fidelity, representation politics, or mimetic truth” (Stanton loc 610).

8 See Parry, “Reflections on the Excess of Empire.”

9 Stanton, The Worlding of Arabic Literature, loc 541.

10 An anecdotal note, which resonates with my interpretation, but whose content I have not been able to find in any published work: I asked a former MA student of mine–who is Sudanese, and who wrote her thesis on Salih–if she too had this sense when reading the Arabic, and she answered that Rex O’Fahi, a history professor at Bergen University who happened to be a friend of Salih’s, related to her that Salih told him that in the process of writing Season he “realized that he was actually writing in English (in his mind) and then came to write down in Arabic what seemed to be a fully structured English paragraph. That was an extraordinary statement for me to hear but it partially explains that elusive, hard to pin down unfamiliarity I sense when I read his work.”

11 Helgesson and Kullberg, “Translingual Events,” 138.

12 Calbi, “Othello’s Ghostly Remainders”; Laouyene, ““I Am No Othello. I Am a Lie”; Quayson, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature; Harlow, “Othello’s Season of Migration”; Caminero-Santangelo, “Legacies of Darkness”; Ford, “Migratory Rhetorics”; Krishnan, “Reinscribing Conrad”; Maalouf, “Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-Visited”; Shaheen, “Tayeb Salih and Conrad”; McDonald, “Psychic Occupation”; Rajiva, “The Instant of Waking from the Nightmare’”.

13 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 28–9.

14 Ibid., 21.

15 Ibid., 22.

16 Ibid., 49–50.

17 Parry, “Reflections on the Excess of Empire in Tayeb Salih’s”, 73.

18 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 358–59.

19 Huebener, “Metaphor and Madness as Postcolonial Sites”, 25.

20 Hamilton, “The Minor Movement of the Abject-Hybrid”, 59.

21 Rajiva, “The Instant of Waking from the Nightmare”, 689.

22 Laouyene, “I Am No Othello. I Am a Lie”, 222.

23 Maalouf, “Tayeb Salih and Joseph Conrad Re-Visited”, 161.

24 Ibid., 164.

25 Makdisi, 81.

26 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 33.

27 Ibid., 95.

28 Ibid., 143.

29 See Calbi’s more extensive analysis.

30 Samatar, “Verticality and Vertigo”, 26.

31 See Tareq El-Ariss’ Trials of Arab Modernity.

32 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 14.

33 Ibid., 20.

34 Ibid., 23.

35 Ibid., 27.

36 Ibid., 32–3.

37 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 27.

 .(33) “ حق اذا ضاجعت امرأة ،بدا كأنني اضاجع حريما كاملا في آن واحد ”

38 Ibid., 30.

39 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 30 and 34.

40 Ibid., 29.

41 Ibid., 29–30.

42 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 35.

43 Ibid., 14.

44 Ibid., 15.

 .(17) فقلت له بالانجليزي، عمداً شيء مدهش

45 Al-Halool, 34.

46 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 44. The “afreet” image comes back two times (14, 74). The afreet is indeed a local legend, but in this case, the scene is perfect for a mixed audience. The Westernised narrator is expecting the exotic and he gets the exotic. This is repeated in Sa’eed’s all-too-Western library where the narrator hallucinates: “the whole floor of the room was covered with Persian rugs. … A fireplace – imagine it! A real English fireplace with all the bits and pieces” (136).

47 Jurdi, “Arabic Poetics through a Canonical Translation”, 82.

48 Ibid., 82.

49 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 63, 76, 78.

50 Ibid., 110.

51 Ibid., 79.

52 Ibid., 61–2.

 .(66) “ وحين يبين الخيط الأبيض من الخيط الاسود ”

53 Ibid., 81.

54 Ibid., 78.

55 Ibid., 107.

56 Jurdi, “Arabic Poetics through a Canonical Translation”, 85.

57 Ibid., 85

58 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 151.

59 Ibid., 65–67.

60 Ibid., 143.

 .(144) “ انت جميل تجل عن الوصف، و انا احبك حباً يجب عن الوصف وقالت باللغة العربية ”

61 Ibid., 35.

62 Jurdi, “Arabic Poetics through a Canonical Translation”, 86.

63 Ibid., 87.

64 Siddiq, 101.

65 Salih, 41.

66 Ibid., 108.

67 Siddiq, 104.

68 Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 60.

69 Ibid., 64.

70 Ibid., 154.

71 Ibid., 67.

72 Ibid., 88.

 .(91) “ ساكنة، لا كالمقبرة، ولكن كالسفينة ألقت مرايها في عرض البحر ”

73 Ibid., 96.

 .(100) “ يبدل النساء كما يبدل الحمير ”

74 Ibid., 111.

 .(114) “ انها الآن في كبد السماء تماما، كما يقول العرب ”

75 In addition, an interesting, very English-sounding phrase occurs twice: “old windbag” (99, 102), where the word muẖrif denotes an older person suffering from dementia but also someone that speaks nonsense. “Windbag” is a person who speaks a lot but it’s all empty phrases. Also note the phrase that is not tweaked in: ‘“People like you are the legal heirs of authority … you’re salt of the earth,’” to which Mahjoub answers with a laugh ‘“If we’re the salt of the earth … then the earth is without flavour” (99).

76 Ibid., 109.

77 Ibid., 124, 127.

 .(125, 128) “ لا حول ولا قوة الا بالله ”

78 Ibid., 61.

79 Ibid., 165.

80 Ibid., 158.

 .(160) انا جين ونفرد مورس أقبل هذا الرجل مصطفى سعيد عثمان زوجي الشرعي في السراء والضراء في الفقر والغنى في الصحة والمرض

81 Ibid., 158.

82 Ibid., 155.

83 Ibid., 147.