Student research project on topic selection

Colonialism in the Tempest and Season of Migration to the North

Both William Shakespeare's play The Tempest and Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North deal with the cultural tensions arising as a result of colonialism, albeit in different historical moments and from different sides of the colonizer-colonized relationship. Whereas The Tempest deals with the European reaction to the colonization of the then-New World and follows a European protagonist confronting a demonized other, Season of Migration to the North follows two protagonists' mirrored experiences returning to Sudan from their time in England and dealing with the difficulties of integrating their Sudanese and English cultural identities. The two texts offer a way of understanding not only the varied reactions to colonialism and its consequences, but also how these reactions have been received and interpreted by a critical audience. By examining The Tempest and Season of Migration to the North along with critical responses to these texts, it will be possible to see how Season of Migration to the North uses the colonizer's fears of retribution as expressed in The Tempest as a way of considering the trauma of colonization and actively combating the cultural stereotypes deployed in the name of colonialism.

Before considering the broader ramifications of either text's consideration of colonialism, it will be useful to examine each text for those moments in which colonialism becomes most relevant, and its ramifications are felt most explicitly. In The Tempest, the character of Caliban is most commonly the focus of any investigation into the play's consideration of colonialism, and a look at his back story as well as his relationship to the protagonist Prospero will reveal why.

By the time Prospero and his daughter Miranda are exiled to the island which serves as the setting of the play, Caliban has already been living there for some time. His mother, Sycorax, was banished "for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing, from Argier," and "left by the sailors" on the island while she was pregnant with Caliban (Shakespeare 1.2.264-265,270). Immediately Caliban's character is identified with the effects of colonialism, because his mother is banished from her home in Africa for practicing ill-defined "mischiefs manifold and sorceries" too terrible to enter "human" hearing, and in this case, as Prospero is the speaker, "human" really means "European." This distinction, between the "human" Europeans and the inhuman other is repeated when Prospero tells of Caliban's birth, calling him "A freckled whelp hag-born -- not honour'd with / A human shape" (Shakespeare 1.2.283-284). Prospero's treatment of Caliban conforms to many of the stereotypes relied upon by colonizers to justify their inhumane treatment of colonized peoples, and the relationship between Prospero and Caliban closely mirrors the interactions between early English settlers in America and Native Americans.

When Caliban is first introduced in the play, he recounts that he and Prospero initially had a mutually beneficial relationship, remarking "When thou camest first / Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me / Water with berries in't, and teach me how / To name the bigger light, and how the less / That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee / And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle / The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile" (Shakespeare 1.2.332-338). This story hews very closely to the favored colonialist narrative of "civilizing" the inhabitants of conquered lands, with the "animalistic" native gratefully showing his colonial master the ins and outs of living in the New World of the island. Prospero belabors this point, telling Caliban "I pitied thee / Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour / One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes / With words that made them known." However, Prospero eventually finds fault with Caliban, telling him that "But thy vile race / Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures / Could not abide to be with" (Shakespeare 1.2.353-360). That Prospero finds this fault in Caliban's "vile race" rather than his individual character reveals the former character's unabashed bigotry, and thus leaves some suspicion as to the veracity of Prospero's claims regarding Caliban's moral deficiencies.

Even the reason for their falling out follows a common European colonialist stereotype of conquered minorities; Prospero accuses Caliban of attempting to rape Miranda. While at first glance one might be inclined to believe Prospero, Miranda does not mention the attempted rape, and throughout the play Prospero is shown to be a cruel, bigoted, and overly unreliable character. In fact, the moments in which Prospero directly contradicts himself or otherwise makes statements in direct conflict with reality are far too frequent to list here, but it is safe to assert that Prospero's word can only ever be regarded with a cautious skepticism. Following the accusation, Caliban does not deny that Prospero prevented him from peopling "this isle with Calibans," but he does not remark one way or the other as to Prospero's particular characterization of the event. The veracity of Prospero's claim remains in doubt, but regardless, the accusation coupled with Prospero's treatment of Caliban and their previously harmonious relationship demonstrates how Caliban is used to represent the anxieties of the colonizer in regards to the revolutionary or otherwise uncooperative potential of the colonized. This detail is important to note, because the character of Mustafa Sa'eed in Season of Migration to the North represents an inversion of these tropes, enacting the colonizer's worst fears in an ultimately fruitless attempt at revenge.

In Season of Migration to the North, the unnamed protagonist attempts to piece together the story of Mustafa Sa'eed, a resident of his village whom the narrator meets upon his return to Sudan after studying in England, and who has had a disturbingly parallel experience to the narrator. Although the problems of colonialism are pervasive throughout the story, as the aforementioned summary suggests, Sa'eed's romantic experiences in England serve as the crux of the story, and are the location of the greatest congruence between The Tempest and Season of Migration to the North. While in England, Sa'eed seduces four women, with at least two of them eventually committing suicide and the fourth, his wife, dying at his own hand. The word "seduce" is used here intentionally, because Sa'eed's own description paints this picture, ultimately enacting the patriarchal colonizer's fear of the Other's sexuality expressed by Prospero's accusation of Caliban. In particular, Sa'eed points out his own destructively seductive nature in his interactions with Isabella Seymour. He tells her that, "I mean you no harm, except to the extent that the sea is harmful when ships are wrecked against its rocks, and to the extent that the lightning is harmful when it rends a tree in two," and after she "cried out weakly 'No. No.'," Sa'eed gives the clearest description of his nature: "This will be of no help to you now. The critical moment when it was in your power to refrain from taking the first step has been lost. I caught you unawares; at that time it was in your power to say 'No'" (Salih 35, 37). Sa'eed is undoubtedly conflicted about his role; he frequently compares himself to Othello, and seems to understand that he is enacting a very specific stereotype regarding colonized peoples and minorities. However, his enactment of this stereotype can be seen as intentional, like a self-destructive way of enacting said stereotype in order to purge it from a collective consciousness.

When his representative defends Sa'eed in his trial regarding the deaths of the women, Sa'eed imagines shouting "this is untrue, a fabrication. It was I who killed them. I am the desert of thirst […] I am a lie. Why don't you sentence me to be hanged and so kill the lie?" (Salih 29). This is because Sa'eed is well aware that he is enacting a role, so that the "lie" he claims to be is the lie of a colonialist stereotype, that might finally be disregarded if only through its enactment and destruction via the execution of Sa'eed. Of course, this does not occur, and Sa'eed returns to Sudan to complicate the life of the narrator, showing that engaging in the stereotypes of colonialism only serves to reinvigorate them (although this should not be taken to mean that by including a character like Sa'eed Season of Migration to the North itself reinvigorates these stereotypes). Although the colonial connection between Season of Migration to the North and The Tempest is clear when comparing the sexually threatening characters of Mustafa Sa'eed and Caliban, it will be beneficial to examine additional critical work on either text, both as a way to substantiate the claims made here as well as discuss alternate interpretations of the texts.

In his essay "Rethinking the discourse of colonialism in economic terms: Shakespeare's The Tempest, captain John Smith's Virginia narratives, and the English response to vagrancy," Paul Cefalu examines how the colonialist elements in The Tempest (along with the other texts mentioned) can be considered in economic terms as well as racial or ethnic ones. He notes that "anticolonialist critics have sought to "demystify the national myths" of empire and to write an alternative history of the colonial encounter" by focusing on "the politics of the early modern English-Native American encounter" with an eye towards "moments of textual rupture and contradiction in early modern texts such as The Tempest" (Cefalu 85). One may identify the scene of Prospero's accusation as one such moment, and indeed Cefalu examines Caliban extensively, albeit in relation to his economic status as a colonized individual, rather than his racial or ethnic status. According to Cefalu, Caliban "learns not one, but two languages in the play […]: the language taught to him by Miranda is the language of a natural economy and precapitalist values; the language he internalizes by the end of the play (one that he teaches himself) approximates the language of instrumental labor and capital" (Cefalu 106). Cefalu still sees Caliban as the locus of colonial discourse in The Tempest, but focuses on the economic colonization represented via Caliban's character rather than the racial or ethnic tensions which are embodied by Prospero's colonialist bigotry.

Cefalu's interpretation is important because it offers some context for the consideration of Caliban and Prospero offered here. Bigotry and racism is rarely an end in itself, but is rather is most often deployed as a means of justifying the atrocities committed in the name of an ulterior ideology, and in this case (and much of colonial history) the particular ideology served by bigotry is capitalism. Thus, Cefalu's analysis does not contradict the assertion that Caliban and Prospero's relationship is predicated on ethnic hostility and colonialist stereotypes, but rather points out that their combative relationship ultimately serves capitalism's purpose.

In contrast to Cefalu's interpretation of The Tempest, Patricia Geesey's analysis of Season of Migration to the North challenges this essay's consideration of Mustafa Sa'eed, describing him as "a cultural hybrid, the resulting offspring from the colonial union of Great Britain and the Arab-African nation of the Sudan" who struggles with integrating either cultural identity into his psyche, rather than a strictly vengeful character embodying the colonial fears of Great Britain (Geesey 129). In her essay "Cultural hybridity and contamination in Tayeb Salih's Mawsim al-hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North)," Geesey notes that "for many scholars, Mustafa Sa'eed's own self-comparisons to Othello have made it difficult not to see in his character a man who exacts vengeance upon British colonizers of the Sudan through his sexual exploits with women in London," but proposes that "it is a mistake to assume that the confrontation between Sa'eed and the English women is indicative of the colonial confrontation played out between Africa and Europe," because "to view Sa'eed's sexual conquests as a colonized person's vendetta is to fall into the trap of cultural stereotyping that is at once Sa'eed's weapon of seduction against the women and ultimately his own downfall" (Geesey 129).

Though Geesey admits that the "multilayered historical, cultural, literary, and economic relationships at play between the Arab/African world and Western Europe" represented in the novel support a number of readings, she does not consider the aforementioned interpretation of Sa'eed as valid. The problem with this claim, however, is that in her brief critique of the "vengeful colonized person" interpretation, Geesey fails to distinguish between Sa'eed and the novel itself. As mentioned before (and as mentioned by Geesey!), Sa'eed enacts cultural stereotypes specifically to deploy them as "weapons of seduction," so one cannot consider Sa'eed's character without acknowledging how these stereotypes define Sa'eed. Thus, viewing "Sa'eed's sexual conquests as a colonized person's vendetta" does not force one to "fall into the trap of cultural stereotyping," but rather allows one to consider how Sa'eed, by himself falling into the trap of cultural stereotyping, allows the novel as a whole to actually challenge those stereotypes.