The Mocking Phantom: The Nihilistic Double, Unreal Bodies and the Psychic Spaces

of the Unconscious in Tayeb Salihs Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salihs metafictional novel, Season of Migration to the North was published (1966) when the
country had just experienced the overthrow of the home-grown military government and the introduction
of a parliamentary system. Thus, begun in 1960 and finished in 1966, the novel belongs to a seismic period
of Arab nationalism in an increasingly globalised world, with the writing of the novel also beginning four
years after the independence of Sudan from British colonial rule. The novel is beset by a displaced Arab
reality and consciousness, a potentially catastrophic rift within Arab society, and an uncompromising
figuration of the return of the repressed (Freud 159-185). This notion is clear in the Byronic anti-hero,
Mustafa Saeed, whom has a nihilistic detachment from reality. The phantom, like the repetitive phrases
that invoke it in the novel, is a revenant, something that returns. This indicates a spectre that appears in
dreams or to the narrator in a non-rational space. Its mocking character signifies Mustafas dark
solipsistic and psychosomatic role as the narrators uncanny double or doppelganger, a projection of the
narrators repressed. Psychoanalytically, the protean Mustafa epitomises Freuds uncanny, appearing
metaphysically between time and space in absurd heterotopic landscapes which Foucault defines as
distorted Other Spaces: ones that unfold inverted as an illusory, ironic reflection of tangible real spaces.
In Season, the narrator experiences the Freudian dislocation of being unheimlich (uncanny), of spaces
becoming heterotopic through his alienation from reality. Mustafas fictional life within the novel
coincides with the era of British colonisation of Sudan. He is born in 1898, which is historically framed by
the battle of Omdurman, in which Kitchener brutally defeated the Mahdist forces and completed the
conquest of Sudan. Mustafa is a psychic phenomenon as a metaphoric product of empire, contextually
circumscribing the era of the height and decline of colonialism from 1898 through 1939, in the light of the
ever-shifting national identity and political and cultural landscape of Sudan.
Mustafas posturing as the sexualised European fantasy of the Orient concretises his non-identity as the
metaphysical lie that was [his] life (Salih 29). This notion is conveyed by Salih through Mustafas self-
exoticised London apartment, his fetishized den of lethal lies (Salih 146), grotesquely decorated by
mismatched cultural articles. This heterotopia, the apotheosis of Mustafas psychological spaces, mirrors
the way English imagination has constructed Africa, a space that exists as an illusion in the colonial mind-
set. For Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood, Mustafas body metonymically projects imaginary exotic
landscapes, a depiction of transgressive desire. Ann, for example, desires his very aura: the jungles of
Africa the smells of rains in the deserts of Arabia (Salih 142). In Mustafas cryptic refrain, Victoria
Station is always identified with the world of Jean Morris (Salih 33). Unlike the other women but like
Mustafa, Jean is displaced from the material world as an omnipresent mirage belonging to nowhere in
time or space. Her liminal state is between human and nonhuman, presence and absence. Jean and her
psycho-space are ungraspable, unattainable, a mirage [that] shimmered in the wilderness of longing
(Salih 33). Muhammad Siddiq points out that their inscrutability parallels each other, and that detached as
they are from a human setting, originate in and inhabit the unconscious (82-4).
Jean, in the phantasmagoric space of the apartment, destroys the emblems of Mustafas illusory exoticism.
Thus, his solipsistic lie form is revealed as the objects represent layers of identity, which she strips from
him successively, revealing his true form of a disincarnate nihilistic void the shadow of the civilised
man. The Wedgwood vase signifies his Anglicised identity, destroying Mustafas illusion of a civilised
native or Black Englishman (Salih 53). The next layer is Arab-Islamic, symbolised by the Arabic
manuscript, it is like his very liver (Salih 156-7), and Jeans chewing of it is metaphorically
cannibalistic, which assigns Jean to an infamous trait of barbarism that gave Europeans the moral
justification for conquering Africa. The only object that validates his spiritual and emotional existence, the
prayer rug, is destroyed and thus completes his exorcism, disembodiment and Orphean journey in
follow[ing] her to hell (Salih 157). Salih sharply juxtaposes the subordinate roles of the earlier women
with the intangible Jean through the use of images describing his failure to possess her (grasping at
clouds bedding a shooting-star [Salih 34]).
Mustafas silence in the courtroom scene symbolises his spectral, disincarnate existence and recalls the
existential nihilism of Camus Meursault. Salih similarly characterises Mustafa as an absurdist character,
perhaps a product of the existentialist philosophy and literature that appeared in contemporary 1960s. As
he accounts his life story to the narrator, Mustafa says that everything which happened before her was a
premonition for the lie that was my life (Salih 29). As a product of the narrators and European
imagination Mustafa Saeed does not exist. Hes an illusion, a lie (Salih 32). Mustafas lie conforms
him to what Homi Bhabha terms the mimic man, his mimicry of imperial systems and exotic primitivism
makes him a phantom of colonialism as the mime that haunts mimesis (Bhabha 115). Similarly he haunts
the narrator as his double whom he incarcerates in this metaphysical postcolonial purgatory half-way
between north and south unable to continue, unable to return (Salih 167). The power of cultural or
colonial hybrids lies in their capacity to manipulate the in between space (Bhabha 38). This can be seen
in Mustafas library that contains not a single Arabic book (Salih 137), even his copy of the Quran is a
translation thus symbolising the spiritual-existential angst of a repressed Arab-Islamic identity a library
that allegorises not enlightenment, but an inner darkness and despair.
The narrator draws analogies to similar heterotopic spaces: a graveyard. A mausoleum. An insane idea. A
prison. A huge joke (Salih 137). Similarly, Mustafas bedroom, a seductive den of lies, was a graveyard
(Salih 30) and like an operating theatre in a hospital (Salih 31) and as graveyard or mausoleum, it is a
heterotopic space of the dead that mirrors the space of the living. Further, as an ironic space, a huge joke
(Salih 137), Mustafas room signifies the rootlessness of their reality. Mustafas enigmatic disappearance
is unexplained in the novel. No body is found in the flood and it is as if his apparition simply evaporates,
that Mustafa never happened a phantom, a dream or a nightmare appearing one suffocatingly dark
night and then being nowhere to be seen (Salih 46). After his alleged drowning, Mustafa becomes a
Derridean spectre present throughout his absence that sees the narrator without being seen by him.

Mustafas relationship with the narrator is multi-layered, and indeed within the narrative Mustafa also
takes on the solipsistic projected form of the narrators dark doppelganger. They are refracted mirror
images of one another, evoking a bizarre nihilistic situation of the narrator being involved in a mimetic
rivalry with a ghost. Two voices in the polyphonic narrative begin to coalesce as one, as thematic,
structural, and stylistic correspondences in the novel also suggest that Mustafa is the narrator's double or
alter-ego; such as the seven years Mustafa spends in jail exactly match the number of years the narrator
spends in England. The extrovert and philanderer Mustafa is the ideal alter-ego for such an introvert of
anaesthetised passivity. The fact is brought to culmination when the narrator experiences a hallucinatory
vision in Mustafas room of inner-consciousness: out of the darkness emerged my adversary Mustafa
Saeed I found myself standing face to face with myself a picture of me frowning at my face from a
mirror (Salih 135). He then opens Mustafas Life Story (Salih 150) and finds it empty.
Mustafa exists in the psycho-space of night-time (I heard his voice on that night, darkly rising and
falling on a stormy, icy night, under a starless sky [Salih 140, 67]), the realm of unconscious marked by
negativity or a nihilistic unreality. Following Freud, Mustafa becomes a double or introspective projection
articulating the narrators repressed libidinal drives or ego as Raja Nima argues: Mustafa is no more than
a substitute for restless needs lying in the innermost depths of the narrator (83). Incidents in the narrative
involving sexuality and murder are directly avoided by the narrator. Instead, he displaces his sexual and
murderous drives into the external projection of his double. Through his encounter with Mustafa, the novel
depicts the disintegration of the narrators conception of identity and the self. He epiphanically understands
his migration not as a physical one between south and north, but rather a metaphysical passage or
dislocation between two static worlds, as undertones of the obfuscatory fog of the psychic forces of
exclusion and repression disrupt the construction of his own identity (something like fog rose up between
them and me [Salih 1]).
The fact that Mustafa is noticed only by the narrator and seems to appear predominantly when the narrator
is alone; and the very fact that the narrator is unnamed and twice reminds other people of Mustafa, further
suggests that the narrator and Mustafa are one and the same person. The narrators admitted inability to get
him out of his mind are all characteristics of the repressed phenomenon of the double. Otto Rank says that
the double attracts only the attention of the one whose double he is but is invariably never noticed by
others and the impulse to rid oneself of the uncanny opponent in a violent manner is also among the
essential features of this motif (30-1). The narrator is caught up in an agonizing conflict between his
involuntary, almost morbid, attraction to Mustafa and a deep aversion to him. This conflict could be
described as one between consciousness and the unconscious, the repressed or unrealized. The narrator is
tainted by Western culture and, like the geopolitically manufactured countries of North Africa, cannot
reconcile the conflicting forces within one body. Further, this emphasises confusion over Arab-Afro
identity as the assimilation of two cultural identities since the Arab conquest of North Africa in AD 639
(Tageldin 85), triggering vast transformations of African land into Islamic zones.
Mustafas uncanniness makes his very presence disturbing, like a mocking phantom (Salih 10) that
displaces the nameless narrator in Wad Hamid and alienates him. As his double, Mustafa forces the
narrator to face his existential crisis of identity and nihilistically destabilises his grasp on reality,
descending into a solipsistic angst (He had said that he was a lie, so was I also a lie? [Salih 49]). Thus the
profoundly disturbing effect of Mustafa on the narrator arises from the fact that the former embodies a
haunting spectre of everything the latter seeks to repress within himself, but plagues him in moments that
seem metaphysical, outside the boundaries of time and space suspended between earth and sky (Salih
48): a ghastly, nightmarish feeling that we were not a reality but merely some illusion (Salih 14-5).
Mustafa is the dark devil of alterity: his eyes wandering off into the horizons within himself the ground
split and revealed an afreet standing before me, his eyes shooting out flames (Salih 14-5).
Thus Mustafas disturbing solipsistic appearance describes the experience of the uncanny, which in the
novel is the encounter with an unexpected and repressed outside element, where the boundaries between
imagination and reality are erased - in this case - the double. The border between reality and illusion, or
lies, is porous, leading to an apprehension of the world as fundamentally untrustworthy, a haunted place.
This is integrated into the novel which can be termed postcolonial Gothic through the use of fantasy, and
particularly its uncanny form, to express the postcolonial condition. Through the process of repression, the
safe haven of the familiar becomes self-haunted by ghosts of the unconscious, a phenomenon that
transforms otherwise comfortable and familiar setting into a place that feels inexorably strange. Bhabha,
for example, describes the unhomely, his term for the Freudian uncanny, as a paradigmatic colonial
and post-colonial condition (13) and the obscure signs of the spirit-world, the sublime and the
subliminal (17).
The nihilistic projection of Mustafa totally engulfs the narrators psycho-space, this is symbolised by the
omnipresence of the sun that is to him the embodiment of absurd cosmic malevolence that leaves him
powerless and passive: an old blood feud existed between it [the sun] and the people of the earth; the sun
melts the brain and paralyses thought (Salih 105-6) so that the narrator muses that this is the land of
despair and poetry but there is nobody to sing (Salih 110). The narrator succumbs to the dark unrealized
side of his personality. The archetypal dimensions of Mustafas personality are intricately interwoven into
his psychological makeup. Imagery of the universal and cosmic is the language of the unconscious (Carl
Jung 267): a dazzling flash, bright as the sun at its heighta complete experience, outside his
consciousness (Salih 51). This description conveys the nihilistic concept that human action is a
meaningless absurdity in the grand order of the universe. This endemic nihilism is elegiacally externalised
in a phantasmagoric landscape where the stones groan, the trees weep, and iron cries out for help No
taste. Nothing of good. Nothing of evil (Salih 111). Nature is anthropomorphised through pathetic fallacy
of images as nihilism becomes the law of the universe, absolving humans of meaning a festival to
nothingness (Salih 114). In the narrative, despite the evil of patriarchal hegemony in the village, the
narrator chooses to do nothing and takes refuge in the nihilistic pseudo-philosophical view that evil and
injustice are part of the system of the universe leading to cataclysmic violence. In the narrators
phantasmal world only nature acts and humans are solipsistic spectres of inactivity and inexistence as the
world has turned suddenly upside down (Salih 133).
Mustafas nonexistence, consequently, is due to his unreality in an abstract, eroticised vision of the
Orient. As a self-conjured image from imagination, he descends into a solipsistic purgatory as an
Orphean character. In Season the narrator follows his double, Mustafa, whom is a representation of his
unconscious, into subterranean galleries, which open up like gateways into other dimensions. Salih thus
evidences a control over the chiasmic relationship between the seemingly opposed parts of the narrative
that transcend colonial barriers: the unconscious and conscious, unreality and reality. Published
prophetically on the eve of Naksa (El-Ariss 89), the catastrophic Arab defeat against Israel (1967) and a
civil war that lasted seventeen years, the novel brings latent tensions to the surface. It exposes and reflects
the idea of postcolonial or colonised subjects becoming an illusion, a nonexistence in a metaphysical space
as cultures are displaced and destroyed by the contagion of colonial influences. Thus, worlds become
heterotopic and in a nihilistic sense meaningless and absurd - trapped in a psychic limbo or alternate
reality as transcultural hybrids. In the mirage-haunted world, Salih suggests that the colonised subject may
be unable to identify the self. The mirage or phantom world exists in an interdependent, symbiotic
relationship with the world of material reality: it marks reality as hybrid, suspended in communion with
alterity. Surpassing the coherent narrative of anticolonial retribution, is a formation of the repressed and
detached Afro-Arab consciousness and reality, which is expressed existentially by Salih as Freuds
uncanny. This in the novel constitutes a metaphysical nothingness, a devastating absurdist denunciation
of life and existential despair. The uncanny doubles, Mustafa and narrator, blur their identities and
become symbols of this competition of self and other, a grotesquerie revealing the depth of the sickness
between peoples fragmented by colonialism in a postcolonial world of existential chaos.