ARTICLE

Gender (and) Imperialism

Structures of Masculinity in Tayeb Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North

WAÏL S. HASSAN
Illinois State University

The seamless continuity between colonialism, racism, and patriarchy makes it impera-
tive for postcolonial criticism to question the foundational category of gender. As Judith
Butler argues, gender postulates a normative masculinity poised against a femininity
construed as lack or deviation. This normative masculinity asserts itself in colonial dis-
course, which, as Edward Said observes, represents a masculine Europe dominating a
feminized Orient. At the same time, racial discourse represents African men as
hypermasculine, as Frantz Fanon and Cornel West, among others, have observed. Thus,
the African man occupies at once masculine and feminine subject positions and, like-
wise, the European women figures ambivalently as both masculine and feminine. Tayeb
Salih’s Season of Migration to the North depicts such ambivalent spaces that enable a
critique of colonial and patriarchal notions of gender.

Key words: Tayeb Salih, postcolonialism, gender, Orientalism, racism

RACE, GENDER, AND

COLONIAL SUBJECTIVITY

The seamless continuity between colonialism, racism, and patriarchy

makes it imperative for postcolonial criticism to call into question the foun-
dational category of gender. As Judith Butler (1990) demonstrated, gender
postulates a normative masculinity poised against a femininity construed as
lack or deviation. This normative masculinity asserts itself in colonial dis-
course, which casts Europe in a masculine role of dominating a feminized
Orient (Said 1978). At the same time, racial discourse represents African
men as hypermasculine (Fanon 1967; West 1993). The convergence of colo-
nial and racial stereotypes, therefore, produces a troubled gender configura-
tion in which an African man occupies masculine and feminine subject posi-
tions and in which, conversely, a European woman occupies the equally
uncertain positions of masculinity and femininity. In other words, the cate-
gory of race often destabilizes gendered colonial identities.

Men and Masculinities, Vol. 5 No. 3, January 2003 309-324

DOI: 10.1177/1097184X02238529
© 2003 Sage Publications
309

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310 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2003

Tayeb Salih’s (1966, 1969) Season of Migration to the North depicts such
ambivalent spaces where colonial power is dispersed and a critique of norma-
tive masculinity becomes possible. I propose to read the novel not only as a cri-
tique of British colonialism and of traditional Sudanese patriarchy, as other
critics have done, but also of the gender paradigm that normalizes colonial and
patriarchal hegemony. If colonial discourse is necessarily masculinist, the
novel clears a space for a radical rethinking of postcoloniality along
nonhegemonic lines and beyond dualistic conceptions of self/other, north/
south, and masculine/feminine. While some forms of anticolonial and
antiracist struggle have reinscribed hegemonic masculinity (Clarke 1998;
Stanovsky 1998), Salih’s novel demonstrates the futility of resisting one form
of hegemony by consolidating another.
The notion of masquerade is particularly useful in analyzing the treatment
of gender in Season. Lacan (1977) linked the concept of the “splitting” of the
subject to the distinct positions of “being” and “having” the phallus—the
phallus being understood here as a symbolic function: both as a condition for
“the establishment of the subject” (Lacan 1977, 288) and “the signifier of the
desire of the Other.” According to Lacan, being and having the phallus are the
respective feminine and masculine subject positions. The being of the phallus
involves a necessary masquerade: the attempt to embody the Other’s desire as
a conduit to one’s own. Such complicity can be found in a “woman [who] will
reject an essential part of femininity, namely all her attributes in the masquer-
ade” (p. 290). The passive rejection, which, for Lacan, defines femininity,
becomes, for Butler (1990), performative—an active control over representa-
tion, which, I suggest, could be extended to the colonized:

Women [or the colonized] are said to “be” the Phallus in the sense that they
maintain the power to reflect or represent the “reality” of the self-grounding
postures of the masculine [colonizing] subject, a power which, if withdrawn,
would break up the foundational illusions of the masculine subject position. In
order to “be” the Phallus, the reflector and guarantor of an apparent masculine
subject position, women must become, must “be” (in the sense of “posture as if
they were”) precisely what men [colonizers] are not and, in their very lack,
establish the essential function of men. Hence, “being” the Phallus is always a
“being for” a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his iden-
tity through the recognition of that “being for.” (P. 45)

In other words, the masculine subject position of the colonizer demands for
its confirmation (for its “having” of the phallus) that the colonized accept
through the performance of masquerade the feminine subject position that
constitutes the being of the phallus.
There are moments when colonial masquerade doubles on itself and turns
into a mockery of the dominant subject position, when femininity becomes a
parody of masculinity rather than its confirmation. Such slippage makes pos-
sible a reading of Salih’s novel that focuses on the splitting of colonial and

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 Hassan / GENDER (AND) IMPERIALISM 311

gender identities and shows how the masculine subject position disintegrates
in the tug of war between colonizer and colonized, man and woman. Not only
is confirmation withheld at those discursive moments but the hegemonic edi-
fice of masculinist/colonial discourse collapses.

MASCULINITIES AT THE EDGE

Season has received international acclaim both in the Middle East—where

Salih was celebrated as “the genius of the Arabic novel” (Muhammadiyya
1976)—and in the West, where it is regularly taught in Arabic, African, and
postcolonial literature courses. Mustafa Sa’eed, its protagonist, is a Sudanese
student who earns his doctorate in England and embarks on a sexual crusade
in which he seduces a number of English women, three of whom commit sui-
cide, and eventually murders his wife. After serving a prison sentence, he
returns to Sudan, assumes a false identity, and settles as a farmer in a village
called Wad Hamid. Several years later, he meets the narrator of the novel, a
Wad Hamidian who has also studied in England, and reveals his hidden past
to him.
Mustafa is a metaphor for colonial violence and a parody of European ste-
reotypes of Africa and the Orient. His life coincides with the period of British
colonization of Sudan: he is born on 16 August 1898, a date historically
framed by the battles of Atbara and Omdurman (June and September of that
year, respectively), in which Kitchner’s army crushed Mahdi forces and com-
pleted the conquest of Sudan; and he mysteriously disappears from Wad
Hamid shortly before the country’s formal independence in 1956. A brilliant
student in the colonial school, Mustafa is the first Sudanese to study in Eng-
land, become a lecturer in economics at London University, and marry an
English woman (Salih 1966, 59; 1969, 55).1 In other words, Mustafa repre-
sents the first contact between Sudanese intellectuals and Europe, in addition
to being historically and psychologically the product of colonialism.2
In London, Mustafa displays active political and scholarly commitment to
the anticolonial struggle, acting as the president of the Society for the Strug-
gle for African Freedom (Salih 1966, 122; 1969, 120) and writing books on
The Economics of Colonialism, Colonialism and Monopoly, The Cross and
the Gunpowder, and The Rape of Africa (Salih 1966, 138-39; 1969, 137).
However, the convergence of colonial and masculine violence echoed in the
title of Mustafa’s last book prompts him to carry out a grim revenge on colo-
nialism marked by sexism and misogyny “in the manner of Eldridge
Cleaver’s theory of the political uses of rape” (Accad 1985, 59). Mustafa
vows to “liberate Africa with [his] penis” (Salih 1966, 122; 1969, 120) and
couches his sexual exploits in the rhetoric of battle, images of Arab desert
warfare, and repeated references to the Arab conquest of Spain. For him,
seducing women is a reclamation of masculinity, a metonymic equivalent of

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312 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2003

conquering territory, and a symbolic revenge on Europe for the crime that
inspires the title of his book: dephallicizing, feminizing, and raping Africa.
Symptomatic of the distorting effects of colonial discourse, this collapse of
(colonial) metaphor into (sexual) metonymy is a function of “obsessional
neuroses, but also and differently psychoses, [which] have the distinctive fea-
ture of ‘reifying’ signs—of slipping from the domain of ‘speaking’ to the
domain of ‘doing’ ” (Kristeva 1991, 186). An embodiment of the kind of psy-
chological damage caused by phallocentric colonialism, Mustafa fails to
grasp the metaphoricity of “the rape” of Africa, or the difference between the
discursive trope (the speaking) and its reality (the doing).
Thus, colonial discourse complicates Mustafa’s notions of masculinity
and femininity. The figure of the English woman evokes hostile anxiety for
him because the British empire expanded under the rule of a mighty woman,
Queen Victoria, whose name defines the age of empire and denotes “victory”
over those she subdued. Thus, “wherever Mustafa turns, he finds himself sur-
rounded by Victorian images. Victoria Station, where his feet took him when
he journeyed from South to North, is the same station from which armed
troops had journeyed in the opposite direction” (Ni‘ma 1986, 234). There is
also another Victoria in the South—Lake Victoria. For thousands of years,
the source of the Nile remained a mystery that ancient Egyptians attributed to
the gods.

But the new comers, with their weapons, modern equipment, and advanced
technology, were able to bend the divine will . . . and divulge the secret. The
womb-mother turned out to be a lake, and the lake turned out to be a woman.
But she was not African or Sudanese; she was British, and her name was Victo-
ria. (Ni‘ma 1986, 237)

In a sense, the rape of Africa and the penetration of its secrets were commit-
ted by, or in the name of, a British woman who takes on the phallic attributes
of colonial violence. Colonialism made Victoria an omnipresent, omnipo-
tent, and violent goddess, and thus, for Mustafa every British woman becomes
her proxy.
Woman also stands for the city. Colonial discourse appropriates the
masculinist identification of the metropolitan site of power and law with the
feminine. That identification is, of course, an ancient trope that goes back at
least to the signifying cluster of the Trojan War, where the city is both the geo-
graphical and metaphoric site of the feminine. Helen’s body is the palimpsest
inscribed with the narrative of ethnic, cultural, and civilizational sovereignty,
honor, and masculine pride of ownership. It stands in metonymic relationship
to Troy, the city to be defended, or sacked and destroyed, by men, while the
contest itself assumes the archetypal form of organized masculine violence.
More explicitly, the identification of city with woman is found in the New
Testament book of Revelation, where Babylon is personified as the Whore

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 Hassan / GENDER (AND) IMPERIALISM 313

(17:1 ff.) and Jerusalem as the heavenly Bride (21:2). Thus, to Gérard de
Nerval (1980) in the nineteenth century, when the old trope of the city-
woman has been appropriated to modern Orientalist discourse, Cairo is indis-
tinguishable from its women. Indeed, in his Voyage en Orient, knowledge of
Cairo is knowledge of its veiled women, who embody the mystery and con-
tradictions of the Orient. The whole section devoted to his voyage to Egypt is
titled “Cairo’s Women” and opens with the following passage:

Cairo is the Levantine city where women remain the most jealously
veiled. . . . Solemn and pious, Egypt is still the land of mystery and enigma,
where beauty is wrapped, as of old, in veils and bandages. . . . Let us halt and try
to lift a corner of the austere veil of the goddess of Sais. Besides, is it not
encouraging to see that in countries where women are believed to be prisoners,
they can be seen by the thousands on the streets, in markets and gardens, walk-
ing aimlessly by themselves, in pairs, or accompanied by a child? Truly, Euro-
pean women do not enjoy as much freedom. (1:149-50)

This passage contains many of the tropes that Mustafa Sa’eed appropriates to
his own masculinist anticolonial discourse. For Gérard (Nerval’s
semiautobiographical narrator), Cairo is “enigmatic” and “mysterious”
(therefore seductive—“Cherchez la femme!”) because its women are veiled.
The gallant and resolute European, however, will attempt to lift the veil and
unravel the mystery of the city-goddess. The veil itself, for him, is a deceptive
barrier, for while it forestalls the masculine gaze, both Oriental and Euro-
pean, it gives “Cairo’s women” a freedom of movement unattainable to Euro-
pean women either in Europe or in the Orient. This imaginary freedom con-
stitutes, for Gérard, a beckoning to adventure. The adventure, however, turns
into a mockery several pages later when Gérard follows two such enigmatic
Cairene women into their house, thinking to himself, “Here I am in the mid-
dle of The Thousand and One Nights” (1:176). They turn out to be French
women in Oriental disguise, availing themselves of the “freedom” of move-
ment enjoyed by Oriental women. This ironic twist does not deter the adven-
turer, whose pursuit of the Other constantly leads him to confront the
significatory lack that, for Lacan (1977), is constitutive of desire. The
performative Oriental-ness of the French women indicates that the mystery
of Oriental women is a colonial construct. However, like the mirage always
shimmering before Mustafa’s eyes, that mystery continues to tantalize
Gérard, who pursues it in the remainder of the narrative—at a marriage bro-
ker’s, in the slave market, and further beyond Egypt in the Druz mountains of
Syria.
Mustafa perceives European women in much the same way as Gérard per-
ceives Oriental women. In the objectifying gaze of the foreign man, women
are deprived of individuality, branded with the mark of the plural, and identi-
fied with the city. Mustafa says of Isabella Seymour,

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314 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2003

We walked along together; she beside me, a glittering figure of bronze under
the July sun, a city of secrets and rapture. I was pleased she laughed freely.
Such a woman—there are many of her type in Europe—knows no fear; they
accept life with gaiety and curiosity. (Salih 1966, 41; 1969, 37)

If Cairo’s women, to Gérard, are stereotypically undifferentiated figures, as

silent and mysterious as ancient mummies, European women to Mustafa are
equally homogeneous creatures resembling the statues of European art and
whose free attitude to life is the polar opposite to that of veiled and voiceless
Oriental women.
Yet the fundamental difference between Gérard and Mustafa is clearly
their disparate positions of power. Gérard is a European man in the epistem-
ically feminized Orient, while Mustafa is an African in Europe who auda-
ciously declares himself an invader: “Yes, my dear sirs, I came as an invader
into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected in the
veins of history” (Salih 1966, 98; 1969, 95). For Gérard, the city-woman is
the object of a knowledge to be attained from the position of having the phal-
lus. For Mustafa, the city-woman embodies a power he lacks, and claiming
that power means gaining control over its site, women’s bodies, through mas-
querade (being the phallus)—by posturing as the embodiment of European
fantasies about Africa and the Orient. He becomes a favorite in liberal, Bohe-
mian, and conservative circles alike by spinning fantastic tales about the Nile
crocodiles and streets teeming with elephants and lions. At one point, he
delivers a lecture on Abu Nuwas, full of “arrant nonsense with no basis of
truth” at Oxford University, to an audience of

retired civil servants who had worked in the East, old women whose husbands
had died in Egypt, Iraq and Sudan, men who had fought with Kitchener and
Allenby, orientalists, and officials in the Colonial Office and the Middle East
section of the Foreign Office. (Salih 1966, 144; 1969, 143)

Even those who might have firsthand knowledge of Arab culture, either
from lived experience or scholarship, are duped by Mustafa’s lies, which re-
inforce cherished Oriental stereotypes. His London apartment also evokes
those stereotypes:

my house, the den of lethal lies that I had deliberately built up, lie upon lie: the
sandalwood and incense; the ostrich feathers and ivory and ebony figurines; the
paintings and drawings of forests of palm trees along the shores of the Nile,
boats with sails like doves’ wings, suns setting over the mountains of the Red
Sea, camel caravans wending their way along sand dunes on the borders of the
Yemen, boabab trees in Kordofan, naked girls from the tribes of the Zandi, the
Nuer and the Shuluk, fields of banana and coffee on the equator, old temples in
the district of Nubia; Arabic books with decorated covers written in ornate
Kufic script; Persian carpets, pink curtains, large mirrors on the walls, and col-
ored lights in the corners. (Salih 1966, 147; 1969, 146)

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 Hassan / GENDER (AND) IMPERIALISM 315

These articles belong to different cultural contexts, but what they share is
their fetishism in Western fantasies about Africa and the Orient.
Such masquerade involves the performance of two specific forms of mas-
culinity associated in Western imaginary with non-Western men: the des-
potic, misogynist Oriental and the uncontrollably jealous and violent Afri-
can, represented by Shahrayar, the Persian king of The Thousand and One
Nights, and Othello, respectively. These characters possess an exotic appeal
that Mustafa exploits. For example, the Arabic wine poetry he recites and his
haremlike bedroom evoke the atmosphere of The Thousand and One Nights
and set the stage for Mustafa’s and Ann Hammond’s masquerade as master
and slave girl (Salih 1966, 144-48; 1969, 143-46). On another occasion, he
compares himself with Othello and goes about seducing Isabella Seymour in
the same way Othello gains Desdemona’s love; the almost identical strategies
of self-exoticization are striking:

Oth . . . I spoke of most disastrous chances:

Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my [travel’s] history;
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
. . . And of cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
[Do grow] beneath their shoulders. . . .
. . . My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of [sighs];
She swore, in faith ‘twas strange; ‘twas passing strange
‘Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful. . . .
She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d,
and I lov’d her that she did pity them.
(Shakespeare 1974, I.iii, 134-68)

I related to her fabricated stories about deserts of golden sands and jungles
where nonexistent animals called out to one another. I told her that the streets of
my country teemed with elephants and lions and that during siesta time croco-
diles crawled through it. Half-credulous, half-disbelieving, she listened to me,
laughing and closing her eyes. . . . Sometimes she would hear me out in silence,
a Christian sympathy in her eyes. There came a moment when I felt that I had
been transformed in her eyes into a naked primitive creature, a spear in one
hand and arrows in the other, hunting elephants and lions in the jungle. This
was fine. Curiosity had changed to gaiety, and gaiety to sympathy, and when I
stir the still pool in its depths the sympathy will be transformed into a desire
upon whose taut strings I shall play as I wish. (Salih 1966, 41-42; 1969, 38)

The structural parallel between these passages, the lies about fantastic crea-
tures and monsters described in Mandeville’s Travels, and the sympathy

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316 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2003

elicited from the mistress only to be transformed into passion for the exotic
reveal Mustafa’s calculated performance of the kind of exotic masculinity
that plays itself out “at the edge” of civilization and even humanity, feeding
European fascination with barbarism and monstrosity, and confirming
Europe’s sense of civilizational superiority. In this manner, Mustafa mimics
Othello, who evokes one of Europe’s most notable depictions of the Other
since Homer’s Cyclops.
Mustafa’s gender masquerade succeeds in seducing Ann Hammond, a
young aristocratic student of Arabic; Isabella Seymour, a forty-year-old wife
of a middle-class professional and mother of three; and Sheila Greenwood, a
waitress from a working-class family. Under the spell of the fabled black sex-
uality, all three engage in orgies with Mustafa. The problematic nature of
black sexuality in colonial/racial discourse crystallizes in the British ban on
miscegenation; in the American South, the punishment for miscegenation
was often castration and lynching of black men. But besides all the theories
about the inequality of the races and the dangers of miscegenation to Aryans
(Young 1995, 90-117), the fear of black sexuality results from the perception
that it

is a form of black power over which whites have no control. . . . In fact, the dom-
inant sexual myths of black women and men portray whites as being “out of
control”—seduced, tempted, overcome, overpowered by black bodies. This
form of black sexuality makes white passivity the norm—hardly an acceptable
self-image for a white-run society. (West 1993, 87)

Those perceptions are at the heart of Mustafa’s interactions with English

women, and Salih’s (1966) foregrounding of the strong link between sexual-
ity and racism highlights the corresponding silence of Conrad’s (1988) Heart
of Darkness, the narrative that Salih ostensibly reverses (Said 1993, 211-12).
Conrad’s novella “flirt[s] with a radical critique of certain Western values,
but stops short” (Torgovnick 1990, 154), and evokes only to “obscure ugly
facts . . . like the African woman’s relation to Kurtz, facts like her death at
the end, which goes unmentioned . . . in any commentary on the novella”
(p. 152). Kurtz’s relationship with the African woman would have consti-
tuted a breach of the British ban on miscegenation and serves as a concrete
example of his lack of “restraint.” However, Marlow’s refusal to speak of or
even to learn about Kurtz’s actions (“ ‘I don’t want to hear any of the ceremo-
nies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz,’ I shouted” [Conrad 1988, 58]) ob-
scures the function of black sexuality in the economy of colonial discourse.
In his study of the rhetoric of colonial discourse, David Spurr (1993) ex-
plained the British colonial officers’ designation of African mistresses as
“sleeping dictionaries,” thus

the metaphor suggests an entire series of unstated connections between the

sexual and the lexical. It suggests, for example, that the African woman is a text

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 Hassan / GENDER (AND) IMPERIALISM 317

to be opened and closed at will, and whose contents allow entry into the myster-
ies of African language; that this language, and by extension African culture, is
itself both contained within and revealed by the female body; that sexual
knowledge of her body is knowledge of Africa itself. The body as text, how-
ever, is read only as a series of lexical fragments, without regard to history or
narrative. In yet another sense, the “sleeping dictionary” evokes Africa as a
dormant or sleeping text, which can only be awakened and brought into defini-
tion by the intervention of the European reader. And finally, the metaphor sug-
gests that the colonizer’s own language derives from his erotic relations with
“her,” the pronoun in this case designating both the African continent and the
African woman. (P. 171)

In addition to being a metaphor for conquest, as Said (1978) pointed out, the
sexual possession of the woman works as a form of textual, discursive, and
specifically masculine knowledge.
Such objectification of the feminine is a function of the classical notion of
the transcendental masculine subject, which is the foundation of patriarchal
discourses both in Europe and in the colonies. It is evident in Arabic novels
such as Tawfiq al-Hakim’s (1938) A Bird from the East, Yahya Haqqi’s
(1973) The Saint’s Lamp, and Suhayl Idris’s The Latin Quarter (1954), where
the masculinist discourse of the colonized feminizes the colonizer. However,
this feminized West remains inaccessible to the kind of knowledge gained
from the position of power. The bodies of Victoria’s daughters and the culture
they represent metonymically remain unknowable, mysterious, offering only
a “mirage” (one of Mustafa’s favorite images) of knowledge. Al-Hakim’s and
Idris’s characters, for example, resign themselves to the fact that the Western
female body unlocks no textual or discursive power of the kind Said and
Spurr described; as for Haqqi’s protagonist, his new knowledge is imparted
by Mary, who acts as his mentor and remains in control throughout their rela-
tionship. Incapable of understanding Susie, al-Hakim’s protagonist falls
back on Kipling’s idea of quintessentially different East and West, the latter
personified as a merciless, oversexed femme fatale. In Halim Barakat’s
(1983) Days of Dust, the Palestinian male protagonist feels that he is being
raped by a married American tourist for whom the journey to the war-torn
Arab world in June 1967 becomes a sexual interlude. Here, the reversal of
gender roles is complete. Arab men are dephallicized, or epistemically cas-
trated, at the same time that their Western mistresses are endowed with phal-
lic colonial power. Contrary to Nerval’s (1980) narrative, these novels depict
situations in which colonial and gender hegemony do not coincide and effec-
tive power is bestowed by colonial, rather than gender, relations.
In that sense, Mustafa’s English mistresses read him as an African, Orien-
tal text, and they do so even in the very act of submitting to his perceived
black sexual power. For Ann and Sheila, Mustafa’s body metonymically
encodes exotic landscapes like those depicted in Orientalist paintings, evokes
mental associations with the primitive and the obscene, and represents
transgressive desire directly related to the construction of black sexuality.

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318 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2003

Sheila says to him, “Your tongue’s as crimson as a tropic sunset. . . . How mar-
velous your black color is . . . the color of magic and mystery and obscenities”
(Salih 1966, 141; 1969, 139). Ann says,

As though intoning rites in a temple, I love your sweat. . . . I want to have the
smell of you in full—the smell of rotting leaves in the jungles of Africa,
the smell of the mango and the pawpaw and tropical spices, the smell of rains in
the deserts of Arabia. (P. 143/142)

To the churchgoing Isabella, he is a symbol of transgression so powerful that

she renounces her religion for his sake:

The Christians say their God was crucified that he might bear the burden of
their sins. He died, then, in vain, for what they call sin is nothing but the sigh of
contentment in embracing you, O pagan god of mine. You are my god and there
is no god but you. (P. 111/108)

These extremes of passion lead all three women to suicide. That they come
from different social strata indicates that what they share is cultural and
racial, if not class, identity. As in Conrad (1988), the fascination of the abomi-
nation puts that collective European identity to the test, but Salih (1966) fur-
ther showed that the complicated masquerade of forbidden desires shatters
the colonial mask of cultural, moral, and civilizational superiority that lies at
the heart of Conrad’s “redeeming idea.” Mustafa’s mistresses realize that in
worshipping him, they have fallen from civilization into savagery. Savagery,
of course, is the demonic face of the exotic, and the allure of one inevitably
leads to the “horror” of the other. In this way, Salih redefined Conradian dark-
ness: the “fascination of the abomination” emerges from the contradictions
of colonial constructions of gender and race, not from some sort of ontologi-
cal evil connected with a feminized Africa, metonymically represented by
Kurtz’s mistress.
The masquerade also destroys Mustafa. His refrain “The train carried me
to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris” (Salih 1966, 33, 35, 37;
1969, 29, 31, 33) reveals his obsession with the woman he married because,
in her resistance to his advances, she merges more fully than the other women
with the city as a psychic function and a trope of empire. Unlike Ann, Sheila,
and Isabella, Jean seems to belong nowhere in particular in English society—
no family, class, or origin that could be traced with any certainty (Salih 1966,
157; 1969, 155). Reminiscent of Egyptian women’s attributes in Nerval,
Jean’s mysteriousness epitomizes the allure of the metropolis. To Mustafa,
Victoria Station, London, and the empire are Jean’s “world” because she is,
like them, ungraspable, unattainable, a “mirage [that] shimmered before me
in the wilderness of longing” (Salih 1966, 37; 1969, 33).
However, Jean does not resist socially constructed gender roles, nor is she
a crusader against Mustafa’s misogyny, entrenched as it is in the rhetoric of

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 Hassan / GENDER (AND) IMPERIALISM 319

colonial discourse that she never questions. Just as Mustafa inscribes himself
in Africanist and Orientalist stereotypes, so does Jean conform to gender ste-
reotypes in an effort to undermine Mustafa’s claim to colonial/sexual power.
If he plays Shahrayar, she plays Sheherazade, and if he claims to be like
Othello, she becomes Desdemona. Yet Jean revises those roles, differentiat-
ing herself from her female models by switching their moral function within
the masculinist value system that produced them but without effectively con-
testing it. If Sheherazade and Desdemona are idealized projections of male
desire, Jean refrains from masquerading as its embodiment, serving instead
as its nemesis. Like Sheherazade, who ends Shahrayar’s daily execution of
women to avenge the infidelity of his queen, Jean ends Mustafa’s destruction
of English women. And like Sheherazade, Jean does so by conforming to
patriarchal discourse, even though the two women embody diametrically
opposite archetypes of femininity in masculinist imaginary: Sheherazade is
ever the obedient and dutiful wife, and even her crafty manipulation of the
king through storytelling leads to his moral and spiritual reform; by contrast,
Jean is the femme fatale who destroys her husband. Instead of Sheherazade’s
edifying tales, Jean “used to lie about the most ordinary things and would
return home with amazing and incredible stories about incidents that had
happened to her and people she’d met” (Salih 1966, 157; 1969, 155), tales
that parody Othello’s and Mustafa’s seductive lies. She destroys the emblems
of his self-exoticizing and undermines the confidence with which he plays his
various parts. On one occasion, she smashes a valuable vase, tears an old
Arabic manuscript, and burns a prayer rug before kicking him “between [his]
thighs” (Salih 1966, 158-59; 1969, 156-57) in a symbolic castration that
emphasizes his status as a dephallicized, emasculated native. Such reversals
turn the masquerading Shahrayar from master to slave and his great
Sassanian capital (Mustafa’s apartment being its analog) into “the rubble of a
city destroyed by plague” (Salih 1966, 37; 1969, 34).
This contest over representation reaches a bloody climax when Jean
effaces the nobility and exoticism of the Moor and “rewrites” Mustafa as an
impotent, cuckolded Othello:

“You’re being unfaithful to me,” I said to her. “Suppose I’m being unfaithful to
you,” she said. “I swear I’ll kill you,” I shouted at her. “You only say that,” she
said with a jeering smile. “What’s stopping you from killing me? What are you
waiting for? Perhaps you’re waiting till you find a man lying on top of me, and
even then I don’t think you’d do anything. You’d sit on the edge of the bed and
cry.”

Desdemona’s handkerchief, which Iago steals and uses as evidence of her

infidelity, becomes in Jean’s case true evidence, which she hardly denies and,
to all effects and purposes, may have even planted herself to further humili-
ate Mustafa (Salih 1966, 164; 1969, 162). Moreover, she dares him to kill
her and be a veritable Othello, a “real man” who lives up to the stereotype of

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320 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2003

the madly jealous African, or to the racist designation of the black man as
“boy.” The episode demonstrates the extent of Jean’s complicity with
masculinist, even misogynistic, discourse in her attempt to strip Mustafa of
his claim to colonial power. His own complicity with colonial, racial, and
masculinist discourse leads him to reenact Othello’s murder of Desdemona,
for the above passage is followed immediately by the murder scene. The
intense psychosexual fulfillment they experience in it announces the con-
summation of their relationship: she kisses the knife that plunges into her
heart as a final assertion of the phallocentricity of colonial discourse and the
various levels of violence it propagates—physical, psychological, epistemic,
discursive—while he sees her as “the goddess of Death,” a phantom chasing
him for the rest of his life.

MASCULINITY AND
POSTCOLONIAL CULTURE

Mustafa’s narrative intertwines with another patriarchal drama that

unfolds in Wad Hamid. Salih (1966) portrayed a traditional society beset by
colonial history, where stifling patriarchy subjects women not only to discur-
sive but also to systematic physical violence. This oppression is often perpe-
trated by false appeals to religion which go so far as to misquote the Qur’an
(Salih 1966, 82; 1969, 78). Cultural resistance to colonialism tends to rein-
force that order. For example, clitoridectomy, a practice dating back to
Pharaonic times, now becomes a marker of a hierarchy of identity and differ-
ence that functions as a form of resistance to Western cultural hegemony, as
when Bint Majzoub, a woman, teases the narrator who has just returned from
England: “We were afraid you’d bring back with you an uncircumcized
[Christian] for a wife” (Salih 1966, 8; 1969, 4).3
In this context, Mustafa settles in Wad Hamid. Paradoxically, his Suda-
nese wife, Hosna Bint Mahmoud, finds in him an ideal husband who treats
her with a respect unparalleled either by his treatment of English women or
by the villagers’ attitudes toward their wives and daughters. If Mustafa’s ear-
lier misogyny feeds on the epistemic violence of colonialism, in the colony
that misogyny gives way to a liberationist impulse on behalf of Sudanese
women. The implication is that national liberation entails the liberation of
women, an argument the Egyptian social reformer Qasim Amin advocated in
1899 (Amin 1992, 6). In fact, Mustafa seems to have transformed Hosna into
an independent-minded woman who is unafraid of defying traditional patri-
archy (Salih 1966, 104; 1969, 100-101). Upon Mustafa’s presumed death,
Hosna’s father agrees to marry her off against her will to the aged woman-
izer, Wad Rayyes, in a flagrant violation of Islamic law that explicitly for-
bids forced marriage.4 When she refuses to let Wad Rayyes touch her, he
attacks, injures, and proceeds to rape her. She stabs him to death, castrates

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 Hassan / GENDER (AND) IMPERIALISM 321

him, then kills herself. Thus, just as the violence of phallocentric colonialism
is literalized in the trail of blood Mustafa leaves behind in the North, so does
the violence of traditional patriarchy assume a horrifically concrete form in
the South. The mutilated body of Hosna Bint Mahmoud and the castrated
body of Wad Rayyes bear witness to the destructiveness of a phallocentric
masculinity.
The binary terms of the novel’s symbolic geography collapse into a uni-
versal masculinist tyranny. Colonialism, anticolonial struggle, and tradi-
tional society are all sustained by a foundational misogyny. A scholar who
has returned from England at the dawn of independence, the narrator is
equally horrified by Mustafa’s past and the disastrous consequences of the
abuses of traditional patriarchy:

I imagined Hosna Bint Mahmoud . . . as being the same woman in both

instances: two white, wide-open thighs in London, and a woman groaning
before dawn in an obscure village on a bend of the Nile under the weight of the
aged Wad Rayyes. If that other thing was evil, this too was evil. (P. 90/86-87)

Located almost exactly in the middle of the novel, this passage states Salih’s
dual critique of colonial and patriarchal masculinities.

IMPLICATIONS FOR GENDER

AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

The recent rise of religious fundamentalism, accompanied by some of the

most repressive forms of patriarchy—most visibly in Sudan, Algeria, Egypt,
Iran, and Afghanistan—indicates that effective subversion of hegemonic
masculinity is a more embattled project now than at any time in modern his-
tory. One must not forget, however, that fundamentalism is essentially a form
of resistance to Western imperialism and the repressive postcolonial govern-
ments that implemented failed projects of Eurocentric modernization
(Khoury 1982, 11-43; Sharabi 1988, 3-25, 61-83). In light of that reality, it
would be naive and trivializing to undertake a narrowly textual deconstruc-
tion of gender within a conception of postcolonialism that overlooks the
immanence in formerly colonized societies of neocolonial—political, eco-
nomic, cultural—hegemony. The question then becomes how to construct
more fluid and nonhegemonic notions of masculinity that promote both
social justice and anti-imperialist resistance.
In the Arab world, many intellectuals in a position to articulate philosoph-
ical frameworks and political projects addressing immediate, local condi-
tions have risen to the challenge. Heirs to Qasim Amin’s and Huda Sha‘rawi’s
pioneering efforts, the decidedly secular critics (e.g., Nawal el-Saadawi) and
religious reformers such as the late Sudanese Mahmud Muhammad Taha

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322 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / January 2003

([1967]1996, 1979), and Egyptian philosopher Nasr Abu Zeid (1994) are
worth mentioning. Guided by principles of equality and social justice, many
of these have attempted (often at great personal risk5) to reinterpret the
Islamic heritage in ways that delegitimate patriarchal hegemony and promote
social reform.
I mention these writers because I find their examples instructive as I sug-
gest some implications for the project of gender and postcolonial studies in
the West. The novel addresses the problem of masculinity on two fronts:
colonialism’s deployment of gendered discourse and the traditional patriar-
chal structures of colonized society. Therefore, one must first examine the
ways in which many varieties of colonial and anticolonial discourse reinforce
hegemonic masculinity. Butler’s (1990) theory of gender attributes as
performative rather than expressive is one useful tool in displacing the hege-
monic discourses of colonialism and masculinity since it reveals the
constructedness of gender identities.
Second, there are material realities in postcolonial societies, social struc-
tures, and various forms of the exercise of power for which Western modes
of analysis and interpretation may be inadequate. For example, in Season,
patriarchy consolidates itself by taking on the task of cultural resistance to
imperialism, and misogyny is sedimented into a coercive set of social norms,
transactions, and institutions that latch onto an immensely powerful religious
tradition. Attempts to undermine that tradition from Western secular per-
spectives often produce the opposite effect. It is here that the embattled work
of progressive Arab intellectuals intervenes, not by attempting to displace
the tradition (Westernization) but by reinterpreting it in such a way as to
divorce it from hegemonic structures. Even though their frames of reference
(poststructuralist in the West, hermeneutical in the Middle East) and strate-
gies (Butlerian parody vs. Qur’anic exegesis) may be radically different, the
politics of gender multiculturalism in the West and of progressive Arab
thought share the same goal of achieving social justice. Yet in the Middle
East, the urgency of that project derives from the severe conditions of life in
postcolonial societies, and what is at stake is not only access to privilege and
social space but basic freedoms and sometimes life itself.
This brings up my final point: such politics cannot be sustained on the lim-
ited scale of discrete communities, either in the West or in postcolonial soci-
eties. So long as the world order favors an imbalance of power between
“developed” and “developing” countries, the West will continue to bask in a
superficial multiculturalism that often reinforces the status quo, while neo-
colonialism continues—in the machinations of the World Bank, the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, globalization, eco-
nomic sanctions, and sheer military bullying that deploys the rhetoric of
“fighting terrorism,” “rogue nations,” and “humanitarian missions”—to
force postcolonial societies to reproduce the same reactionary structures of
resistance that perpetuate their subordination, including the reinforcement of

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 Hassan / GENDER (AND) IMPERIALISM 323

hegemonic masculinity. Making the alliance of gender and postcolonial stud-

ies in the West productive and relevant requires us to take stock of these reali-
ties and to advocate a genuinely global politics of equality.

NOTES
1. The first page number refers to the Arabic text; the second refers to the English translation.
Unless a published translation is cited, all translations from Arabic and French are mine.
2. Ironically, in Arabic, Mustafa means “the chosen,” and Sa’eed means “happy” or “felici-
tous.”
3. The published translation erroneously renders the Arabic for Christian (nasraniyya) as
“infidel.” Islam distinguishes between “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians) and infidels
(kuffar) or nonbelievers.
4. The Prophet ruled that “the widow shall not be married until she is consulted, and the vir-
gin shall not be married until her consent is obtained” (Ghattas-Soleiman 1991, 96-98). Ghattas-
Soleiman (1991) pointed out that the villagers’ attitudes toward women predate Islam, which re-
stored to women many of the rights and privileges now denied them in the name of Islam. For an
extended treatment of this subject, see Leila Ahmed (1992).
5. Taha was executed on charges of apostasy by the Numeiri regime in 1985, while Abu Zeid,
facing similar charges a decade later, fled Egypt to the Netherlands.

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Waïl S. Hassan is an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the

author of a forthcoming book on Tayeb Salih, of which the present article is part, as well
as articles on Voltaire, Pynchon, Sartre, postcolonial theory, Arab American autobiog-
raphy, globalization, and the teaching of world literature. He is currently working on a
book on Anglophone Arab literature.

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