Notes on Season of Migration to the North
It is not a real love; it is only physical desire and a sensual love that lacks sincerity and leads to destruction. So their relationship with him is one of exploitation. What they feel for him is only an emotional obsession and a strong desire for the sexual satisfaction that they lack with their European partners.
For him theirs is a possessive love, exactly like the relation between the colonisers and the occupied land. They exploit it, exhaust it and drain all its resources for their enjoyment.
He marries the fourth one, Jean Morris, after chasing her for three years. She is addicted to his body but she has never treated him as a husband. She never forgot that she was European and he was Black. When he can no longer put up with her insult, rejection and arrogance, he kills her and ends up in jails. He writes:
9I pursued her for three years. Every day the string of the bow becomes more taut. It was with air that my water skins were distended; my cravens were thirsty, and the mirage simmered before me in the wilderness of longing; the arrow’s target had been fixed and it was inevitable the tragedy would take place. So I married her. My bedroom became a theatre of war; my bed a patch of hell. When I grasped her it was like grasping at clouds, like bedding a shooting star, like mounting the back of a Prussian military march. That bitter smile was continually in her mouth. I would stay awake all night warring with bow and sword and spear and arrows, and in the morning I would see the smile unchanged and would know once again that I had lost the combat. It was as though I were a slave Shahrayar you buy in the market for a dinar encountering a Scheherazade begging amidst the rubble of a city destroyed by plaque. By day I lived with the theories of Keynes and Tawny and at night I resumed the war with bow and sword and spear and arrows.
He, on the one hand, does not tolerate this relationship, which hurts his dignity, and on the other hand is
For him theirs is a possessive love, exactly like the relation between the colonisers and the occupied land. They exploit it, exhaust it and drain all its resources for their enjoyment.
He marries the fourth one, Jean Morris, after chasing her for three years. She is addicted to his body but she has never treated him as a husband. She never forgot that she was European and he was Black. When he can no longer put up with her insult, rejection and arrogance, he kills her and ends up in jails. He writes:
9I pursued her for three years. Every day the string of the bow becomes more taut. It was with air that my water skins were distended; my cravens were thirsty, and the mirage simmered before me in the wilderness of longing; the arrow’s target had been fixed and it was inevitable the tragedy would take place. So I married her. My bedroom became a theatre of war; my bed a patch of hell. When I grasped her it was like grasping at clouds, like bedding a shooting star, like mounting the back of a Prussian military march. That bitter smile was continually in her mouth. I would stay awake all night warring with bow and sword and spear and arrows, and in the morning I would see the smile unchanged and would know once again that I had lost the combat. It was as though I were a slave Shahrayar you buy in the market for a dinar encountering a Scheherazade begging amidst the rubble of a city destroyed by plaque. By day I lived with the theories of Keynes and Tawny and at night I resumed the war with bow and sword and spear and arrows.
He, on the one hand, does not tolerate this relationship, which hurts his dignity, and on the other hand is