Tayeb Salih

Tayeb Salih

Tayeb Salih (12 July 1929 – 18 February 2009) was a Sudanese writer, cultural journalist for the BBC Arabic programme as well as for Arabic journals, and a staff member of UNESCO.

Quotes

Season of Migration to the North (1966)

• It was a steamingly hot July night, the Nile that year having experienced one of those floodings that occur once every twenty or thirty years and become legendary - something for fathers to talk to their sons about.
  • Chapter 3, pg. 45

• But I would hope you will not entertain the idea, dear sirs, that Mustafa Sa'eed had become an obsession that was ever with me in my comings and goings. Sometimes months would pass without his crossing my mind. In any case, he had died, by drowning or by suicide - God alone knows.
  • Chapter 4, pg. 61
  • The living cannot dwell on each person that dies and try to figure out why.

• It is a chaotic house, built without method, and has acquired its present form over many years: many differently-sized rooms, some built up against one another at different times, either because they were needed or because my grandfather found himself with some spare money for which he had no other use.
  • Chapter 5, pg. 71
  • The narrator is at his grandfather's house with some of their friends. The house is made of mud and is described as being chaotic in designed.

• They are my responsibility, and one of the reasons that brings me here each year is to see how they are getting on.
  • Chapter 6, pg. 88

• I told him that Mustafa Sa'eed was a lie. 'Do you want to know the truth about Mustafa Sa'eed?' I said to him with another drunken laugh.
  • Chapter 7, pg. 107
  • Thinking about Mustafa Sa'eed during the drive in the hot sun and heat as he leaves for Khartoum after the circumcision ceremony for Mustafa's boys.

• I had not thought of the boys during the whole of the ghastly journey. I had been thinking of her. Again I said to Mahjoub: 'What happened?'
  • Chapter 8, pg. 116

• The world has turned suddenly upside down. Love? Love does not do this. This is hatred. I feel hatred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs (sic) must confront him. Even so, there is still in my mind a modicum of sense that is aware of the irony of the situation. I begin from where Mustafa Sa'eed had left off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing.
  • Chapter 9, pg. 134

• I had put out the candles and locked the door of the room and that of the courtyard without doing anything. Another fire would not have done any good.
  • Chapter 10, pg. 166

The Wedding of Zein (1968)

• Haneen is often seen traveling around with no possessions, food, or people for he is “a pious man wholly dedicated to his religious devotions,”
  • Pg. 44.

• Although many people feel depressed when they see him, (because he reminds them of death, the afterlife, and prayers.
  • pg. 87

• To the people, he is not a person, but an institution
  • Pg. 90
  • Description of Haneen

• ...the Imam is revered and followed by only the more traditional villagers. To most young men and the influential “gang,” the Imam is “a necessary evil"
  • p. 92

• Where does the lamplight end? How does the darkness begin? And does it matter?

• • p. 105

• The human world is a “boiling cauldron” that cannot be defined precisely ― it is a dynamic fluid with smooth gradation within, at the same time integral and turbulent, and both known and unknown to itself.
  • p. 120

External links

• The Wedding of Zein