“Over there is like here, neither better nor worse”

For someone who is spending a fair amount of time outside his own society, and has to deal with the romanticising and/or exaggeration of difference, in my own mind and in the minds of others, Tayeb Salih, in his enigmatic novel ‘Season of Migration to the North,’ has some nice antidotes.

 

The narrator comes back from seven years in England, to his native Sudan. He’s asked about the people ‘there,’ and remarks to himself,

“...that just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak”.

Or,

“[o]ver there is like here, neither better nor worse.”

It’s a sentiment I sympathise with. Finally, for those who want to believe Africa is a ‘hopeless continent’ or alternatively that it is ‘rising’, Salih replies:

“[j]ust because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean?”

Colonialism, sexuality, violence, destruction, poetry, hope, hopelessness: it’s a good read.