They are no longer stirring still. In fact, they are dying at an alarming rate. First, there was Edward Said, then Mahmoud Darwish, and now Tayeb Salih. And if Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with anyone, especially with a ruthless occupier. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life living on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our t...read more
They are no longer stirring still. In fact, they are dying at an alarming rate. First, there was Edward Said, then Mahmoud Darwish, and now Tayeb Salih. And if Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with anyone, especially with a ruthless occupier. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life living on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He also had a prodigious capacity for understanding people no matter where they came from. A sign well defined in his work of art, Season of Migration to the North, where the narrator intones: “They [the Sudanese people] were amazed to learn that Europeans with some differences were much like us, marrying and raising children in accordance with tradition and that generally they were a moral and honest people.” A humanist voice at its best! This is not the nonsense one finds in shabby screeds likes the “clash of cultures” or “what went wrong?” Suffice it to add that Salih had an unbounded energy for waging struggles on behalf of the truth—the truth not only of usually unrecorded social suffering, but also the truth about the institutional obduracy that lurks insidiously beneath the surface of things, and a persistent endeavor of his last years the callous posturing of so-called realistic, or pragmatic writers.
