Season of Migration to the North: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Mustafa begins telling his story, informing the narrator that he was born in Khartoum, as his passports show, but that his father died a few months before his birth. He had no siblings, and he had a distant relationship with his mother. One day, a British colonial officer asks Mustafa, still a young child, whether he wants to go to school, and Mustafa says he does. When he does begin school, it immediately becomes apparent that Mustafa is something of a child prodigy: he is so ahead of his classmates that, by the age of 12, the headmaster—a British man—tells him that he should go abroad to study. Mustafa himself, though still young, feels a deep need to move on to bigger things.

A scholarship is arranged for Mustafa to attend high school in Cairo. His mother seems happy when he tells her that he is going, although they never say good-bye properly. Mustafa arrives in Cairo, where he is looked after by the headmaster of the school there, Mr. Robinson, and his wife, Mrs. Robinson. Mustafa is attracted to Mrs. Robinson and feels the stirrings of sexual desire when she hugs him upon arrival. He associates the city of Cairo with her, and he remains there studying for three years, during which time he continues to greatly impress his teachers with his intellectual achievements. He is so brilliant that, at fifteen, he secures a government scholarship to continue his studies in London.

Mustafa arrives in London, which he finds to be incredibly green and orderly. It is interesting to hear the English language (which he had mastered at a phenomenal speed in school) actually spoken by the English people around him. In London, he enters the world of a woman named Jean Morris. He says that everything that had happened before his encounter with her was a “premonition,” and that “everything I did after I killed her was an apology, not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life.”

Mustafa goes on to recount to the narrator the moment of his meeting with Jean Morris at a party in London, when he was twenty-five. The second time he met her, she told him that he was ugly, and he had sworn then and there that one day he would make her pay. The next morning, he had woken up with Ann Hammond in his bed in his London apartment—a young, intelligent, pretty woman from an upper-middle class family. Mustafa had slept with her—as he had with other women—in his bed, in a room decorated with mirrors, which gave the impression of him sleeping with a harem. Shortly after her relationship with Mustafa, Ann Hammond committed suicide by gassing herself. She had left a note behind saying, “God damn you, Mustafa Sa’eed.”

Mustafa skips from the memory of Ann Hammond’s suicide to his trial in a British courtroom. There, he remembers being cross-examined by the prosecutor, who asked him whether he had caused the suicides of Ann Hammond, Isabella Seymour and Sheila Greenwood. Mustafa replied, “I don’t know.” However, to the prosecutor’s question of whether he had killed Jean Morris, he answered, “Yes.”

Mustafa pursued Jean Morris for three years. One day, she gave in to him, telling him that she was tired of him chasing her. They then married. But Mustafa tells the narrator that their bedroom was a “theater of war,” one which always left him defeated, after his days spent working as a lecturer of economics at the University of London.

Mustafa then recalls another of his lovers, Sheila Greenwood, wondering aloud how she had found the courage to commit suicide. A girl from a humble background, she had worked as a waitress in a Soho restaurant, where Mustafa had first met her. After her relationship with Mustafa, she also committed suicide. Mustafa remembers that, during his trial for the murder of Jean Morris, the prosecutor pointed out that Mustafa, in the period between 1922 and 1923, lived with five different women simultaneously, going by a false name with each one and making promises of marriage to each.

Mustafa then recalls his encounter with Isabella Seymour—another of his victims. He met her in a London park on a summer’s day, quickly seducing her with his exotic descriptions of the Nile river and the wild animals in the jungles of his homeland. When she asked him what his race was—whether he was African or Arab—Mustafa had replied that he was “like Othello,” “Arab-African.” Playing on her desire to fetishize him, Mustafa seduced her, and a month after their meeting, brought her to his London apartment—to his room evocative of the oriental “East”—to sleep with her.