Season of Migration to the North: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

One night, shortly after learning of the details of Hosna’s murder-suicide, the narrator stands outside of the secret room in Mustafa Sa’eed’s house. He enters. Inside, he strikes a match and sees a face. He thinks it is the face of Mustafa Sa’eed, but as he approaches, he realizes that it is his own face. The narrator finds a lamp, lights it, and sees that the four walls of the room are covered in books. He is astonished to find that there is also a fireplace—a real English fireplace—in the room. The narrator begins to set fire to the rugs, but then puts it out.

The books on the walls are on all topics; among them are Mustafa Sa’eed’s own published books. None of the books is in Arabic. Above the mantelpiece is a painting of a woman. There are also photographs of Mustafa Sa’eed and a photo of Sheila Greenwood, which she signed. She told Sa’eed that her mother would go mad if she found out her daughter was romantically involved with a black man, and her father would kill her. She was completely engrossed by Sa’eed’s exotic appearance and cultural roots before she committed suicide.

Another signed photograph depicts Isabella Seymour. When she met Mustafa Sa’eed, she was a church-goer and a married woman, raising two children. In a letter she left Mustafa Sa’eed before her death, she wrote that she hoped that Sa’eed would find as much happiness as he had given her. In court, her husband took the stand, admitting that his wife had cancer before her death, and testifying that she had admitted the affair to him a few days before she died. Nonetheless, he said that he felt no bitterness towards her or the accused, Mustafa Sa’eed. 

The narrator thinks that, after all these victims, Sa’eed still managed to crown his life with another—Hosna Bint Mahmoud. The narrator picks up a third photograph—this one of Ann Hammond. He remembers what Sa’eed told him about her: that she had begun spending more and more time in London, neglecting her studies at Oxford, in order to be with him. She would inhale the smell of his armpits and tell him how it was the smell of “rotting leaves in the jungles of Africa…the smell of rains in the deserts of Arabia.” Sa’eed had met her in Oxford after giving a lecture on the Arabic poet Abu Nawas.

Sa’eed would quote Arabic poetry to Ann Hammond, and she would tell him that in his eyes she could see deserts. He took her to his “oriental” London apartment, where Ann would play his slave girl and he her master. She was found after she gassed herself in her flat, leaving behind a note that said: “Mr. Sa’eed, God damn you!”

The narrator picks up a photo of Mustafa Sa’eed with Mrs. Robinson and Mr. Robinson in Cairo, in 1913, and remembers the letter he received from Mrs. Robinson recently, in which she spoke of Sa’eed as “dear Moozie,” remembering her and her husband’s love for him. She mentioned in the letter that she was writing a book about their life together.

The narrator opens a notebook entitled “My Life Story—by Mustafa Sa’eed.” There is hardly anything in the notebook, except for a cryptic sentence. He finds sketchbooks with Mustafa’s sketches, as well as scraps of notes and poetry. The narrator grows tired of putting these pieces together; he realizes that Sa’eed wanted to be “discovered;” he wanted the narrator to puzzle together these pieces of his life.

The narrator turns to the painting of Jean Morris above the English mantelpiece. He recalls, again, Mustafa Sa’eed’s story of his relationship with Jean Morris, how she would torment and humiliate him at parties. Sa’eed had fallen in love with her nonetheless. Once, he had kept away from her for two weeks, but she showed up at his house, driving away Ann Hammond in tears. She stripped naked before Sa’eed, but whenever he tried to touch her, she would demand to destroy his valuable belongings—which he allowed her to do. When he finally came near her, she hit him. Sa’eed pursued her for three years until she agreed to marry him.

After their marriage, Jean Morris refused to let Mustafa Sa’eed sleep with her. Two months into the marriage, he threatened her with a knife. She bared her chest to him then and told him to kill her, but he was too afraid. It was then that Sa’eed remembered that he had received news of his mother’s death nine months earlier. He wept belatedly. One day, as they were sitting together in a park, Jean finally kissed him, and they made love right then and there, on the park bench. This sexual contact with Jean made Sa’eed feel like an “invader,” a conqueror arriving from the south.

While Mustafa Sa’eed had his moments of ecstasy with Jean, most of the time they were at war, even resorting to physical fights. Jean would make him jealous by flirting with other men. One day, he found a handkerchief which didn’t belong to him in the house and he questioned her about it, demanding to know whom it belonged to. However, whenever he questioned her about her lovers, she challenged and rebuffed him. 

One cold winter’s night in February, Mustafa Sa’eed returned home to find Jean Morris stretched out naked on the bed in his London apartment, her thighs open. As his eyes roamed over her body, he took out a knife. On this night, he felt in control, and indeed, Jean seemed to have given herself up to his power. She had kissed the blade that he held in his hand and urged him to take her. It was then that Mustafa had pressed the dagger between her breasts, and then lay on top of her, pressing it down into her chest. She was ecstatic as he did so, telling him that she thought he wouldn’t have had the courage to kill her. As she was dying, they told each other that they loved one another.