Ann Hammond Character Analysis in Season of Migration to the North

Ann Hammond is a young English woman, a student, whom Sa’eed meets after giving a lecture at the University of Oxford. Hammond is completely taken by Sa’eed’s exotic background and she immediately enters into a sexual relationship with him in which she plays his slave girl, “Sausan.” She spends more and more time in London at his apartment, neglecting her studies in Oxford. She is devastated when, one day, Jean Morris arrives at Sa’eed’s apartment while she is there. Hammond ultimately kills herself. During Sa’eed’s trial for Jean Morris’s murder, the prosecuting attorney suggests that Hammond, like Sheila Greenwood and Isabella Seymour, committed suicide as a consequence of Sa’eed’s emotional manipulation and abuse, but Hammond’s father, who testifies in the trial, also notes that his daughter was undergoing a spiritual crisis at the time of her suicide, and that this may have played a role in her decision to take her own life.

Ann Hammond Quotes in Season of Migration to the North

The Season of Migration to the North quotes below are all either spoken by Ann Hammond or refer to Ann Hammond. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

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“In London I took her to my house, the den of lethal lies that I had deliberately built up, lie upon lie: the sandalwood and incense; the ostrich feathers and ivory and ebony figurines; the paintings and drawings of forests of palm trees along the shores of the Nile, boats with sails like doves’ wings, suns setting over the mountains of the Red Sea, camel caravans wending their way along sand dunes on the borders of the Yemen, baobab tress in Kordofan, naked girls from the tribes of Zandi.”

Related Characters: Mustafa Sa’eed (speaker), The Narrator, Ann Hammond

Related Symbols: Sa’eed’s London Apartment, Sa’eed’s Secret Room in Sudan

Page Number and Citation: Book Page 121

Explanation and Analysis: