Sa’eed’s London Apartment Symbol Analysis

Mustafa Sa’eed’s apartment in London, where he consummates his relationships with the English women whom he seduces, represents a fetishized version of his native Sudanese culture. Mustafa Sa’eed fills the room with the smell of incense, with small sparkling lights, and with rugs and paintings that all evoke a sense of the “exotic east.” As such, the room reflects a European colonial view of the “east” as a place that embodies the foreign, the savage, and the magical. In embodying many of the stereotypes that Europeans hold about the east, Mustafa Sa’eed’s apartment thus represents a reductive, fetishized, stereotypical version of his native culture. Sa’eed deploys this fetishized representation in order to lure English women such as Isabella Seymour, Sheila Greenwood, and Ann Hammond to him, knowing that his exotic roots are a major source of their attraction to him. The London apartment, moreover, stands in direct contrast to Sa’eed’s secret room in Sudan, which fetishizes his life in London.