From The Tragedy of Othello The Moor of

From The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice (Shakespeare, 1603): Othello (spoken while wooing Desdemona): I spoke of most disastrous chances: Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes I’ th’ imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence And portance in my [travel’s] history; Werein of antres vast and deserts idle, …And of cannibals that each others eat, The Anthrophagi, and men whose heads [Do grow] beneath their shoulders… My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of [sighs]; She swore, in faith ‘twas strange; ‘twas passing strange ‘Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitifu… She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, And I lov’d her that she did pity them. From Season of Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih, 1966) I [Mustafa] related to her [Isabella Seymour] fabricated stories about deserts of golden sands and jubles where nonexistent animals called out to one another. I told her that the streets of my country teemed with elephants and lions and that during siesta time crocodiles crawled through it. Half-credulous, half-disbelieving, she listened to me, laughing and closing her eyes…Sometimes she would hear me out in silence, a Christian sympathy in her eyes. There came a moment when I felt that I had been transformed in her eyes into a naked primitive creature, a spear in one hand arrows in the other, hunting elephants and lions in the juble. This was fine. Curiosity had changed to gaiety, and gaiety to sympahty, and when I stir the still pool in its depths the sympathy will be transformed into a desire upon whose taut strings I shall play as a I wish. (Season of Migration to the North, 1969, p. 38) (Wai’l Hassan, Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction [2003]: p. 98)

Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad and Season of Migration to the North “Secret sharer” relationship between narrator (Marlow & narrator in SMN) and “narrated” individual (Kurtz & Mustafa); lines blurred between them? “Narrated” individual powerful, compelling, cruel, brilliant, active; narrator much less so, passive Same narrative frame: address to assembled “gentlemen” Kurtz and Mustafa: universal geniuses; miscarried attempt(? ) at bridging world of colonizer and colonized Imposed colonial-era binaries - Europe & Africa; light &dark; civilization & savagery – do not bear up under scrutiny “Fascination of the abomination”: narrator catches glimpse, pulls away at last moment How does SMN depart from Heart of Darkness?