My Life Story

An autobiography that stops after the dedication — "to those who see with one eye, who speak with one tongue" — on a shelf of English books in a triangular room in a village on the Nile, with not one volume in Arabic.

Rollebon is the biography Sartre’s historian cannot finish because the subject has occupied him. Sa’eed’s autobiography is the one the subject cannot start because he has occupied a room instead.

The room is the book. Fireplace, oak, gilt, a graveyard of English titles, all his, none in the language of the village he came home to. My Life Story is the punchline and the refusal: a cover, a dedication that insults everyone who would want the pages filled, and then the silence he lived as a weapon in London and as a secret in Wad Hamid. He could explain colonialism in print. He could not explain the photograph over the mantel. Salih, who knew both rooms — the Sudanese village, the English education — files the empty notebook as the only honest volume in the house.

Barton wants her island told. The Commissioner will tell Umuofia in a paragraph. Sa’eed leaves the narrator a key and a blank. Three ways of not getting the life onto the page, and the third is the one that looks most like a book. That is why it belongs on these shelves, and not only in a locked room.

On the readability rating. The title, the dedication, the empty leaves. Salih quotes the one sentence Sa’eed managed. The life is elsewhere, which is the novel.

In-world history

Mustafa Sa'eed, the village's stranger, drowns in the Nile, or walks into it. He leaves the narrator the key to a room no one else has entered. Inside: an English fireplace on the equator, a portrait of Jean Morris, and a library with no Arabic in it — *The Economics of Colonialism*, *The Cross and Gunpowder*, *The Rape of Africa*, all Mustafa Sa'eed. On the table, a notebook titled *My Life Story*. The first page is a dedication to those who see with one eye, speak with one tongue, and see things as black or white, Eastern or Western. Every page after that is empty. The narrator reads until dawn, then goes to the river.

Why it matters

Salih's other invention, besides the life, is the life unwritten. Sa'eed could write *The Rape of Africa*. He could not write himself except as a sentence about people who think in halves.

Appearances

Season of Migration to the North (1966) — Tayeb Salih Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal; a notebook in the locked room, title on the cover, a dedication on the first page, the rest blank

Catalogue record

Category: Autobiography
World: Season of Migration to the North
Imagined by: Tayeb Salih
Language: English
First appearance: Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (1966); English by Denys Johnson-Davies, 1969
Readability: Quoted

In-world history

Why it matters

Appearances

Connected volumes

Catalogue record

Sources