Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Saleh, and The Grass is singing – Doris Lessing
A. The Grass is singing:
We are told by Tony Marston that the key to the tragic events that led to the murder of Mary Turner could be found from “the look on the Sergeant’s and Slatter’s faces when they looked at the body, that almost hysterical look of hate and fear.”
It is further stated that if Tony Marston “had acted according to his by now muddled ideas of right and wrong, his feeling that a monstrous injustice was being done, what difference would it make to the only participant in the tragedy who was neither dead nor mad. For Moses would be hanged in any case; he had committed a murder, that fact remained. Did he intend to go on fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle? And if so, which principle?” (22). In his rather hysterical monologue Tony Marston imagines speaking to the Sergeant and Slatter “If you must blame somebody, then blame Mrs. Turner. You can’t have it both ways. Either the white people are responsible for their behavior, or they are not. It takes two to commit a murder – a murder of this kind. … I have lived here, I tell you, which neither of you has done …”monologue Tony Marston imagines speaking to the Sergeant and Slatter “If you must blame somebody, then blame Mrs. Turner. You can’t have it both ways. Either the white people are responsible for their behavior, or they are not. It takes two to commit a murder – a murder of this kind. … I have lived here, I tell you, which neither of you has done …”
B. Season of Migration to the North:
“I no longer remembered anything; I no longer saw or was conscious of anything but this catastrophe, in the shape of a woman, that fate had decreed for me. She was my destiny and in her lay may destruction, yet for me the whole world was not worth a mustard seed in comparison” (132).
“How often have I asked myself what it was that bound me to her! Why didn’t I leave her and escape? But I knew there was nothing I could do about it and that tragedy had to happened” (134).
