If Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with any one, a ruthless occupier in particular. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He also had a prodigious capacity for understanding people no matter where they came from.

A sign well defined in his chef-d’oeuvre, Season of Migration to the North, where the narrator intones: “The [the Sudanese people] were amazed to learn that Europeans with some differences were much like us, marrying and raising children in accordance with tradition and that generally they were a moral and honest people.” A humanist voice at its best! This is not the nonsense one finds in shabby screeds likes the “clash of cultures” or “what went wrong?”

Suffice it to add that Salih had an unbounded energy for waging struggles on behalf of the truth—the truth not only of usually unrecorded social suffering, but also the truth about the institutional obduracy that lurks beneath the surface of things, and a persistent endeavor of his last years the callous posturing of so-called realistic, or pragmatic writers.

Power never phased or impressed Si Tayeb, as he was often called: he took on its many contemporary forms with undaunted courage. When the 2005-Cairo Third Arab Novel Conference sought to salvage something of the reputation of its much coveted prize by awarding it to Salih, the decision raised eyebrows. The recipients of the same prize had been Saudi novelist Abdul-Rahman Munif, Sonallah Ibrahim who turned it down, and Gamal El-Ghitani, who belongs to Ibrahim’s defiant generation, declined to be named for the award. “With all due respect Tayeb Salih is an outstanding novelist,” he chimed in, “his winning of the prize does not whitewash the event.” The remark is replete with political intrigue and chivalry. After all, Salih was an outsider, and an outsider must climb all the mountains, one by one, before he or she can be honored as one of “us.”

In all sorts of ways, Salih’s rich life and his death both reflected and clarified the turbulence and suffering that have been at the core of the Arab experience: this is why his life bears scrutiny. So much in it embodies the Arab trying situation in all its irresolution. The one thing that seemed to stand out to everyone at the time of his death was that Tayeb Salih had staged his own glorious entry into, and possibly exit from, history, something only a person of his extraordinary stature could have done.

No one failed to comment on his grace, sensibility, and what a sense of being in the world that was both fair-minded and bon-vivant. For him, the Arab world was a constant interrogation that is never answered completely—or articulated adequately. Everything in his personality confirmed that restlessness, from his gregariousness to his moody introspection, from his optimism of the will and energy of the soul to the immobilizing sense of powerlessness that has claimed so many of us. (The Darfur genocide and civil war that has been tearing his homeland apart for decades never left him at peace). As a result, his life simultaneously expresses defeat and triumph, abjection and attainment, resignation and resolve. In short, it was a version of the Arab world, lived in all its complexity by one of the finest Africans or our time.

The first time I met Tayeb Salih was in at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2002. He was the keynote speaker for a conference on “Hate in the World.” He spoke eloquently and defiantly about Islamism, arguing that it was disfiguring a great religion and degrading a kind people. The same feeling is echoed in Season where he sets out to decipher the stew language back in Sudan, a life lived on the edge both sexually and emotionally in London where his narrator leads a life that is bent on leaving an imprint, a bend in the river Thames. That he self-destructs at the end of the novel is no surprise.

In Paris, Salih was handsome, provocative, and there for us, the younger generation. He was also kind to me when I approached him about granting me permission for a possible new translation from Arabic to English of Season; a translation that would render the narrative in the light of the period that followed the events of 9/11. He was most generous and welcoming.

I was struck by his unassuming manner, and the cordiality of his regard for potential friends and allies. Always serious, he was never solemn, and rarely resisted the chance to say something witty or deflating in an Arabic that was music to the ears to those of us who surrounded him as a modern-day Moses. He never posed or took on airs. Directness and sincerity of approach were the hallmarks of his intellectual presence, even though he could be scathingly ironic in his attacks on imposture and fraud.

Later, at a considerable distance from London, he seemed to be moved by a well-nigh compassion and self-reflective wisdom that kept well-attuned to sally after sally, cause after cause, struggle after struggle. Struck down as he was in the prime of his brilliance, he has nevertheless laid on every intellectual the obligation to remain at the very line that he, Tayeb Salih, drew against orthodoxy and fanaticism of any kind, a particular front which more than anyone in the last decade he discerned, explained, and creatively opposed.

His loss to us friends, students, and colleagues is as grievous as it is cruel, and were it not for the vast legacy of thought that he has left for us as sustenance and example, even if he wrote only a few novels and short stories, we would be truly abandoned. Today, we honor his memory while we remind ourselves of his immense intellectual achievement which has resulted in an oeuvre of unique richness and unparalleled scope. His death is too poignant to experience alone in the US at such a distance, so keenly felt is it by all of us.

A brilliant reader of texts and former student of mine, Kahled Ghazel, who makes his home in the UK, told me about his death in a message that I received yesterday. Noureddine Marrouchi, my brother in Tunisia, spoke elegantly about him and how his loss is a misfortune not only to the Arab world at a time when we need more than ever the Salihs, the Saids, the Darwishs, but also to the rest of world. I reminded Noureddine that people like Tayeb Salih do not die, that they are what John Keats aptly called “bright stars.” They forever live in our memory; they live in us, in our gestures, joys, and tears; in our hopes and impediments.

True that Salih died at a time when humanity has a shortage of champions of justice while the orthodoxy of virtue and power seem so unchallenged (the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, a man blinded by his own insight, is a reminder to us all that we are in for a rough ride) and, alas, so ascendant. It is Salih’s magnificently critical spirit that we must hold on to and try, unceasingly, to perpetuate.

copyright: Penguin

In the end, Tayeb Salih—a restless and relentlessly articulate man of letters—will be remembered less for his writing, which was sparse as I mentioned earlier, even though Season of Migration is up there with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, than for his ability to bring people together and create situations that allowed them to play a more effective role than they could have done on their own.

No one knew better than him how to turn the shambles of defeat into some sort of achievement. But he was never satisfied by purely moral triumphs. He was too much the realist in his understanding of raw and calculated violence. He believed in genuine encounters between people.

He was always elated when he found someone in whom he discerned promise or talent, because that gave give him an opportunity to bring out what was hidden and make it shine. He was an optimist at heart. Even when he was being fatherly, there was a tender quality to the monitoring, and you rarely got any sense that he was domineering. There was a kind spirit beneath the quiet and peaceful temper. He, like Said and Darwish before him, stood for energy, mobility, discovery, and risk.

In the unfolding story of the Arab world, Salih, I believe, will remain a model of what it is to have been dedicated to an idea—not as something to bow down to, but to live, and to re-examine constantly. To understand him properly is to re-enact the drama of struggle and principle in which he was engrossed, not by copying it but by living it anew, and in doing so, leaving it open for future revision and critical reflection. It is a blessing to have met him in Paris and kept in touch with him ever since. It was a victory, small though it might have been, but a victory nevertheless.

In the end, writers like Tayeb Salih become important not only because they were raised and flourished between continental shelves but because they revealed the nature of a world that constantly collides with itself. Chimeras, the old man in Season of Migration explains to his grandson, are mythological monsters composed of different kinds of creatures. “Like us,” he says, “different kinds of fathers and mothers.” Yet he is able to discern his family’s complexity, like that of the tributaries of the Nile, as part of a larger movement of peoples and ideas.

Put differently, to travel the West is to uncover its link to the world: the pluralism of Moorish al-Andalus in lines from The Rubaiyat carved in stone; Goethe’s love of Sufi poets; Borges’s fascination with the East which culminated in a book under the title of El acerkamiento a Almotásim (a homage to the 12th-century Persian Sufi poet, Farid-ud-Din al-Attar). Or, is it inevitable that the steady convergence between Islam and the West should assume a jejune, flesh-and-blood form in the shape of reductionism on both sides of the cultural divide? Even so, the final note of my farewell to a giant being is far from pessimistic. In fact, it may be said to resemble Said’s intellectual in opposition, “. . . a kind of counter-memory, with its own counter-discourse that will not allow our conscience to look away or fall asleep.” That is at bottom an attitude worth the pain of positioning the poetics of discovery and reconciliation as Tayeb Salih lived it to the full until his untimely death on Wednesday in London, his adopted home, surrounded by his family and all those who loved him dearly. On a day like today, a rather gloomy day in Vegas, one feels tempted to echo Horatio, who, in bidding good-bye to his friend, Hamlet, says:

Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.—