The nature of the uncanny in Season of Migration to the North.

AuthorHalool, Musa Al-
PositionCritical essay

A CAREFUL EXAMINATION OF Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966) and its metatextual milieu offers a unique insight into the politics and semantics of vengeful sexuality in a postcolonial context. First, the writing of the novel was begun in 1960, that is, four years after the independence of the Sudan from British colonialism. Second as an allegorical Bildungsroman, spanning the whole period of the British dominion over the Sudan, the novel traces the existential impact of colonialism on part of the Arab-African intelligentsia. As such, it becomes imperative to view the protagonist's character and conduct as a product of imperialism. Third, because the novel seems to be more informed by the sexual revolution in the West and of the decolonization of the Third World in the 1960's than by the colonial period it purports to depict, Season represents a retrospective attempt on Tayeb Salih's part to dramatize the colonial past through the character of Mustafa Said. This method allows Salih to imagine, from a detached vantage, the sexual response of a misguided intellectual toward his colonizers. Notwithstanding Salih's obvious condemnation of Mustafa's perverse behavior, Season attests to a conceptualization of colonialism as rape and of anti-colonial struggle as sexual revenge. History functions on the semiotic and, aphrodisiac level in the protagonist's anachronistic conception and in his exploitation of ancient East-West conflicts to justify his own sexual conquests of the women of his British colonizers. Fourth, Mustafa's response to colonialism, in spite of his being its beneficiary in the form of scholarships, British citizenship, and a professorship at the University of London, illustrates the extent to which colonialism damages the self-image of the colonized native and expresses metaphorically his desire to be his own master. Fifth, the flaming of Mustafa's minor narrative within a major narrative told from a postcolonial perspective by a nameless narrator, who frowns upon the sexual conquests of Mustafa, his own colonial alter ego, dialectically binds vengeful sexuality to the colonial situation. This technique of doubling also allows the reader to gain an insight into its destructive effects not only on the perpetrator but also on everyone he associates with.

In this novel we see that the relationship between Mustafa Said and the four respective English women takes on supra-personal dimensions. In other words, instead of being a relationship between two individuals, Mustafa's fatal attraction to those women becomes an erotic dialogue and an adversarial intercourse between his colonized Sudanese culture and the colonial English culture. Throughout these relationships Mustafa cannot evade becoming aware of the historical grievances that his culture harbors against the white European culture. In order for such a violent relationship to develop and be persuasive, Tayeb Salih not only situates his narrative within a colonial context but also provides the necessary information concerning Mustafa's personal history and psychological make-up. By so doing, Salih succeeds in creating a very complex character who presents himself as the victim not only of his own delusions but also of forces beyond his control.

First published in 1966, Salih's Season became immediately both a critical and popular success. Salih, who was then head of the drama section of the Arabic service of the BBC, was soon to be acclaimed by Raja Al-Naqqash and others as the "genius of the Arabic novel" largely on account of this particular novel. Denys Johnson-Davies, the most famous English translator of modem Arabic literature in the twentieth century, produced an English translation of the novel while it was still in manuscript form. In no more than four years after the publication of the Arabic original in Beirut, this translation was published by Heinemann under its African Writers Series.

In addition, Season has been the unexhausted subject of numerous critical monographs, journal articles, critical anthologies, master's and doctoral theses in the Arab world, Europe, the United States, and South Africa. (1) In its Arab context, Season was thematically linked to several earlier works, such as Suhayl Idris's Al-Hayy Al-Latini (The Latin Quarter), Yahya Haqqi's Qindeel Om Hashem (Ore Hashim's Lamp), and Tawfiq Al-Hakim's 'Usfoor min Al-Sharq (A Bird from the East).

Muhammad Shahin, in Tahawwulat al-Shawq fi Mawsim al-Hijraila al-Shamal sees history as forming the novel's infrastructure (155), calls Season "a wonderful literary documentary that takes into account the dubious relationship between the two [Arab and Western] worlds" (141). Though Shahin suggests that what matters in...

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