Essay - Season of Migration to the North PDF

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Your Name Professor / Supervisor Name Course Name 7 Nov 2020 Season of Migration to the North: An Analysis An esteemed masterpiece, Tayeb Salih perhaps, had left us with a legacy in the form of writing, a famous and well-known novella entitled Season of Migration to the North. Born in 1929, he was a Sudanese, later he would be a student in the University of London, and becoming a prominent writer, especially in the field of postcolonial literature. The Season of Migration to the North was firstly published for Arabic readers in 1966, though Salih was very fluent in both Arabic and English. The novel plot was set in the 1960s where the readers are introduced to the character of Mustafa Sa’eed. The story would mainly revolved around his chaotic life in Europe—living with several British women and serving as a prisoner—and later around his unfortunate life when he came back to his hometown in Khartoum, together with the subsequent events that will led to the novel ending. In this essay, I explore how the classic literature coincides with the topics of constructions of space, sexual politics, and modernism-traditionalism dichotomy. Firstly, I would not deny that Salih has regularly commanded the metaphors of space in order to put a soft emphasis on the greater theme of Season of Migration to the North itself. It was given a significant role by the author to some extent. When we discuss about the deeper meaning of him putting Sudan, Egypt, and England as the main settings in his novel, we may want to look back onto the past. Clearly, the British Empire was once the governing body of the two African countries—with the denomination of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan—until it officially dissolved in 1956. The era of postcolonialism was still robust during the time he wrote the novel. Thus, we can infer that Salih had put much effort in enlivening the theme of

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postcolonial life dilemma within the character of Mustafa Sa’eed as he lived and studied in the West before. As England was representing the modern and lavish dream home, Mustafa would need to manage his dilemma in continuing his own life when stretching back to his rural countryside hometown later. In justifying what the author has did to utilize the depictions of local trees, rivers, or cityscapes in the novel, we should firstly experience the text as a whole—from the used typical furniture to the vastness of Nile River—as in other words, to watch the richness of descriptions from the Sudan by our imagination. I am with no doubt that there shall be a number of readers who are not having the best of their ability to imagine the images of these things, as easily as they had never having seen them, thus Saleh has successfully wrote down his narrative with such beautiful and down-to-earth imagery that helps them to be more close to the novel characters. For example, Salih wrote how Mustafa describes the atmosphere of his room in great detail along with the wide variety of displayed images of Sudan such as by saying “the paintings and drawings of forests of palm trees along the shores of the Nile”, “boats with sails like doves’ wings, suns setting over the mountains of the Red Sea”, and also “camel caravans wending their way along sand dunes on the borders of the Yemen.” Salih’s spatial narrative—specifically, its chain of directional and geographic tropes— portrays the characters’ sense of space (Velez 2010, 191). The geographic metaphors used by Salih depicted by such landscapes actually resonate with the topic of migration, where the characters have been undergone throughout their life course prior to the novel climactic point. Moving on to the next point, sexual politics is, of course, one of the thing that need to be magnified upon in the analysis too. In Season of Migration to the North, it should be clarified that such sexual politics depicted in the narrative are those of which we usually refer as the politics encompassing genders. Not only that, the ‘real’ sexual relationships between characters, such as what had Mustafa Sa’eed done with his ‘British mistresses’ also should be

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among the evidence for us to explore the political dynamics at that time. Before diving deep into the academic commentaries, we should note first on how Salih skillfully narrates the features and personalities on both Mustafa Sa’eed and Jean Morris characters on which the two of them were lovers throughout the most parts of the story. Clearly, Jean Morris was the first wife of Mustafa Sa’eed, only agreeing to that matter after three years being pursued by him. To the readers’ shock, she indeed still possessed her witty features by being a flirtatious girl not only with his husband, but also with other men. Though this issue gave a torment to Mustafa himself, he also exhibited some quite similar personality towards other British women—after murdering Jean Morris—but with a twist, whereas his intention was only to channel his disapproval and revenge of the Empire’s wrongdoings to his motherland. How he had done that? He took advantage to ensnare these women by using his extraordinary looks, his smartness, his seductive charm, and his skills of manipulation. Consequently, three of them committed suicide. The enraged colonized character here have used the element of sex in making negative political decisions towards the his ‘colonizer’. Even if they were regarded as vicious, for him, the act of seducing women is a reclamation of masculinity, similar to the action of re-conquering lost territories, and also as a symbol of revenge for the crimes done by the Europeans towards the people of Africa, including Sudan (Hassan 2003, 312). In the colonial politics era, it is not common to see women being actively engaged in the politics as the governing Empire was already being in charge of most administrative bodies. In the colonized Sudan, women were considered as house workers, and not nation builders, let alone community leaders. We may find proportional changes during the first post-colonial years in which women enjoyed much more freedom and rights. Yet, just like what happened to Hosna Mahmoud who was forced to re-marry with someone who she did not want, women in the postcolonial era might need to strive more for their liberties in the future.

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Next, we also need to examine on the fact that Mustafa was unable to curb his inability to come to up with such comfortable terms that will shed light onto the contradictions of his identity and his experience while being trapped between the lavish life and traditional norms at the same time. The traditional environment is always being utilized by authors for the purpose of representing the essence of innocence which quite hidden in modern developments. In Season of Migration to the North, Saleh actually came up with the idea that traditional countryside brought a sense of eternalness, besides from adding stability and a sense of identity (Elsheshtawy 2005, 25). That is why Mustafa felt the urge to come back to his hometown—because the main reason of him being in a foreign country (England) was his sole intention in submitting contributions to his beloved homeland. He attempted to pick revenge on the colonizer, which is the British women, by making them as a means of establishing illegitimate relationships, Even though, it should not an easy task for him to just settle down in his real home sooner without retreating back to his ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ life. Evidently, upon his return to the hometown, he deliberately build another home—even he already had one there—which had the West elements, and filled with English collections. There, Mustafa married with Hosna Mahmoud—soon to be his long-term ‘real’ wife—and soon became alienated as he had lost all of his freedom and need to cope back with his old traditions. Nevertheless, the modernism-traditionalism dichotomy in the story of Season of Migration to the North were marked by how detailed Saleh had written on the very opposing features of his London Apartment with his ‘new house’ in Sudan. The progress was also outlined on how Mustafa made his move as according to the place he was living at the time. All in all, the plot presented in this classic literature was not the only element that we should look upon. Besides, the side topics that relates to the Season of Migration to the North like spaces, sex, and modernism-traditionalism also offer a good insight on the postcolonial history and its literature too. Definitely, one’s life dilemma is its apparent identity.

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Work Cited Velez, Mike. 2010. "On Borderline Between Shores: Space and Place in Season of Migration to the North." College Literature, vol. 37 no. 1, p. 190-203. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lit.0.0090. Hassan, Waïl S. 2003. “Gender (and) Imperialism: Structures of Masculinity in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 309–324, doi:10.1177/1097184X02238529. Elsheshtawy, Yasser. 2005. “The Mythical East: Architectural Metaphors in Tayeb Saleh's ‘Season of Migration to the North.’” Built Environment (1978-), vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 21– 30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23289496....