EN3262 Tayeb Salih - Season of Migration to the North

Brief lecture Notes

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

The postmodern dimension

(1) Ambiguity: There is a major role for ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, and interpretive subjectivity in the narrative as a whole.

(2) Self-reflexivity: This is a novel about narrativity, over and above the stories it narrates.

(3) Dual narrative: The novel is an interwoven double-narrative: the story of the unnamed narrator in the present time of narration; and the recollected narrative in the past time of narration concerning Mustafa Sa'eed.

(4) Intertexuality: The novel bears a generic resemblance to, and sustains a broad analogy with, several other novels: for example, with the modernist classic, Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899).

(5) The novel as a postmodern bildungsroman: In some ways the narrative represents a portrait of the artist as a Sudanese colonized intellectual applying the lessons of modernist narratives to his own predicament. At once specific and generic; particular and allegorical.

(6) The novel is a fable of integrative and disintegrative modernity. ["No, I am not a stone thrown into the water but seed sown in a field", 5], which also uses geographical typologies of North and South, the rivers Nile and the Thames; London and Cairo.

Brief lecture Notes

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

The colonial/postcolonial dimension

(1) The Sudan as colonial/postcolonial zone under British control: the text as a sort of "national allegory".

(2) The colonial myth of social modernity: "civilizing the native".

(3) Manichean delirium: Frantz Fanon's idea that colonialist ideology fosters a binarism in which the colonized internalize a sense of their own "natural" inferiority, in comparison with what is believed to be the "natural" superiority of the colonizer, such that whenever bad qualities appear in the colonizer, they are dissembled as attributes of the colonized.

[Sources: Frantz Fanon, Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth [1961], trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 41-42; and Black Skin, White Masks [1952], trans. C. L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 44-5, 183).

(4) Sexual politics and the revenge of the repressed: Caliban's abuse of Miranda.

(5) Religion, colonialism, postcoloniality: The place of women in Islamic societies; the role of feminine sexuality in Islamic society: e.g. the characterization of Bint Majzoub and Hasanah bint Mahmud.

(6) Fanon on the three stages of the development of the decolonized intellectual: "Fanon’s essay ‘On National Culture’ (1959): The intellectual ‘gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power’; then finds himself ‘disturbed’ about his ambivalent relation towards native as well as European cultures; and finally, ‘after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people’, ‘turns himself into an awakener of the people’ (1963: 222-3)."

(7) The novel uses ethnic stereotypes: e.g. "You're a savage bull that does not weary of the chase". (p.33): These can be related to the use of sexual stereotypes in D.H.Lawrence.