Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi (Oct 2018)
An Analysis of Al-Tayyib Salih’s “Mawsim Al-Hijrah Ilâ Al-Shamâl”
Abstract
al-Tayyib Salih (Tayeb Salih) was one of Sudan's greatest authors of the twentieth century. In 1966, Salih published his novel Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl (Season of Migration to the North), the one for which he is best known. It was first published in the Beirut journal Hiwâr. The main concern of the novel is the impact of British colonialism and European modernity on rural African societies in general and Sudanese culture and identity in particular. His novel reflects the conflicts of modern Sudan and depicts the brutal history of European colonialism as shaping the reality of contemporary Sudanese society. Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl is a story told to an unspecified audience of the “traveled man,” the African who has returned from schooling abroad by an unnamed narrator. The narrator returns to his Sudanese village of Wad Hamid on the Nile in the 1950s after writing a PhD thesis on ‘the life of an obscure English poet’. Mustafa Sa'eed, the main protagonist of the novel, is a child of British colonialism, and a fruit of colonial education. He is also a monstrous product of his time. Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl is considered to be an important turning point in the development of postcolonial narratives that focus on the encounter between the East and the West. Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy regarded it as one of the best novels in Arabic of the twentieth century.
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