Saturday, February 21, 2009

Al-Tayyib Salih father of Season of Migration to the North has died...

Season of Migration to the North (Arabic: موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال Mawsim al-Hiǧra ilā ash-Shamāl ) is a classic post-colonial Sudanese novel by the late novelist Al-Tayyib Salih. Originally published in Arabic in 1966, it has since been translated into English and French.

The novel charts individuation of the (un-named) narrator, who has returned to his native village in the Sudan having spent seven years in England furthering his education.

On his arrival home, he encounters a new villager ("Mustafa Sa'eed") who exhibits none of the adulation for his achievements that most others do, and displays an antagonistically aloof nature. The villager betrays his past one drunken evening by wistfully reciting poetry in fluent English, leaving the narrator resolute to discover the stranger's identity. As it turns out Mustafa was also a precocious student educated in the west but simultaneously harbors a violently hateful and complex relationship with his western identity and acquaintances. The story of Mustafa's troubled past in Europe and in particular his love affair with a British woman, forms the center of the novel. What the narrator then discovers about the stranger, Mustafa Sa'eed, awakens in him great curiosity, despair and anger, as Mustafa emerges as his doppelganger. The stories of Mustafa's past life in England, and the repercussions on the village around him, take a toll on the narrator, who is driven to the very edge of sanity. It is only finally, floating in the river Nile, precariously between life and death, that the narrator makes the conscious choice to rid himself of Mustafa's lingering presence, and to stand as an influential individual in his own right.

The novel was banned in the author's native Sudan for a period of time. This may have had to do with the second half of the novel, which contains some graphic sexual imagery, which the Islamic government of Sudan may not have approved of.

(From Wikipedia)

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