Season of Migration to the North

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Season of Migration to the North  
Season of Migration to the North

Front cover of Penguin Classics edition of the novel
Author Al-Tayyib Salih
Original title موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال
 Mawsim al-Hiǧra ilā ash-Shamāl'
Translator Denys Johnson-Davis
Country Sudan
Language Arabic
Publisher Al-Tayyib Salih
Publication date 1966
Media type print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages 169 pp (Heinemann edition)
ISBN ISBN 0-435-90630-5

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, French and German.

Contents

[edit] Summary

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 doppelgänger. 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.

[edit] Controversy

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.

[edit] Characters

  • Sheila Greenwood
  • Ann Hammond
  • Mahjoub
  • Bint Mahmoud (Hosna)
  • Bint Majzoub
  • Jean Morris
  • The Narrator (Anonymous)
  • The Narrator's Father
  • The Narrator's Grandfather
  • The Narrator's Mother
  • Wad Rayyes
  • Mustafa Sa'eed
  • Isabella Seymour
  • Mrs. Robinson
  • Mr. Robinson

[edit] Editions in print

[edit] External links

  • Review by Marina Harss at Words Without Borders

Saree S. Makdisi, The Empire Renarrated: Season of the MIgration to the North and the Reinvention of the Present. This article analyzes the layers of this narrative and what the author may have been speaking to.

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