Cultural Contact and Responsibility: Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

In Season of Migration to the North, with the newly independent Sudan as backdrop, Tayeb Salih offers his answer to the cultural conflicts between the north and the south in Sudan and to those between the newly independent Sudan and the West. By establishing the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's views on ethics to this book, this study examines how Levinasian responsibility works as a model for cultural contact. Season of Migration to the North unfolds as the unidentified Sudanese narrator's learning process. Through his endeavor to help himself and his people, he gradually sees the need for a different conception of responsibility. In the book the southern Sudanese people's fear of the northerners' forceful imposition of Arabization and Islamization and Sudan's difficulty in constructing its identity in its dealings with the West find their parallels in the Sudanese characters' fascination with the culturally different and in the characters' inability to meet the culturally different without murderous reductions and subsequent conflicts. Through the unidentified narrator's reluctant recognition of his uprooted culture, his shared desire for the culturally different, and his inescapable responsibility for the other people, Salih shows his people the desirability of being responsible for the Other. In addition to the establishment of unique selfhood through service rendered to the Other, Levinasian responsibility makes contacts peaceful and beneficial to all the parties concerned. Without people's ability to take responsibility for the Other, cultural contacts, whether between nations or between two human beings, remain superficial, murderous, and suicidal.