Geo-spatial politics and the trope of migration in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

The encounter between Africa and Europe during the historical reality of the colonial and imperial enterprise has fashioned an elaborate corpus of knowledge systems. These knowledge systems have been produced and circulated by Europe as standard and they have become part of the European regime of universal truth-telling. Thus those who are defined as Others, and are marginal to the Empire, are constituted as outside of culture and civilisation. This asymmetrical construction of relations between the North and the South in terms of oppositional binaries and racial essentialisms is the furrow which Tayeb Salih elects to plough in Season of Migration to the North. The novel exists at the intersection of the colonized personality's rebellious engagement with the imperial enterprise as a way of visiting the violence which the colonised world was, and is still, a victim of against Europe. Situated within the contestatory site of postcolonial counter-hegemony, Salih's novel unveils the politics inherent in colonialist writing and the attempt by the postcolony to rupture some of these textual politics by revisioning the assumptions, biases and prejudices directed at the colonised subject. The novel is also self-critical as Salih uses it to condemn the postcolonial Sudanese and African condition as guilty of those ‘germs’ it accused the colonialists of. He suggests a hybrid ethos which enables a critical appreciation of the good in all cultures, an adaptive spirit as the way out of postcolonial quagmire in African nations and a multicultural consciousness among the peoples of all races for peace and harmony in the world.