Subversion of Heart of Darkness’s Oriental Discourses by Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

Tayeb Salih is one of the most influential writers of post-colonial period who bear a torch to devastation and multifaceted and far-reaching results of colonial time by their critical approach. To turn the tables, armed struggle was the first step of resistance for independence in the process of decolonization. But later on, intellectual exertion to construct a national identity was debated aloud to take place the violent opposition because colonizers had not only invaded lands but also they interposed identity, culture and language of colonized people into East-West axis (traditional-modern, barbaric-civilized, underdeveloped-developed) which would be never the same as it had been before colonialism. In this sense, this study aspires to set forth how Season of Migration to the North responds to colonial discourses of Heart of Darkness which springs out of the rooted perspective against the East. At first, Salih makes quiet and passive colonized native characters of Conrad to be heard and then shows how they survive while struggling with doubled identity interposed between East-West and the periods before and after colonization. Salih humanizes who Conrad dehumanizes in Heart of Darkness . However, Joseph Conrad denies offering a solution to the problems of natives like hybridity; Salih comes through a final point for the colonized people. By compare and contrast, the study will try to show how Conrad’s criticism is superficial, insufficient and paradoxical in the means of not providing a remedy for identity problem unlike Tayeb Salih who resolves rooted troubles of colonialism through “mental miscegenation” as Benedict Anderson put forward many years after Salih’s death.