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A review by wille44
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
4.5
Season of Migration to the North is a strong novel that shines a light on the turmoil of post colonial Africa, mirrored by a landscape in equal parts harsh and beautiful. Tayeb Salih weaves a brief but impactful tragedy, his characters are trapped in a country ravaged by colonizers and now without them have to build upon ashes, fighting amongst themselves. They walk an impossible path of reconciling the infrastructural potential provided by following the example of their European colonizers with their own culture, trod underfoot by this same group.
We follow Mustafa Sa'eed throughout the novel, a mysterious man whose shadow is cast long after he leaves, his violent and destructive time spent in England a reversal and response to Conrad's seminal Heart of Darkness, a book in which White colonizers descended into what he depicted as a black, ugly, primitive world of Africa. Here Salih takes his African man into the heart of a different darkness, England, in which a great line of women find ruin in his arms, his bedroom a place of fatal toxicity for them.
Here Conrad is ostensibly inverted, the black man bringing ruin to the white women of England, but truly it is Sa'eed's life that is undone, his self loathing amplified by the dehumanizing fetishizing that he is subjected to, women interested in him as an exotic partner, a talisman of Africa, not a human being. This is strongly hammered home with his most damaging relationship, with Jean, a woman who actively, openly hates him while being attracted to him and he to her. He falls madly in love with this woman, the only one who wears her true feelings towards him as a person on her sleeve, and the two destroy each other, a colonial allegory in which both parties ended up badly damaged, with the Europeans leaving all together and Africans left to pick up the pieces.
Salih binds this all together with beautiful prose and a slippery, engaging maneuvering of time. Chronology is fractured and jumbled, within the same sentence we slip from present day to a trial twenty years in the past, back beyond that to childhood and then return to where we started. Our perspective constantly shifts and transforms, and our understanding of a scene dramatically shifts through these insertions of temporal transience, it is wonderfully done and adds a dreamlike sensation to the novel that crescendos beautifully in a narrative and thematic way. It is a gripping, beautiful read throughout, and a harsh reflection on the dynamics of post colonialism and the systemic, generational challenges of emerging from that hole.
We follow Mustafa Sa'eed throughout the novel, a mysterious man whose shadow is cast long after he leaves, his violent and destructive time spent in England a reversal and response to Conrad's seminal Heart of Darkness, a book in which White colonizers descended into what he depicted as a black, ugly, primitive world of Africa. Here Salih takes his African man into the heart of a different darkness, England, in which a great line of women find ruin in his arms, his bedroom a place of fatal toxicity for them.
Here Conrad is ostensibly inverted, the black man bringing ruin to the white women of England, but truly it is Sa'eed's life that is undone, his self loathing amplified by the dehumanizing fetishizing that he is subjected to, women interested in him as an exotic partner, a talisman of Africa, not a human being. This is strongly hammered home with his most damaging relationship, with Jean, a woman who actively, openly hates him while being attracted to him and he to her. He falls madly in love with this woman, the only one who wears her true feelings towards him as a person on her sleeve, and the two destroy each other, a colonial allegory in which both parties ended up badly damaged, with the Europeans leaving all together and Africans left to pick up the pieces.
Salih binds this all together with beautiful prose and a slippery, engaging maneuvering of time. Chronology is fractured and jumbled, within the same sentence we slip from present day to a trial twenty years in the past, back beyond that to childhood and then return to where we started. Our perspective constantly shifts and transforms, and our understanding of a scene dramatically shifts through these insertions of temporal transience, it is wonderfully done and adds a dreamlike sensation to the novel that crescendos beautifully in a narrative and thematic way. It is a gripping, beautiful read throughout, and a harsh reflection on the dynamics of post colonialism and the systemic, generational challenges of emerging from that hole.