Mavi Atlas

Abstract

In Season of Migration to the North, Sudanese novelist Tayep Salih depicts a vivid image of the entanglement of postcolonial Sudan. Reflecting the experiences of Mustafa Sa’eed, the major character, from homeland to London and back to homeland again, the novel also reveals how the colonial project renders Mustafa Sa’eed as a being with a phantom identity in a postcolonial context. This novel offers a unique insight into the ways in which Mustafa’s performance of sexuality itself becomes a form of sexual violence against the English women in order to reverse colonialism. In other words, Mustafa presents sadistic acts of revenge upon the English women, taking advantage of his corporeality and masculinity in an attempt to reflect colonialism and to rewrite the hegemonies included in the colonial project. This creates a list through which the novel operates and the crossroads of violence, sexuality, gender, colonialism, male hegemony come to be the main concern of this work. Then, the moral lesson of Tayep Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is proposed for the readers of his novel is that the dualism and amalgam of all cultural experiences and forms provides a remedy for cultural contamination, which belongs to colonial mentality. At this point, Tayep Salih in his novel makes a great effort to construct both a new culture and new ways of experiencing and seeing the reality.