The Mimetic Discourse in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is often regarded to be a novel about the return of the native. After studying in England for seven years, the unnamed narrator returns to his native village in Sudan, where he meets and tells the story of Mustafa. The novel is about the return to England of a self-proclaimed native, Mustafa Sa’eed; who is strangely enough not born in England and is visiting England for the first time. Given his English-oriented educational background, arguing that Mustafa has highly sought to live in England and call it home negates the prevalent perception which positions Mustafa as the vindictive colonized subject who travels to England seeking to avenge his colonized country. Many critics view Mustafa’s escapades with women in England, which result in the murder of Jean Morris, as representations of the spiteful bent of the colonized subject against the colonizer: “Reaction to Season often falls into ... an attempt to re-establish the dominance of the emasculated, colonized male by attacking the women of the colonizers” (Davidson 388). Like other critics, Patricia Geesey observes that it is “difficult not to see in his character a man who exacts vengeance upon British colonizers of the Sudan through his sexual exploits with women in London” (129). Mike Velez, in his article “On Borderline Between Shores: Space and Place in Season of Migration to the North,” emphasizes the seductive role played by Mustafa in London: “In a form of revenge for the colonial “taking” of his country, Sa’eed devotes himself to seducing English women by posing as the fulfillment of their Orientalist fantasies” (191). Similarly, Danielle Tran asserts the notion that Mustafa launches a “racially centered sexual crusade against Britain” (2). Caminero-Santangelo argues that “While in England, Mustafa wages a kind of imperial campaign against British women by seducing and discarding them. He sees his sexual conquests as a form of reverse colonization and as a means of anticolonial resistance” (75). In sharp contrast to the general critical perception, this paper explores Mustafa’s character not as a neurotic avenger in the west as it is generally conceived, but as a colonizer who seeks to go native, that is in this case, to become completely westernized. This self-sought cultural transformation, to Mustafa, does not happen without a complete identity shift from the colonized to the colonizer.