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The death of the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, who spent most of his life in exile, reminds us once again of the seismic world he lived in; a world ruled by tensions, choices, certain successes, and inevitable failures. His best-known 1966 novel, Season of Migration to the North, remains a singular depiction of the complicity and disgust which conscience evokes; it marks Salih as an author of lasting resonance. On its surface, Salih s narrative appears relatively straightforward. But as one reads deep into the event-zl text, one realizes that it is multi-layered, with questions which elude easy answers even decades on. Salih's tale is of a man who returns to his native village in Africa after years of study abroad, only to discover that another man, Mustapha Sa'eed, has taken his place. A strange, delicious, and elliptical work, Season of Migration initially reads not unlike a string of theatrical monologues which map out the distance between the rural countryside of northern Sudan and cosmopolitan London of the 1920s. Yet, its performative voice is underpinned by the weight of experience: of scenery by turns ignored and obsessed over. Colonial and sexual conquests compete across the East- West divide in a remarkable colonial encounter, foUowed by misunderstandings of its kind. In a form of revenge for the colonial "taking" of his country, Sa'eed devotes himself to seducing English women by posing as the fulfiUment of their OrientaUst fantasies. His tale haunts the unnamed narrator, who finds his steps tracing those laid by others.
The questions that preoccupy those of us who take SaUh seriously can be put as follows: Why did he refuse to settle for a simplistic denunciation of colonialism and why does everything remain uncomfortably ambiguous in his world? What are we to make of his ability to evade aU fixed labels which accounts for the novel's longevity? Does he really manage to put his finger on the root of our intertwined fates and overlapping territories, to adapt freely from Edward Said? In Seasons of Migration to the North, Salih's lasting achievement Ues in his deft unraveUng of traditional assumptions regarding setting, geography and location. Whüe the novel's settings- - the vast "greenness" of England pitted against the "sand-strewn" deserts of the Sudan -...