Season of Migration to the North Reading Order

Season of Migration to the North (1966) by Tayeb Salih is the great Sudanese novel and one of the essential works of postcolonial literature — a novella-length masterpiece that inverts Conrad's Heart of Darkness by sending an African man to Europe rather than a European to Africa, and explores the violence of the colonial encounter from the colonized subject's perspective. Mustafa Sa'eed, a Sudanese scholar who studied at Oxford and made his way through the literary and sexual circles of London in the 1920s and 1930s, returns to his village in Sudan after years abroad. The unnamed narrator, also returning from study in England, gradually uncovers Mustafa's history: his sexual conquests of European women who projected their romantic fantasies of 'Africa' onto him, his trial for the murder of his English wife, his imprisonment, and his return to Sudan, where he disappeared. Salih's novel is one of the most formally compressed major works of the twentieth century: what Conrad expanded into three hundred pages of Gothic atmosphere and philosophical meditation, Salih compresses into one hundred and seventy pages of crystalline prose and devastating moral clarity. The novel refuses the consolations of both sides — neither Western orientalism nor simple anti-colonial nationalism. Mustafa Sa'eed used Europe's fantasies about Africa as a weapon against it, and was as much destroyed by those fantasies as the women he destroyed; the colonial encounter is shown as a violence that deforms both parties, leaving nothing intact.