Tayeb Salih

When two works of literature, especially a work of fiction and non-fiction, are analyzed and reveal interconnected ideologies, it is likely no coincidence but rather a partnership of philosophies functioning together to reveal a greater truth. Such is the union between Frantz Fanon's, The Wretched of the Earth and Tayeb Salih's, Season of Migration to the North: one gives an orderly account of information while the other gives a fictional account of what that information looks like in fruition. Both texts explore the effects of colonialism in creating the " native intellectual " , another role in connection to the struggle for independence for the individual and collectively for the people or " natives ". Interestingly, Salih's novel reflects the painful results of colonialism not only through the colonized intellectual's journey and the abuse of power through the bourgeois nationalist, but through the role reversal of Mustafa as the colonizer to a group of European women. Upon these topics, both texts aid one another to bring movement, characters the audience can become invested in, imagery they cannot turn away from and enlightenment about colonialism by bringing it to life. Mustafa Sa'eed, perhaps the most fascinating character within Salih's novel, plays a quintessential role in describing the colonized intellectual, mirroring Fanon's sentiment, but more importantly, Mustafa is the very near embodiment of the description of the colonizer and the system of colonization. Fanon described colonialism as a machine, incapable of thought or reason (23) and yet, these are nearly the exact words implemented to describe Mustafa by a fellow student who had fallen in love with him, " You're not a human being. […] You're a

Yazdıklarımızın bizden uzun yaşadığı bu devirde hikâyemizin duyulması ve insanların hikayemizle yakınlık kurulması belki de her zamankinden daha kolay. Kitaplar dünyayı önümüze getiren araçlar olmuşken aynı zamanda kendi dünyalarını kuran araçlar olmuşlardır. Fakat bazen kurulan bu dünyalar birbiriyle çarpışabilir. İşte burada gerçeği açıklama ya da kafalardaki soru işaretini silme dürtüsü devreye giriyor. Dünyanın bir ucunda (Sudan) doğduktan sonra uzun süre diğer ucunda (İngiltere) yaşayan Tayyib Salih bize kendi topraklarının öyküsünü anlatıyor. Bunu yaparken önceden çizilen imajları yıkıyor, var olan düzeni eleştiriyor, hem suya hem sabuna dokunduğu için pek de sevilmiyor ve yasaklanmalara uğruyor. Fakat dünyanın her yerinde çok okunuyor, başka dillere çevriliyor,-romanının kahramanı Mustafa Said gibi o da eserlerinin telif ücretini alamıyor-ve derslerde tartışılıyor. David Damrosch'un Dünya Edebiyatı Nedir? 1 adlı eserinde bahsettiği çevirinin gücü işte burada devreye giriyor. Arapça yazılan bir eser çeşitli dillere çevriliyor ve Dünya Edebiyatına mal oluyor. Ben bu yazımda Tayyib Salih'in Afrika'sı ile Joseph Conrad'ın Afrika'sı üzerine konuşup bu imajlar üzerinden manzaralar çizmeye ve bunları yorumlamaya çalışacağım.

Tayeb Salih's book is a staple of the post-colonialist canon, but isn't in the same class as Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart'. In my view it is very confused about both English and native Sudanese women's sexuality, and is coming from a very defensive psychological position. Still, all grist to the post-colonialist's mill, I suppose!

Reading The Wedding of Zein (1962) by Tayeb Salih from a Bakhtinian
perspective can be helpful to trace the revolutionary touch that marks the
novel. As the world of Rabelais celebrates the unofficial discourse of the
festive life standing against the strictures of the feudal culture, the same
celebration of the festive time in terms of merry moments of unbridled
indulgence of feasting, joking and folk festivities in the carnival type could be
mapped out in the narrative of The Wedding of Zein. The latter presents a
reconciliatory vision to syncretise the social and spiritual worlds so as to
materialise the delighted and optimistic world that Salih is panting for. The
vision of the dream world of Salih collides with a harsh world involving an
identity crisis. A facet of the ideal world that Salih heads to undertake lies in
cancelling out the identity privileges that are determining in the social,
economic and political life. In theory, the carnivalesque implications including
the dismantling of hierarchies and the celebration of popular culture are the
same principles postmodernism feeds upon. To this end, in view of
postmodernism, Salih makes out of the narrative of The Wedding of Zein a
carnival to suspend all the hierarchical prerogatives. Similar to Bakhtin as he
disrupts the hierarchical social stratification privileging the bourgeois group
through the gay time of the wedding, Salih interrogates the official discourse
at the time of state building predicated upon the legacy of colonialism,
excluding different groups from the Sudanese identity.

This book uniquely analyzes two novels from very different contexts, Guatemala and Sudan, to illustrate that there is a profoundly problematic area within the ‘ethical purchase’ of postcolonial studies. It relates this problem to the ‘magical realism’ label that is applied to various postcolonial fiction. The book demonstrates this problem within postcolonial studies by critiquing the works of some of the foremost postcolonial critics. The study ends by bringing theory down to reality when it asserts that because of the differences between societies and cultures as they stand today, and with postcolonial studies lacking the necessary theoretical apparatus to deal with these differences, cultural contact is bound to elicit violence in one sense or another.

This article uses Homi K. Bhabha's concept of hybridity to study Tayeb Salih's 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North. For Bhabha, hybridity is a condition born out of cultural difference; it defies notions of origin, possibilities of transcendence, and all shapes of cultural and subjective entity. In Season of Migration to the North, hybridity of this kind is reflected in both the character of Mustafa Sa'eed and in the novel's form, which largely represents the narrator's complex and self-reflexive "readerly" experience of Sa'eed's life. In view of the novel's formal hybridity, the article argues, extrapolating from Bhabha's theory, that the concept of hybriditythe process of culture-formationalso throws light on practices of self-reflection and the ways in which subjective and cultural meanings are continually being altered and revised. As such, the narrator's recuperation of agency in the novel is a direct outcome of his experience of hybridity. KEYWORDS Tayeb Salih; Season of Migration to the North; hybridity; aesthetic form; postcolonial agency; peripheral modernisms

Tayeb Salih is Sudan's greatest storyteller whose contribution to both African and Arabic literatures is grelaty recognized. His stories are celebrated for their high degree of originality, humoristic and symbolic airs as well as their incorporation of aesthetic and literary features. "A Handful of Dates" is one of his best-acknowledged works. It tells the story of a boy depicted as a witness to the greed and ill-natured spirit of his grandfather who has gotten his wealth by craftily observing a neighbour, Masood, who inherited a good deal of land. He waited for the moments when Masood was under the greatest financial pressure-and that way, bit by bit over forty years; he took advantage of Masood's property, and gained possession of two thirds of his land. The grandfather described Masood as an indolent and a much-married man and thus, held him responsible for all the losses of land and wealth he suffered. The author showed the disgust of the boy to his grandfather's exploitation of Masood when he spewed up some dates his grandfather had taken over from Masood's land and had given him to eat. Though the story was tiny and brief, it did say and exhibit a lot of themes of interest and applicability to people of all cultures and ideologies. The fact that the story-along with other stories by Salih-was celebrated and translated into English by Denis Johnson Davies has helped in bringing about the recognition of Salih's skilled literary abilities, and has assisted in proving the undisputed importance and utility of translation as a tool to enhance and strengthen ties between peoples and literatures of the world. Some of the achievements gained from translating this story into English are: 1. Contributing to the depiction and thus, the understanding of the natural habitat in Sudan as a model of an Afro-Arab community with the details of life based on love for and dependence on palm trees as major source for income and a criterion to measure power; 2. Strengthening shared beliefs about the universality of values and feelings towards them and depict their representation in Salih's literary works.

The article argues that Mustafa's sexual exploits in England do not reflect a vindictive attitude from a colonized subject, who seeks to castigate the British colonizer, as generally assumed. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's conceptualization of the ambivalence of colonial mimicry as a mode that disrupts authority, Mustafa's violent acts mark his latent desire to be completely westernized as he considers aggression to be part of the colonizer's constituent identity. His aim is not, as often assumed, to retaliate against the colonizer but to seamlessly assimilate with the western world through mimesis, which he manifests as his fellow students call him the "Black Englishman." By examining his education and life through the eyes of others who have known him well and by setting him as the foil of the unnamed narrator, Mustafa comes to represent a slippage in the mimetic discourse of colonial mimicry, a puppet in the hands of English puppeteers.

This critical study of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter will consider (1) the conflict between genders, (2) the conflict between cultures, and (3) the culturally transcendental nature of the inter- and intra-gender conflicts, as well as the interrelationship between the gender and culture conflicts.  In terms of the third respect, the primary issues of gender and culture merely become metaphors for their wider referents – Europe and (oriental) Africa.

In Season of Migration…, the extra-generic implications of the clash find expression in the characterization.  Even though Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter shares a similar orthodox, Islamic cultural context as Season of Migration…, it does not share Tayed Salih’s cultural ambiguity, especially due to its Feminist-Womanist perspective.  In both novels, gender is merely an item in a matrix of cultural dilemmas.

Sufi characters – saints, dervishes, wanderers – occur regularly in modern Arabic literature. A select group of novelists interrogates Sufism as a system of thought and language. In the work of writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Gamal Al-Ghitany, Taher Ouettar, Ibrahim Al-Koni, Mahmud Al-Mas’adi and Tayeb Salih we see a strong intertextual relationship with the Sufi masters of the past, including Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Al-Niffari and Al-Suhrawardi.
This relationship interrogates the limits of the creative self, individuality, rationality and all the possibilities offered by literature. In this dialogue with the mystical heritage, these novelists seek a way of preserving a self under siege from the overwhelming forces of oppression and reaction that characterised the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The novel has long been an arena for discussion of social issues that are both in support of, and in critique of, the norms underwritten by the state. The rise of the British novel paralleled the rise of the nineteenth century British Empire. The novel became an effective means to transmit the culture of the state to the outlying territories and over the course of the 20th century, the colonies of began writing back. This paper examines two colonial era novels (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim), two colonial self reflexive novels (Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India), and two post-colonial responses (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North). By comparing these six novels and time periods to each other, patterns emerge which show the destructive impact of colonizing cultures as well as a trend of injustice. There are also patterns which show the possibility of an alternative narrative which is found through interpreting opposing cultural forces simultaneously. These analyses are informed by Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. He proposes a theory of narrative liberation which is the process of constant re-writing.  For the post-colonial responses, it is not enough to react to the colonizing works with linear narratives of emancipation.  These post-colonial responses use cutting prose, montage, and fragmented story structure to tell the colonizing experience with their own voice.  However, it is not exclusive and does not aim to create another marginalized group. History and culture is a series of overlapping territories and shared heritage, and the process of liberation is a process of creating co-authorship and the search for finding one’s authentic voice.

al-Tayyib Salih (Tayeb Salih) was one of Sudan's greatest authors of the twentieth century. In 1966, Salih published his novel Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl (Season of Migration to the North), the one for which he is best known. It was first published in the Beirut journal Hiwâr. The main concern of the novel is with the impact of British colonialism and European modernity on rural African societies in general and Sudanese culture and identity in particular. His novel reflects the conflicts of modern Sudan and depicts the brutal history of European colonialism as shaping the reality of contemporary Sudanese society. Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl is a story told to an unspecified audience of the “traveled man,” the African who has returned from schooling abroad by an unnamed narrator. The narrator returns to his Sudanese village of Wad Hamid on the Nile in the 1950s after writing a phD thesis on ‘the life of an obscure English poet’. Mustafa Sa'eed, the main protagonist of the novel, is a child of British colonialism, and a fruit of colonial education. He is also a monstrous product of his time. Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl is considered to be an important turning point in the development of postcolonial narratives that focus on the encounter between East and West. Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy named it one of the best novels in Arabic of the twentieth century.

Immigration has emerged as a prevailing political issue throughout history and it has had numerous consequences particularly on literature. Advancing into a new country may be to some individuals like advancing into the unknown, into an ever-agonizing exile. Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Tayeb Salih are writers whose lives and narratives were mapped amidst the most violent times on all ideological levels. The three writers were geographically displaced which equipped them with extensive personal experience in addition to having witnessed the agonies of numerous immigrants.

What happens when a novelist inserts a text considered to be the divinely-revealed discourse of Truth into a human composition? What does the voice of the divine do to our reading of the fictional text? Shawkat Toorawa's recent article on the engagement of modern Arabic creative writers with the Qur'an provides much food for thought, especially with respect to the ways in which the writers that he studies deal with the Qur'an's themes, structure and text. The focus in what follows will be more limited: through a series of readings of recent Arabic novels, this chapter will argue that the Qur'an is most frequently invoked and used in recent Arabic fiction (post-1967) to think through a series of events and employ a narrative structure that might usefully be called apocalyptic; that is, both catastrophic and revealing. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, the etymology of the word "apocalypse" is linked to revelation and un-covering: ἀποκαλυπτω meaning to un-cover, to lift the veil; hence ἀποκαλυψις meaning revelation and, following the biblical translations of André Chouraqui, contemplation. 3 Building on Derrida's work, J. Hillis Miller describes the literary work as "the apocalyptic promise of a never-quiteyet-occurring revelation." 4 In the Qur'an we are constantly enjoined to remember God, his blessings, his mercies, and the apocalypse that will come at the end of time. There is no gainsaying the importance of the Qur'an as dhikr, as a discourse that is there to be remembered; nor of the importance of memory as the primary mode of human-divine interaction. 5 The word dhikr as remembrance is also used to designate the Qur'an itself, as in Q15:9: "It is We who have sent down the Remembrance [al-dhikr; the Qur'an], and We Who shall preserve it." Finally, the word dhikr and the verb dhakara are used to refer to the act of saying or mentioning something.

Despite the renewed interest in Arabic writing following Naguib Mahfouz's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war on terror, and the US invasion of Iraq, texts by Arab authors are surprisingly absent from the major anthologies and textbooks of postcolonial and world literature in English. Postcolonial literature has been too narrowly defined so that it refers to Commonwealth literature, excluding Arabic writing altogether, whether it be Arabic fiction in English or Arabic fiction in English translation. It is perhaps even more troubling that anthologies of world literature, which include many works in translation, tend to exclude or marginalize Arab writing. Drawing from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's statement that "such slips become the rule rather than the exception in less careful hands" (1989, 272) and from the relevant ideas of other key thinkers (such as Edward Said, Roger Allen, Arif Dirlik, Waïl Hassan, and Slavoj Žižek), I explore whether such exclusions are painted with orientalist and racist attitudes toward Arabic writing. I conclude with suggestions on how teachers of world literature today can partially overcome the problems in such useful and indispensable textbooks and anthologies. The article asks whether Arabic writing in English can be given no more and no less than the level of attention other Englishes enjoy in our global village today.

Immigration has emerged as a prevailing political issue throughout history and it has had numerous consequences particularly on literature. Advancing into a new country may be to some individuals like advancing into the unknown, into an ever-agonizing exile. Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Tayeb Salih are writers whose lives and narratives were mapped amidst the most violent times on all ideological levels. The three writers were geographically displaced which equipped them with extensive personal experience in addition to having witnessed the agonies of numerous immigrants.

In his two-part “The literary history of world-systems” Matthew Eatough utilizes world systems theory to examine literary studies. He makes use of Baucom’s “speculative epistemologies” to explore the connection between the global economy speculative financial instruments and the rise of the novel in 18th century. But Eatough is interested in tracing the history of literary studies and world systems theory. In this paper, I use speculative epistemologies to indicate ways of knowing that are speculated in fiction. My starting point is the decolonial critique of world system theory, which I use to formulate border reading; a reading strategy that is attentive to indigenous epistemologies. I apply this reading to two entirely different to two works of fiction that have nothing in common save for their articulation of indigenous epistemologies from two entirely unrelated epistemic terrains, two entirely different colonial experiences, and two separate geocultures within the world literary system. Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and Al-Tayyib Salih’s Bandarshah present viable speculative epistemologies that are profoundly engaged with their respective political contexts Their speculative epistemologies are contextually grounded in the very real experiences of the postcolonial condition in Guatemala (1940s) and Sudan (1960s).

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) is considered an Arabic masterpiece in the world of post-colonial literature. While critics have used Orientalism as a theoretical lens to read and understand the narrative of Salih’s novel, seldom has the concept of Occidentalism been a main focus of their analyses. Using the perspective of Muslim Arab African immigrant character, I argue that the novel’s protagonist, Mustafa Saeed, reflects to a remarkable degree the phenomenon of Karpman drama triangle. Saeed’s migration from Sudan to England reveals the character’s movement in the direction of victim-persecutor - rescuer. But the return to his native land, Sudan, is marked by a shift in his movement. Saeed’s new track is to move towards victim – rescuer-persecutor.  The ambiguity of Mustafa’s fate after the persecution point symbolizes the traumatized psyche of the postcolonial individual identity.

Si les écrits occidentaux sur l’Autre, Arabe ou Oriental, sont pléthoriques, qu’en est-il de ceux produits par le monde arabo-musulman ? De quels types de représentations l’Autre a-t-il fait l’objet dans les textes arabo-musulmans ? Enfin quelles sont en somme nos connaissances actuelles au sujet des représentations arabo-musulmanes de l’Autre ?
C’est à ces questions que tentent de répondre les différents articles qui composent cet ouvrage ; car à l’instar des autres cultures, celle du monde arabo-musulman, à travers ses hommes de lettres, ses historiens et ses artistes, a développé ses propres représentations de l’Autre. Cet Autre, selon les époques, l’espace géographique, les sensibilités, et le lieu d’où l’on parle, s’avère variable, incarnant tantôt une « altérité proche » tantôt une autre, foncièrement lointaine.
L’ ouvrage est organisé en trois parties :
Dans la première sont abordées des questions liées à l’altérité et ses représentations dans le monde arabo-musulman de manière générale. Certaines contributions s’attardent sur quelques notions et terminologies arabes qui ont servi et servent encore à appréhender l’Autre ; d’autres tentent de dévoiler les multiples regards portés sur
les autres, qu’ils soient des « Autres proches » à l’image des Berbères ou des chrétiens d’Orient ou des Autres lointains comme les Japonais.
La deuxième partie est consacrée à l’art et à la littérature d’expression arabe. Les contributeurs analysent, à partir du prisme de l’altérité, différentes œuvres modernes de quelques auteurs des plus marquants de la scène littéraire arabe (al-Ṭayib Ṣāliḥ, Hudā Barakāt, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm…).
La troisième partie, quant à elle, permet de mettre en lumière d’autres sensibilités et d’autres manières d’aborder l’altérité dans le monde arabo-musulman car ce sont les oeuvres littéraires écrites par des écrivains arabes francophones (Fouad Laroui, Driss Chraïbi, Boualem Sansal) qui font l’objet d’analyses et d’investigations.