Tayeb Salih

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.