Novel · A way to begin
Season of Migration to the North
موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال
Tayeb Salih · 1966
Synopsis
Back in his village on the banks of the Nile, in the fifties, after a thesis defended in England on an obscure English poet, the narrator notices a newcomer, Mustafa Said, the only one not to marvel at his degrees. One evening of drinking, the man recites English verse in perfect language and gives himself away. Pressed with questions, he gradually tells the story of his life in London in the twenties: a prodigy schoolboy shaped by colonisation, who seduced Englishwomen by playing on their dreams of the Orient, and a revenge that turned into tragedy.
Context
The novel first appeared as a serial in 1966 in the Beirut review Hiwar, then in book form the following year; the English translation by Denys Johnson-Davies, published in 1969 in Heinemann's African Writers Series, made it known beyond the Arab world, and it has since been translated into more than twenty languages, more than thirty according to the Guardian. Read as a response to Conrad's tale, it reverses its course: it is a man from the South who travels up to the North. Its frankness about desire and the villagers' coarse language led to its brief ban in Sudan.
Who it is for
Short, built on comings and goings, with a prose that is remarkable even in translation. Some passages are violent.
Prizes and reception
Edward Said counted it among the six great novels of modern Arabic literature, and in 2001 the Arab Academy of Damascus named it the most important Arabic novel of the century.