Dissecting the Double Consciousness: A Postcolonial Reading of Tayeb Salihs Season of Migration to the North

Name of Author : Dr. Gils M. George

Abstract: Season of Migration to the North is arguably one of the best known Arabic novels by Tayeb Salih. Originally published in Arabic, it was soon published in over thirty languages including English, French and German. The themes of lack of roots, alienation, and difference between Self and Other, exile, hybrid identities or merged identities, concept of East and West and migration are prevalent throughout the novel. This paper attempts to make a deeper analysis of the postcolonial themes in Tayebs Season of Migration to the North. The novel straddles across continents, mapping the ethno racial relationship between people white and black. This novel also deals with love, longing and losses. The characters inherit a series of loses, the loss of native culture, tradition, identity and so on. The novel offers perspectives on the hybrid identities and the vicissitude of the traumatized mixed race originally belonging to one country and living in exile. The characters are trapped between two spaces and cultures. Being marginalized and displaced, these characters have developed hybrid identities, ambivalent attitudes and mimic acts. Enduring a sense of alienation, the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Saeed find themselves marginalized and placed in an in- between space of cultural hybridity.

Keywords : Hybridity, ethnoracial, ambivalent attitude, alienation

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