Tayeb Salih: Season of Migration to the North

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Salih's unnamed narrator returns to Sudan during the year of its independence, 1956, poised to apply his British PhD in English poetry to the post-colonial independence of his village and country, only to find himself caught between tradition and modernization. The narrator considers suicide in the final scene of the novel, but instead calls for "Help!" as he floats in the middle of Nile. This call, which I read to be a literal call to the reading world, to the host cultures that embraced his novel, was never seriously answered; the ending is perhaps even more powerful and emphatically literal today.

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