The Female, The Feminist and the Feminine: Re-Reading Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (Critical Essay‪)‬

This paper inquires into the dynamics and the inner dialectics in the construction of Arab women's identities in Tayeb Salih's "Mawsim al-Hijrah ila Shimal" (Season of Migration to the North 1969). The novel, (henceforth Season) has been acclaimed in the East and the West for its excellent imbrications of race, gender, culture and empire, with such an iconicity that is altogether too good to be true. The quality and quantity of studies that the novel has occasioned attest to its pre-eminent position in contemporary literary writing in Africa even as it has succeeded in bringing Sudanese creative writing to the front burners of literary discourse at the international level (Nabil 1995; Kadiatu 1998; Gibson 2002; Wail 2003). That the novel has "not finished being read" (Macherey "Problems" 70) is a function of its artistic excellence. It is because Season is artistically complex and original than its peers. Corti says the "more artistically complex and original a work of art, the more it rises over the works that surrounds it, the greater is its availability to different readings" (An Introduction 5-6). But despite the panoply of studies on the novel there still appears to be a lacuna. Season was written as a nexus for the re-articulation of culturally and socially mediated world-view of the colonial subject/object and second, as a mirror of the intra-Sudanese cultural experiences and encounters (Makdisi "The Empire" 804-820). Whereas existing works and studies have attended to the former in depth, they have, however, focused little on the latter. Whereas most of the works have examined the postcolonial role the British women play in the novel, the role of Arab women has not enjoyed much detailed and in-depth study. The works have also focused little attention particularly on Mabrukah, wife of Wad al-Ris, in relation to the thematics of the narrative even as they have largely not created a web in which the Arab (Sudanese) women would intersect and interface with a view to underscoring the conflicts in their identities and the contrarieties in their relationship at the gender level.