MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Within Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, the story of an unnamed Sudanese protagonist is woven with the tale of Mustafa Sa’eed, a scholar of the West with a mysterious, sordid past. Within the narrative, Mustafa Sa’eed styles himself as an Other on several planes. He acts as a gentleman who is too civilized for his native Sudan, an exotic womanizer who seeks to dominate European females, and an Othello-esque Afro-Arab man of status and power. At times, Sa’eed’s Otherness becomes otherworldly. He is described as a ghost and a false god, but he is also likened to a genie and an ifrit. The latter two mythological creatures represent Orientalist constructs; their invocation in the text captures a sense of failed cultural hybridity and damnation which function as central themes in the novel. While it is easy to compartmentalize Sa’eed as a postcolonial force exacting vengeance upon the colonizer, many scholars have felt that this is a myopic reading of the text. The comparison of Mustafa Sa’eed to an immolating, shapeshifting fire demon is apt because it illustrates his manipulative behaviors and his fervent desire for power. Sa’eed’s awareness in morphing into his various selves creates fissures in his character. Riddled with multiple identity fractures, he moves beyond a conflict of double consciousness. The volatile Othered selves he constructs do not blend together but instead, consume one another. Existing scholarship has commented on the use of the supernatural within Salih’s work, yet it has not closely inspected the significance of the ifrit and how shapeshifting and immolation function as larger tropes in Season of Migration. My particular reading of the text shows the difficulty and potential impossibility of negotiating a hybrid identity and reveals the significance of these Eastern mythological creatures within a postcolonial context.