Distorted Love in Tayeb Salih's Season ofMigration to the North

Abstract

All men dream: but not all equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. T. E. Lawrence' In a blurb on the back of the French translation ofTayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North Claude-Michel Cluny says that the novel is: 'Angoisse des batards nes des noces de 1'Afrique et de l'Occident, du passe avec le futur ...../ It plays out the agony of the bastard, or hybrid, who is the product of a love-hate relationship between East and West and of past and future,3 and reveals, as Octavio Paz puts it, 'that the ancient beliefs and customs are still in existence beneath the Western forms.'4 The novel explores the concept of time, a concept so singular in Sudan, due to its environm.ent a...11d distances, that control over either does not seem possible. Life moves at a pace different from that in the \X/estern \Vorld . and problems are magnified or minimised accordingly by this distorted sense of time.5 Moreover, not only time but history is distorted by c )l1stant flashba.c fu d fast=for vards 'p 1nctt1ated by the agonizing cry of (Mustafa) Sa'eed, totally lost to himself tom apart between East and West, South and North, Black and White.' 6 .