Season of Migration to the North-In What Way Mustafa Saeed Resembles Othello and How Different They are From Each Other?

Introduction

Sudanese novelist and short-story writer al-Tayyib Salih won acclaim as a master of style and fictional form early in his career when he published his complex and poetic Season of Migration to the North. Although Salih's literary production has been limited—three novels and a series of short stories—his creation of the mythical village Wad Hamid in northern Sudan (akin to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county) has made him a major voice in Arabic literature. In the novel "season of migration to the north" by Tayeb Salih, Mustafa Saeed - the major character in the novel - refers himself as Othello in the beginning then he opposes by saying “I am no Othello” (BookRags Encyclopedia Article, 2009). This paper discusses in what way Mustafa Saeed resembles Othello and how different they are from each other.

Discussion

The reading the character of Mustafa Saeed it appears that Tayeb Salih's 'Season of Migration to the North' explores cultures in contact or in conflict. A close reading of the text reveals that both issues are explored. When Saeed refers himself as Othello and when he refuses. Hybridity, where one culture is grafted on the other such that both can flourish, is sought in the novel. The other possibility, where one culture takes over in a form of contamination, is rejected. Cultural contamination is considered a byproduct of European colonialism in Africa that must be overcome.

Harlow (pp. 75-79) mentions that for many critics, the dilemma centers around the interpretation of the secondary (or sometimes thought to be the main) protagonist of the novel: Mustafa Sa'eed, one of the first Sudanese to go abroad and study at Oxford University and "the first Sudanese to marry an Englishwoman". Before his marriage, Sa'eed seduced and drove to despair and suicide a series of three women. His marriage to Jean Morris is violent from the very start and ends with Sa'eed plunging a knife into her chest while having sexual intercourse with her in an ultimate act of eros and death. For many scholars, Mustafa Sa'eed's own self-comparisons to Othello have made it difficult not to see in his character a man who exacts vengeance upon British colonizers of the Sudan through his sexual exploits with women in London (Harlow, pp. 75-79). However, Ali Abdallah Abbas has suggested that it is a mistake to assume that the confrontation between Sa'eed and the English women is indicative of the colonial confrontation played out between Africa and Europe. He argues that to view Sa'eed's sexual conquests as a colonized person's vendetta is to fall into the trap of cultural stereotyping that is at once Sa'eed's weapon of seduction against the women and ultimately his own downfall (BookRags Encyclopedia Article, 2009). As the variety of critical opinions demonstrate, in Season of Migration to the North, the unnamed narrator's alter ego, Mustafa Sa'eed, draws the reader's attention to the multilayered historical, cultural, literary, and economic relationships at play between ...