An Analysis Of Tayib Salih's Season Of Migration

When Isabella Seymour, one of Mustafa Sa’eed’s amours in London, asks Mustafa, “are you African or Asian?”” he replies, “I’m like Othello-Arab-African”. Tayib Salih, the author of Season of Migration to the North which recounts Mustafa’s journey west and his subsequent return to a village in his native Sudan, in his novel shows that his novel was written through a lens that shows that it is addressed for the people of the Sudan, that they might find it a mythology of their own. And yet, Season of Migration is, a novel, a form imported by the Arabs from the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Europe and the Middle East confronted each other issues of culture, colonialism and curiosity. But if Season is, by western

“Speak of me as I am” (V, ii, 342) Who is Othello? The question must be posed, if he is to be spoken of as he is. Othello, the Moor of Venice, thought to know the answer to the question he presents at the point of death, thought to know at least when he first appeared on stage, the “black ram”, sought by Brabantio for “tupping (his) white ewe” (I, i, 88-9). “I must be found”, he says, “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/ Shall manifest me rightly” (I, ii, 30-2). Why should Othello then be concerned at the end of the drama that he not to be spoken of as he is? Othello, who had been made generally by the Venetians to fight their wars against the Turks, has married one of their daughters. His part, his title, perhaps even his “perfect soul”, have been conferred on him, the stranger in their midst, by his hosts, his employers. When he has killed their daughter, those parts, the title, are revoked. His perfect soul sullied. What is there then to speak of? What is known of Othello, his past, his background, beyond what the Venetians, and literary critics of Shakespeare, once made of him? Except that he is an “extravagant and wheeling stranger/ Of here and everywhere” (I, i, 135-6). To Othello, who defiantly demanded, dared even: “Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate/ Nor ought set down in malice”, to Othello Mustafa Sa’eed answers, “I am like Othello-Arab-African”. And to his defenders at his trial, the same Mustafa Sa’eed will silently will silently scream, “ I am no Othello, I was a lie”(page 95) Whose is the lie? And who is Othello? Who Mustafa