Hybridity and the Quest for Identity in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1969)

Abstract

The construction of "otherness" in postcolonial literature is ostensible in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. Salih’s narrative, by means of a device of reversal, renarrates Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in such a way that it challenges the ideological claims of empire embedded in it. Such concept of Otherness seems to entail unity and purity of the two entities of Self and Other as they are ascribed two clear-cut types of qualities that draw a neat-division between them, and deny any influence that one might have on the other, namely in moments and spaces of encounter and negotiation. Yet, during and after colonial and cultural encounters and migratory processes that the world has experienced, such concept of Other/Otherness is conceived of as being erroneous; for identities, a complex concept indeed, have been in a perpetual flux to the point that hybridity is the dominant trait of colonial and postcolonial subjects. In this line of thought, hybridity tends to debunk the system of binarism which is mistakenly deployed in the representation of "selves" and "others". Such binarism is, however, drawn into a Lacanian mirror-image wherein the identity of Self/Other is complementary; for only in encountering the Other does the Self know itself. This paper intends to examine the manifestations of hybridity along with the question of the Self’s quest for identity in Season of Migration to the North. In the light of the different thoughts that have informed the concept of hybridity, the paper also looks at signs of ambivalence and mimicry in the work of Tayeb Salih.