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"A Drop of Poison": Mental and Physical Infection in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Hussein, Zainab
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1513338028751278

Abstract Details

2018, Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, English.
Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North, published shortly after Sudanese independence from colonial rule, is in itself a practice in resistance. Salih subverts the European narrative, and instead replaces it with the experience of his protagonist MustafaSa'eed. Through this novel, Salih combats the British literary and social tradition of the"germ" of infection that is transmitted to the British body politic through the brown body of the formerly colonized subject. ! propose that Salih's novel demonstrates that for all of England's germaphobic and paranoid ideas directed toward the brown body, England's conquest of Sudan is the true source of evil and infection in the novel. Rather than perpetuating the myth of the colonizing mission as the benevolent enterprise that the British often uphold, Salih underscores that colonialism and the conquest of Sudan is the origin of the plague that both the postcolonial body and postcolonial society must struggle to come to terms with, even "post-independence." The motif of the "germ" is constantly repeated by the British in the text. However, Mustafa, appropriates this terminology, and in doing so, points to a source-hood for his actions as the first Sudanese to ever set foot in England-- that source-hood being the British empire and the colonial mission. This infection manifests itself on both the mental plane, through education and the monopolizing of culture, as well as the physical plane, through ideas of sexuality and miscegenation. Other postcolonial scholars tend to read Salih's novel as a letter to the empire, focusing entirely on Mustafa's actions in the post-colonial context. I, however, intend to look at the ways in which the disease of colonialism was intended to erase any possibility of the post-colonial, and the ways in which the novel itself grapples with the notion of anything surviving post contamination
Melissa Gregory (Committee Chair)
Parama Sarkar (Advisor)
50 p.
African Literature; Language Arts; Literature; Middle Eastern Literature
germ; infection; education; sexuality; season of migration to the north; Tayeb Salih; Sudan; North African literature; postcolonial; disease

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hussein, Z. (2018). "A Drop of Poison": Mental and Physical Infection in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North [Undergraduate thesis, University of Toledo]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1513338028751278

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hussein, Zainab. "A Drop of Poison": Mental and Physical Infection in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. 2018. University of Toledo, Undergraduate thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1513338028751278.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hussein, Zainab. ""A Drop of Poison": Mental and Physical Infection in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North." Undergraduate thesis, University of Toledo, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1513338028751278

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by University of Toledo Honors Theses and OhioLINK.