Robyn Creswell | The Poetry of Tayeb Salih's 'Season of Migration to the North'

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argued that Tayeb Salih’s Mawsim al-hijra ila- l-shamal (A Season of Migration to the North), first published in Arabic in 1966, performed a “deliberate …reversal” of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Rather than a white man journeying upriver into the heart of Africa, Salih’s fiction depicts a black man traveling from Sudan to the imperial metropole on the Thames. Said’s influential reading has canonized A Season of Migration as a postcolonial novel, situated in a tradition of even more canonical European precursors. In Salih’s writing, however, the significant literary form isn’t the novel, but poetry. What happens to our understanding of Salih’s work when Arabic poetry is placed at its center, rather than British novels and narratives? And what difference does it make to the work of translation when Salih’s narrator isn’t conceived as a stand-in for the novelist, but rather as a student and transmitter of poetry, and perhaps a would-be poet himself?

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