Season of Migration to the North and Heart of Darkness African Mimicry of European Stereotypes

Abstract

This article examines Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North as it mimics Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It looks at the NorthSouth dynamics in terms of colonial-postcolonial asymmetrical power relations underlying these two representative literary narratives. The two novels are structured along two round trips taken by the narrators in a reverse order, yet the ensuing outcomes are quite compelling. As each of the two novels resolves itself in a self-challenging manner, it also addresses a more challenging public issue. Salih’s Afro-Arab, Sudanese narrative moves from the egocentric to the polyphonic, from the dominance of a monolithic culture to the subordination of convergent cultures, and back to the starting point in the Sudan. Conrad’s Euro-English narrative moves from the polyphonic to the egocentric, and back to the starting point in Europe. Along the two trips, deceptively distinct at face value, personal and collective memories are invariably recalled by the narrators to interpret and elevate the difficult situations the main characters of the two novels pass through. The stress on the spatial metaphors, as the texts place themselves in historical contexts, is so crucial for the notion of intertextuality. This raises the assumption whether Salih’s model of intertextuality can be read as an explicit African attempt at writing back to the West or an implicit call for a dialogue through the sympathetic medium of literature. The article examines this assumption, in particular, through analyzing the forms of mimicry used by Salih to parody Conrad’s text. Emphasis is placed on examining the issue of duplicity and/or complicity between characters and narrators. This is done in terms of Freudian and Jungian interpretations of human psyche under alienation and stress. Language and linguistic discourse features are also examined as part of the narrative structure and the historical contexts shaping the flow of events in the two tales. These are looked at as linguistic devices addressing the issue of ‘otherness’ and therefore foregrounding the possibility of a dialogue implied by the ways Salih and Conrad orchestrate their essentially polyphonic texts.