shaunrandol
Reader
Here are the first couple of paragraphs of a review on Salih's wonderful book, Season of Migration to the North:
Tayeb Salih, who passed away earlier this year, first published Season of Migration to the North in 1969, during the waning years of European colonialism. Prominent Arabic-English translator Denys Johnson-Davies brings this thoughtful, colorful, and distinctly African novel alive. One woman’s voice is “saw-edged like a maize leaf,” while the voice of a deceased man rose from the beyond like “dead fishes floating on the surface of the sea.” An inky sky is peppered with stars like “nothing but rents in an old tattered garment.”
But the novel is much more than exquisitely descriptive. It is colorful—I laughed aloud while reading it. It is also sexual, and violent, and often both simultaneously. But what really makes this eloquent story compelling is its seesaw-take on the colonizer and the colonized, the Self and the Other. Colonialism, it seems, is often in the eyes of the beholder, especially when viewed from the perspective of the individual.
To read more: http://www.mantlethought.org/content/whither-sudanhttp://http://www.mantlethought.org/content/whither-sudan
Tayeb Salih, who passed away earlier this year, first published Season of Migration to the North in 1969, during the waning years of European colonialism. Prominent Arabic-English translator Denys Johnson-Davies brings this thoughtful, colorful, and distinctly African novel alive. One woman’s voice is “saw-edged like a maize leaf,” while the voice of a deceased man rose from the beyond like “dead fishes floating on the surface of the sea.” An inky sky is peppered with stars like “nothing but rents in an old tattered garment.”
But the novel is much more than exquisitely descriptive. It is colorful—I laughed aloud while reading it. It is also sexual, and violent, and often both simultaneously. But what really makes this eloquent story compelling is its seesaw-take on the colonizer and the colonized, the Self and the Other. Colonialism, it seems, is often in the eyes of the beholder, especially when viewed from the perspective of the individual.
To read more: http://www.mantlethought.org/content/whither-sudanhttp://http://www.mantlethought.org/content/whither-sudan
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