Summary
Sudanese novelist whose Season of Migration to the North reverses Conrad’s voyage in Chapter Three, II of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism: the river is now the Nile, the voyage runs northward from a Sudanese village into the heart of Europe, and Mostapha Said is a mirror image of Kurtz (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.238-239 / printed p.211-212).
Details
- The reversals are threefold: the use of Arabic; a Sudanese protagonist’s northward voyage to Europe; and a narrator speaking from a Sudanese village, so that a voyage into the heart of darkness is converted into a sacralized hegira, concluding with Said’s return to and suicide in his native village (PDF p.238 / printed p.211).
- So deliberate are the mimetic reversals that even Kurtz’s skull-topped fence is repeated and distorted in the inventory of European books stacked in Said’s secret library (PDF p.238 / printed p.211).
- Salih’s narrator, quoted at length, holds that sooner or later the colonizers will leave, the railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours, and we shall once again be ordinary people — and if we are lies, lies of our own making (PDF p.239 / printed p.212).
- With Ngugi, Salih appropriated the quest and the voyage for post-colonial purposes; his hero does and is the reverse of Kurtz (PDF p.56-57 / printed p.29-30).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Heart of Darkness, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Joseph Conrad