Abstract
Readings of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North privilege the Sudanese novel's intertextuality with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Largely ignored is the English poem that Mustafa Saʿeed, Season's central figure, recites one night, unleashing Season's core narrative. Yet that poem - Ford Madox Hueffer's Antwerp, which eulogizes Belgium's resistance to the Germans during World War I - upends Season's economies of race, history, and language. Hueffer's Belgian children and mothers, awaiting men who never return, evoke not their colonizing compatriots in the Congo but Mustafa and his mother in the Sudan, shadowed by a father and husband who dies in the service of British colonialism. Further, Mustafa's recitation of Antwerp recasts as mirror-images English poetry and Arab-African orature/literature.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | A Companion to World Literature |
| Editors | Ken Seigneurie, B. Venkat Mani |
| Place of Publication | Hoboken, NJ |
| Publisher | Wiley |
| Pages | 2687-96 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Volume | 5A |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781118635193 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781118993187 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 19 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- African literature
- Arabic literature
- colonialism
- Ford Madox Ford
- Nahḍa
- postcolonialism
- Sudan
- Tayeb Salih
- world literature
- World War I