‘I Choose Life’: Negation, Agency, and Utopian Hope in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.

Abstract

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North dramatizes the violence of colonialism and patriarchy and their impact on the African psyche. This article shifts from the prevailing scholarship on Mustafa, the main protagonist, to locate hope in what one does, not merely as an abstract concept. The unnamed narrator exemplifies Salih’s vision of a postcolonial subject that recognizes the perils of binary thinking and aspires instead toward an ethic acceptance of vulnerability and difference. Invoking Tia DeNora’s conception of hope as “an orientation to action” and “a space for possibility,” I show how the narrator’s embrace of hope is linked to and complicated by the effects of colonialism and patriarchy in his Sudanese village. Overall, the aim of this article is threefold: first, to examine Salih’s critique of female negation and male hegemony; second, to highlight Salih’s rejection of passivity and fatalism–how both undermine individual and collective agency and reinforce female negation in society; and, lastly, to consider Salih’s postcolonial utopianism and privileging of autonomy.