Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-6bnxx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-29T00:43:14.141Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Palms behind the Smog: Strange Energies in Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl (Season of Migration to the North)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2024

Charis Olszok
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay argues for the primacy of energy as an impetus in the writing of the Sudanese author al-Tayyib Salih. Taking his most famous novel, موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال (1966; Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl; Season of Migration to the North), as a case study, it explores the significance of climatic factors and of changes to energy regimes in the novel's plot, characterization, intertextuality, and postcolonial critique. Through the character of Mustafa Saʿid, it argues for a posthuman impulse in the novel, as Mustafa uncannily transforms from Faustian archetype to a fantastical, nonhuman force. It concludes by shifting to alternative forms of energy within Salih's writing, as the spiritual energy of the Sufi “unseen” meets the unheeding world of atoms, supercharged with new energies in the modern era.

Information

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 139 , Issue 2 , March 2024 , pp. 200 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Abu-Haydar, Jareer. “A Novel Difficult to Categorize.” Amyuni, Tayeb Salih's Season, pp. 45–53.Google Scholar
Adonis. An Introduction to Arab Poetics. Translated by Cobham, Catherine, Saqi, 2013.Google Scholar
Al-Halool, Musa. “The Nature of the Uncanny in Season of Migration to the North.” Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, 2008, pp. 31–38.Google Scholar
Amyuni, Mona Takieddine. Introduction. Amyuni, Tayeb Salih's Season, pp. 11–25.Google Scholar
Amyuni, Mona Takieddine, editor. Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North: A Casebook. American University of Beirut, 1985.Google Scholar
Balkan, Stacey, and Nandi, Swaralipi. “Reading Our Contemporary Petrosphere.” Introduction. Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, edited by Balkan, and Nandi, , Penn State UP, 2021, pp. 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barak, On. Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization. U of California P, 2020.Google Scholar
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Verso, 2010.Google Scholar
Brown, Norman O. “The Apocalypse of Islam.” Social Text, no. 8, winter 1983–84, pp. 155–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbin, Henry. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Princeton UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Corton, Christine. London Fog: The Biography. Belknap Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Eggan, Taylor. The Ecological Uncanny: Estranging Literary Landscapes in Twentieth-Century Narrative Fiction. 2017. Princeton U, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Elad-Bouskila, Ami. “Shaping the Cast of Characters: The Case of al-Ṭayyib Salih.” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1998, pp. 59–84.Google Scholar
El-Ariss, Tarek. Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political. Fordham UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Fekadu, Sarah. “The North and the Desert: Tayeb Salih's Poetics of the Anthropocene.” REAL, vol. 33, no. 1, 2017, pp. 255–72.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by McLintock, David, Penguin Classics, 2002.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by McLintock, David, Penguin Classics, 2003.Google Scholar
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. Columbia UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frye, Northrop. “Spengler Revisited.” Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, edited by Gorak, Jan, U of Toronto P, 2003, pp. 297–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gade, Anna. Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations. Columbia UP, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guth, Stephan, and Pepe, Teresa, editors. Arabic Literature in a Posthuman World: Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference of the European Association for Modern Arabic Literature (EURAMAL). Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hassan, Waïl. Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction. Syracuse UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Holt, Elizabeth. “Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ's Season of Migration to the North, the CIA, and the Cultural Cold War after Bandung.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 50, no. 3, 2019, pp. 70–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hsia, Adrian. “On the Reception of Faust in Asia.” International Faust Studies: Adaptation, Reception, Translation, edited by Fitzsimmons, Lorna, Continuum, 2008, pp. 149–60.Google Scholar
Jibril, Talha. على الدرب مع الطيب صالح : ملامح من سيرة ذاتية [ʿAlā al-darb maʿ al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: malāmiḥ min sīra dhātiyya]. Tub li-l-istithmar wa-l-khidamat, 1997.Google Scholar
Kapuściński, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. Translated by Brand, William R. and Mroczkowska-Brand, Katarzyna, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985.Google Scholar
Khairallah, Asʿad E. “The Travelling Theatre or the Art of Entertaining a Doomed Caravan with Entertaining Stories.” Amyuni, Tayeb Salih's Season, pp. 95–111.Google Scholar
Lowry, Joseph E. “Histories and Polyphonies: Deep Structures in al-Tayyib Sālih's Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl (Season of Migration to the North).” Edebiyat: Journal of M.E. Literatures, vol. 12, no. 2, 2001, pp. 161–93.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes. “‘A Choice of Nightmares’: The Ecology of Heart of Darkness.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 55, no. 3, 2009, pp. 620–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. U of California P, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota P, 2013.Google Scholar
Nassaar, Christopher. “Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Salih's Season of Migration to the North.” The Explicator, vol. 56, no. 2, 1998, pp. 105–08.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olszok, Charis. “Following the Pipeline: Petro-phantoms in Fāḍil al-ʿAzzāwī's The Last of the Angels (1992) and Imīl Ḥabībī's Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter (1991).” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 54, 2023, pp. 347–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olszok, Charis. “Salīm Barakāt's Weird Ecology.” Comparative Literature, vol. 75, no. 4, 2023, pp. 415–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omri, Mohamed-Salah. Nationalism, Islam and World Literature: Sites of Confluence in the Writings of Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī. Routledge, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Qurʾan : A New Translation by Tarif Khalidi. Penguin Books, 2008.Google Scholar
Salih, al-Tayyib. “مشروع الجزيرة” [“Mashrūʿ al-jazīra”]. Aṣwāt, vol. 1, 1961, pp. 97–99.Google Scholar
Salih, al-Tayyib. موسم الهجرة الى الشمال [Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl]. Dar al-ʿAwda, 2014.Google Scholar
Salih, al-Tayyib. Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Johnson-Davies, Denys, Penguin Books, 2003.Google Scholar
Salih, al-Tayyib. Tayeb Salih Speaks: Four Interviews with the Sudanese Novelist. Translated and edited by Berkley, Constance and Ahmed, Osman, Embassy of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan, 1982.Google Scholar
Salih, al-Tayyib. “يوم مبارك على شاطء أم باب ” [“Yawm mubārak ʿalā shāṭiʾ Umm Bāb”]. مختارات من القصص القصيرة في 18 بلدا عربيا [Mukhtārāt min al-qiṣaṣ al-qaṣīra fī 18 baladan ʿarabiyan], edited by al-Ṭāhir Aḥmad Makkī, Markaz al-Ahrām, 1993, pp. 159–66.Google Scholar
Samatar, Sofia. “Dear Tayeb Salih.” Arablit and Arablit Quarterly, 2020, arablit.org/2020/11/02/dear-tayeb-salih/.Google Scholar
Samatar, Sofia. Nonstandard Space: Tayeb Salih, Fantasy, and World Literature. 2013. U of Wisconsin, Madison, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Samatar, Sofia. “Verticality and Vertigo: Spatial Effects in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North.” Comparative Literature, vol. 71, no. 1, 2017, pp. 19–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Selim, Samah. The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985. Routledge, 2010.Google Scholar
Siddiq, Mohammed. “The Process of Individuation in Al-Tayyeb Salih's Novel ‘Season of Migration to the North.’” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 9, 1978, pp. 67–104.Google Scholar
Spengler, Oswald. Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. Routledge, 2017.Google Scholar
Sperl, Stefan. “Qasida Form and Mystic Path in Thirteenth Century Egypt: A Poem by Ibn al-Fārid.” Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, edited by Sperl, Christopher Schakel, , Brill, 1996, pp. 65–82. Vol. 1 of Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa.Google Scholar
Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual. Cornell UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Tayyib, Hasan al-. الطيب صالح : دراسات نقدبة [Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: dirāsāt naqdiyya]. Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2001.Google Scholar
Verhoeven, Harry. Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan: The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State Building. Cambridge UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warner, Marina. Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. Random House, 2011.Google Scholar
Wensinck, A. J. “al-Ḵẖaḍir (al-Ḵẖiḍr).” Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by Bearman, P. et al., 2nd ed., Brill, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0483.Google Scholar
Werres, Peter. “The Changing Faces of Dr Faustus.” Lives of Faust: The Faust Theme in Literature and Music, edited by Fitzsimmons, Lorna, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 1–18.Google Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” Editor's column. PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2, Mar. 2011, pp. 305–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar