Moving in and Out of Borders: Othello, Caliban, and Conrad in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

Borders can be lines on a map, marked with flags, fences, or barbed wire, or they can be boundaries and limit conditions, as much a part of mental baggage as to do with zones of geographical and political demarcation. In postcolonial experience, a border is a cultural barrier more often breached than respected. This paper examines the kind of breaking through boundaries represented in the novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) by the Sudanese novelist Tayib Salih. In his narrative, the protagonist is characterized in a manner that hovers and moves to-andfro across boundaries such as that between realism and allegory, between autobiography and intertexuality, and between literal and figurative acts of translation. The protagonist crosses the literal border from his colonized South to the North where the colonizer lives. He also breaks down the barriers that separate civility and being civilized from rapacity and barbarism. Salih’s novel crosses over into the mode of a fable, which negotiates a crossing between a tale set in England and the Sudan and a fable in which a North African assumes and inverts the typologies and stereotypes associated with Shakespeare’s Othello and Caliban. Salih’s fiction provides a fascinating reflection on a singular aspect of the postcolonial condition which the paper attempts to explicate: the compulsion to create psychic borders, and the equally strong compulsion to break through such borders and boundaries.