Two key texts of the English literary canon, William Shakespeare’s play
Othello (1604) and Joseph Conrad’s novel
Heart of Darkness (1902), inform and frame
Season of Migration to the North. Salih explicitly sets his Arabic novel—which deals with the encounter between “east” and “west,” between Europe and Africa/the Orient—in relation to, and in the context of, these two European texts. On one level,
Season of Migration to the North can be understood as a rewriting of Shakespeare’s famous play
Othello. In fact, the protagonist of Salih’s novel, Mustafa Sa’eed, likens himself to Shakespeare’s tragic hero and describes himself in terms of Othello’s ethnic identity, as an “Arab-African.” Through these references to Othello, Salih’s novel frames itself as a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, with the encounter between an “Arab-African” protagonist and western European culture set within the framework of colonialism. Likewise, Salih’s novel recalls Conrad’s novel
Heart of Darkness, which tells the story of a European colonial merchant who journeys down the Congo river into the “heart of darkness”—a problematic and derogatory reference to the “heart” of the African continent. Salih’s novel tells the story of a reverse journey: of an Arab-African protagonist who journeys from Africa into the “heart of darkness” of Europe, where he confronts firsthand the colonial violence at the center of European civilization. As a postcolonial text, therefore,
Season of Migration to the North can be seen as “writing back” to, and challenging, key literary works of European (and particularly British) culture, and it thereby inscribes a postcolonial counter-narrative to these colonial “master” narratives of Europe.