So I had a really intense Colonial Encounters class and for the past couple hours I've just been shaking and trying not to vomit. I don't think I even articulated my point clearly in class because I was so upset.
Oddly enough, it took me a couple years to make the connection between Season of Migration to the North and my own family.
"As it turns out Mustafa was also a precocious student educated in the west but simultaneously harbors a violently hateful and complex relationship with his western identity and acquaintances. The story of Mustafa's troubled past in Europe and in particular his love affair with a British woman, forms the center of the novel. What the narrator then discovers about the stranger, Mustafa Sa'eed, awakens in him great curiosity, despair and anger, as Mustafa emerges as his doppelganger. The stories of Mustafa's past life in England, and the repercussions on the village around him, take a toll on the narrator, who is driven to the very edge of sanity. It is only finally, floating in the river Nile, precariously between life and death, that the narrator makes the conscious choice to rid himself of Mustafa's lingering presence, and to stand as an influential individual in his own right."
Mustafa kills his British wife, by the way. He's in Sudan because he just got out of prison for stabbing her to death - something she "challenged" him to do.
Oddly enough, it took me a couple years to make the connection between Season of Migration to the North and my own family.
"As it turns out Mustafa was also a precocious student educated in the west but simultaneously harbors a violently hateful and complex relationship with his western identity and acquaintances. The story of Mustafa's troubled past in Europe and in particular his love affair with a British woman, forms the center of the novel. What the narrator then discovers about the stranger, Mustafa Sa'eed, awakens in him great curiosity, despair and anger, as Mustafa emerges as his doppelganger. The stories of Mustafa's past life in England, and the repercussions on the village around him, take a toll on the narrator, who is driven to the very edge of sanity. It is only finally, floating in the river Nile, precariously between life and death, that the narrator makes the conscious choice to rid himself of Mustafa's lingering presence, and to stand as an influential individual in his own right."
Mustafa kills his British wife, by the way. He's in Sudan because he just got out of prison for stabbing her to death - something she "challenged" him to do.