the failure of the particularity of the exilic experience in "Seasons Of Migration to The North" (CP blog)

“and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated”

This particular quote highlights the narrators attempt to emphasize the problematic distinction between the 'European' and the 'Oriental' figures, yet it presents only a part of the idea of what this similarity implies and where it stems from. “Seasons of Migration to The North” is a novel that proposes a reversal to the oriental discourse, and by presenting a protagonist like Mustafa Sa’eed, on the surface Salih takes the reader into the mind of a man who’s sole purpose in life is becoming one with the ‘North’. But perhaps by presenting such a reversal, and showing the perspective of the oriental male who spends his life “conquering” women, Salih is actually turning the reader’s attention to the fact that the impossibility of the friendship between colonizer and colonized is not so much a reality because their differences cannot be overcome, but is more the consequence of similarity between them that exists in the wake of a post colonial world as a result of the colonial experience.

In fact the post colonial narrative can be seen to represent the disfunctionality of the relationship that did exist before the colonizer had left, the effects of which are deeply entrenched not only into the life of the oriental (Mustafa Sa’eed) who is on a journey to find his identity in the north, but is also apparent in the colonial figure, embodied by the women who are constantly pulled towards the oriental man in an attempt to identify themselves. In essence the post colonial narrative gives birth to two self destructive figures who will continuously be pulled towards each other because their experiences are not as different as they have been thought to be. And in trying to create such a relationship both are fated to die, the women committing suicide and mustafa sa’eed drowning in the Nile. Hence the text introduces a new perspective, where the exilic state is not the consequence of a lost identity but of the muddle created by a multiplicity of identities that are impossible to separate. The exilic figure is constantly seen tying himself to a history, but Salih is able to show that when histories become intertwined and the colonizer and colonised can no longer separate themselves on the bases of a history then the exilic state is no longer the experience of an individual, or that of a particular group of people, but the experience of a particular era that transcends geography.