Table of Contents Introduction 2. Season of Migration to the North 2.1. Initial Disarrays 2.2. Mustafa Sa’eed’s Apartment 2.3. Mustafa Sa’eed’s Library 3. Conclusion Introduction This paper is an exploration of the complex development of identity closely related to the formation of a sense of space and place in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. Published in 1966, only ten years after Sudan received its independence from the British Empire, it challenges the opposition of modernism and traditionalism by depicting the distance between London during the 1920ies and the rural countryside of the Sudan. The paper examines the assumption that identity and the shaping of place is static. Studying the two different yet intertwined struggles of creating a meaningful place of the protagonists, I will take a closer look at Mustafa Sa’eed and the unnamed narrator and try to illuminate, how colonial politics created new spaces and affected their way of thinking and living in these spaces. A key point of interest will be the description of Mustafa Sa’eed’s two places, the apartment in London and the secret study room, he created during the narrative as possible reflections of his identity, and the contrasted procedure of the unnamed narrator. In the process of examining the novel it will become apparent how Salih managed to dissolve existing boundaries of East and West and thus built a room for new conceptualizations of social realities. Instead of following the dualism of North and South, he places the reader in the ambiguous zone of colonial encounter through his main character Mustafa Sa’eed, who is exemplary for a whole society in disarray after a history of colonization. I will emphasize the consequences of imperialism presented in Season of Migration to the North, in which the culture of the imperial power clashes with the culture of its victims and thus try to show how the author manages to resolve traditional assumptions regarding location and setting. Season of Migration to the North Initial Disarrays The novel opens with the return of the unnamed narrator, who had been studying poetry for seven years in England. After a short moment in which he felt alienated, he soon recovers a feeling of being at home. “...I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose” (SMN, 2). His pastoral depictions of the village convey a naive feeling of an untouched place, lacking any signs of a former imperialism. “Life is good and the world as unchanged as ever” (SMN, 3). Answering numerous questions to the villagers, he almost affirms that the Orient and the Other are almost the same. The only change he could spot at that time was the water pumps as a first sign of modernity, which slowly replaced the water wheels on the bank of the Nile River. It is not until the appearance of Mustafa Sa’eed, that the narrator is expelled from his illusion. Mustafa Sa’eed, having his life in England long behind him, has married a woman from Wad Hamid and settled with her in the village. Although Sa’eed is not born in Wad Hamid and only lived there for some years, he is regarded as one of the villagers and even more so conveys the narrator the feeling of being the actual stranger. “I (the narrator) was furious – I won’t disguise the fact from you – when the man laughed agriculture, engineering or medicine.” Look at the way he says “we” and does not include me, though he knows that this is my village and that it is he – not I – who is the stranger” (SMN, 9). This notion gives an initial hint in respect of the complex and interwoven physical as well as mental journey of disarray. Early on, the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed are joining a drinking session with some friends, when Sa’eed, animated by too much alcohol, starts to recite a poem about the First World War (“Those Women of Flanders/Await the Lost”) in perfect English. The sudden knowledge of their common western education leads to a final loss of the narrator’s sense of place. He realizes that he had been living in an illusion. It is not until the second chapter, that Salih’s inversion of the familiar geographical tropes of North and South begins in earnest (Velez, 193). Sa’eed begins to tell the story of his childhood and subsequent travels. As a young boy he got introduced to school by a colonial official and for the first time came in contact with visible examples of imperial space. While most native Sudanese distrusted sch