Tayeb Salih Character Connection

Our group decided to do the life of Tayeb Salih. Each of us was responsible for a piece of Tayebs Salih biography that interested us the most.  We hope you enjoy the readings and find the questions we posted thought provoking.

 

 

 

Tayeb Salih Character Connection

According to an interview from 2002, Tayeb Salih started his Journey going to intermediate school in the Sudan, after he attended the only secondary school in Sudan he had left his village at the age of 10.  He went to London when he was 23-24 years of age.  Salih said, “That is when I became an outsider.”  He did return to Sudan for a brief time as a teacher.  But returned to England where he lived the rest of his life until 2009. Much of his material for writing comes from his own life and experience in the Sudan, pulling from many of the people in his family and village.  He said that his mother was the most like Bint Majzoub.  His own grandfather was mirrored in the narrators’ grandfather.  He only stopped short of saying he used himself and experiences with other family members and acquaintances as material for the two main characters.

Salih was born in 1929 and grew up in the Merowe area of northern Sudan, in a village called aac-Dabba. His was primarily a farming family, but included some merchants and Islamic scholars, and Salih was sent to a khalwa, or Islamic religious school, as a youth. He departed al-Dabba at the age of ten to study at the Wadi Sayyidina School in Omdurman, one of Sudan’s two principal urban centers, and studied agricultural sciences later at Khartoum University in the capital city. Changing direction, he went to England to study economics and political science at the University of London, and took education courses at the University of Exeter as well. Returning to Sudan, he taught for a time, and became a scriptwriter for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Returning to England in time, he came to head the drama department of the BBC’s Arabic-language television division. His career also included a stint with the Sudan Broadcasting Service, a post as director of information for the government of Qatar on the Arabian Peninsula, and work as an adviser to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He married a Scottish woman, with whom he had three children.

“The Season of Migration to the North” is told by an anonymous Sudanese-born narrator who grows increasingly obsessed with his doppelganger, a man whose life and career seems to have foreshadowed his own.

 

Who or what is his doppelganger?

 

 Mustafa is that character he is dubbed Mustafa by the village people it means “the black Englishman” 

These two characters the Narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed had a similar educational background to Tayeb Salih. The three journeyed to study at Khartoum and then to England but unlike Salih they returned to Sudan to share their education with their people.

 

Of the three who do you think wasted their education?  Mustafa, the narrator or Salih?  Why?

 

In the introduction Laila Lalami says, “The two main characters in the book, the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed, travel between north and south; they move between Eastern and Western traditions; they speak English and Arabic; they live, at one point or another in a village and in a city; they are foreign men in a white world, or foreign-educated men in a black world.”  In the interview mentioned above, Salih  states that there is a misconception of Islam in the West and Laila Lalami writes in the introduction, “Islam is portrayed in the book as it is lived, not as it is imagined.  The characters appear to consider religion on part of their lives, but are not defined by it.” (Introduction xiv)

 

Do you think that Salih is also being described in Lailas’ Introduction?

 

I believe that Mustafa did not die in the flood either by accident or suicide but had faked his death and planned to return to England and assume another identity. I think the author Salih left that possibility open as a body was never found it did not wash up on shore with the other bodies.   Mustafa also just shared his last wishes with his wife and gave the letter to her to give the narrator in case of his death.

 

 Premonition or Premeditation? 

Remembering Writer Tayeb Salih “Writers and Company” 7/24/11. http _www.cbc.ca_player_Radio_Writers+and+Company_2011_ID_2047561604_.htm