Season of Migration to the North

by Tayeb Salih (1966)

7/10

A strange and enchanting book. A little slower and more meditative than I like these days, and I won’t pretend to totally comprehend it, but I can appreciate it as a piece of art for sure. I also think it has great value as a cultural touchstone of NE African society.

Reading this makes me look at something like The Sheltering Sky with less respect in hindsight. Sure I think Bowles did an impressive job of capturing the harshness and existentialist dread of the North African desert, but then again he can only do it from a European (i.e. colonial) perspective. It feels much more authentic to read Salih’s take on similar thematic elements, but from the perspective of the colonized.