Commodity of the Savage: Fetishism in Season of Migration to the North Anonymous College

56% of audiences for the premier The Legend of Tarzan were women. 34% were men. The same is true for George of the Jungle and 300. Film School Rejects author Kristen Lopez hypothesizes that perhaps the turnout was for Alexander Skarsgard's muscles, or Brendan Fraser's smile; yet, it is hardly easy to deny that the savage man is traditionally one of the most attractive archetypes to women. Rugged, primitive, and hyper-sexual, these stereotyped men find themselves in erotic stories and on covers of paperback books at the supermarket. The oblique fetishism of primitive culture has permeated society for decades. Once a person or a thing fetishized, simply nothing else will be satisfactory. What happens when what we desire becomes what we need? Tayeb Salih, author of Season of Migration to the North, takes the ideas of culture, love, lust, and views of the self and turns them into political and economic terms. Yet conversely, Salih casts these themes through a lens in which we must decide whether these things already are what we fear - void of love itself. The fetishism of cultures creates commodities out of its peoples, transforming love and relationships from emotionally abstract to coveted socioeconomic objects.

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