Racial Identity and the Uncanny in Season of Migration to the North Harsh Karamchandani College

Season of Migration to the North (henceforth, Seasons) is a post-colonial Sudanese novel by author Tayeb Salih which records the life of the narrator after his return to his village, Wad Hamid, after staying for seven years in England. A new man, Mustafa Sa’eed, has settled in the village since and the book revolves around the interaction of the narrator with Mustafa, Mustafa’s subsequent mysterious departure and the narrator’s obsession with him. The anecdotes of Mustafa’s past experiences in England and his sexual exploits disturb the narrator’s normal life in his village and instill a fear in him. While the anecdotes themselves shed light on an interesting dynamic between the colonizer and colonized in a foreign land, the effect of these foreign tales on a man in his native land is also worth exploring further. This paper aims to address how fear shapes one’s racial identity in a foreign land and affects one’s identity in one’s own native land when confronted with the Uncanny.

Mustafa was a foreign man in a foreign land in England, a black man in a white man’s world and a colonized man in the colonizer’s realm. Everyone around him had cultural stereotypes about his place of origin and the exoticism associated with it....