194. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
In Season of Migration to the North* (A Three Continent Book/Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997 (First Pub., 1966 in Arabic and Translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies, 1969); 169) a young man has arrives home, at Wad Hamid, a small village near the Nile in northern Sudan, from his studies at England where he trained as a Poet. He arrives home to the usual ululation and susurration that meets individuals who have had the opportunities to study abroad, especially during the period where coming across a foreign trained individual was as rare as finding water on a desert. Thus, the narrator's homecoming from abroad is celebrated amongst his people; except one man, whose name he later finds to be Mustafa Sa'eed. Mustafa Sa'eed's lack of enthusiasm in the narrator's return sparks a certain kind of 'need-to-know' curiosity in the narrator; he sees him a person of a different breed, one not awed by the airs of a freshly-arrived scholar. The narrator, hi...