Lost-Identity; A Result of “Hybridity” and “Ambivalence” in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

During the colonial period, British colonizers marched to the Third and Fourth World countries to exploit them for the purpose of colonizers’ economical uplifts. Therefore, colonizers internalized their own superiority over the inferior colonized countries by devaluing their culture, race, language, and identity in order to pillage the colonized. As the result, many of the colonized individuals migrated to the developed countries to educate there in order to save their motherlands. However, facing with an alien culture and language caused the colonized to have a merged and dual identity. In this regard, Season of Migration to the North, written in 1969 by Tayeb Salih, is the story of an intelligent colonized who sacrifices his own life and identity to take revenge on colonizers by traveling to London and educating there. But, Mustafa Saeed, the intelligent colonized, loses his own identity in this way and finally disappears as the victim of this colonizing strategy’s consequence, merged- or lost-identity. Therefore, in this study, it has been tried to investigate Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North through Homi K. Bhabha’s theories of “Hybridity” and “Ambivalence” as the causes of merged- and even lost-identity in post-colonial discourse.