Season of Immigration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Season of Migration to the North- Novel by Tayeb Salih

Mustafa Saeed, the young man from Sudan who travelled to the west and stayed there for most of his 

life with his lover Jane, returns back to Sudan and decides to live as a stranger between the villagers of 

Wad Hamed. As the gossips spread around the villagers about this mysterious new comer, the novel 

takes the reader in a dense adventure between colonialism and the tradition, it shows vividly the sense 

of alienation Mustafa Saeed had felt twice, once when he was abroad and a second time when he was 

surrounded with people who spoke his own language. 

For the exercise, the first sketch is more of a landscape where the Nile river is represented in blue and 

the high hills of the north of Sudan where the novel took place are represented with the color brown. 

Second sketch is my personal interpretation of one quote from the novel,

“I want to take my rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly, I want love to flow from my 

heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, 

books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand.”

Third sketch and the last one is also a personal interpretation for a quote that describes the moment

when the two lovers decided to end things and let go of each other. Jane returns back to the world she 

knew before Mustafa, and Mustafa goes back home, only to feel like a stranger between his people. 

“That was a goodbye. No tears, no kisses, no noise. Two creatures walked part of the road together, then 

each went his own way”