Analysis Of The Story The Story Of Mustafa Saeed

The story of Mustafa Saeed is one that’s filled with intricate use of metaphors and symbolism. In Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North, the role of women is frequently deployed to demonstrate the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Mustafa sees sex as if it is violent in nature, a form of conquest over women whom he heavily objectifies. It feels as if the narrator almost intentionally constructs Mustafa’s journey as a perfectly symbolic anti-colonialism discourse. Mustafa bears the ambition to reclaim and reassert Africans masculinity by physically dominating European women after his mother country Sudan had been subjected to being a colony of the British Empire. Despite his initial successful anti-colonial quest, Mustafa, the calculated, relentless, nationalist, anti-colonial fighter turns out to be the true victim who falls to the power of Western colonization. The indispensability of his colonial master would eventually lead t o his final submission, as the narrator poetically hints, â€Å"But sooner or later it settles down in its irrevocable journey towards the sea in the north† (Salih 58). Mustafa presumptuously plans his disappearance into the Nile flood that flows toward the direction of Western civilization. Mustafa Saeed first comes across as someone who clearly assumes a naturallly stone-cold personality starting at a young age: he has no emotional attachment to his mother as he anticlimactically departs from his mother as a