Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North both aligns with, and undercuts, Frantz Fanon’s study of the relations between coloniser and the colonised and between a black man and white woman in Black Skin, White Masks. We can study the areas where Salih’s conception of his characters are in direct conversation with Fanon’s ideas, particularly with Fanon’s distillation of the cause of Jean Veneuse’s neurosis as independent of his race. From the areas where Salih parallels and diverges from Fanon’s archetypes, we can explore Salih’s motivations in his portrayals of the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed. Ultimately, Salih diverges from Fanon’s psychoanalysis of a black man in love with a white woman, which elevates the white man as the ideal that all other identities aspire towards. Instead, Salih strives to reframe the East-West dynamic and portray abiding commonalities between both parties.
Fanon explains that Veneuse is first a neurotic and coincidentally a black man. Sent away to boarding school since he was seven, Veneuse did not enjoy a secure feeling of being loved in early childhood. Fanon diagnoses that this phenomenon has nothing to do with race. Even “if this objective difference [in race] had not existed, [Veneuse] would have manufactured [his neurosis] out of nothing” . Similarly, Salih …show more content…
As Fanon posits, this is because they do not accept that “the Negro is a man like the rest, the equal of the others”. Veneuse’s schoolmates, with whom he seldom interacts, “hold him in high regard”. Their vague praises of Veneuse, for instance calling him “the kind of Negro that a lot of white guys ought to be like”, highlight their superficial understanding of Veneuse’s character. On the other extreme, society also warns that “associating with anybody of that race is just utterly disgracing
Fanon explains that Veneuse is first a neurotic and coincidentally a black man. Sent away to boarding school since he was seven, Veneuse did not enjoy a secure feeling of being loved in early childhood. Fanon diagnoses that this phenomenon has nothing to do with race. Even “if this objective difference [in race] had not existed, [Veneuse] would have manufactured [his neurosis] out of nothing” . Similarly, Salih …show more content…
As Fanon posits, this is because they do not accept that “the Negro is a man like the rest, the equal of the others”. Veneuse’s schoolmates, with whom he seldom interacts, “hold him in high regard”. Their vague praises of Veneuse, for instance calling him “the kind of Negro that a lot of white guys ought to be like”, highlight their superficial understanding of Veneuse’s character. On the other extreme, society also warns that “associating with anybody of that race is just utterly disgracing