Arab Fiction and Migration in the Work of Haqqi and Salih

Summary

Abstract: In her article “Arab Fiction and Migration in the Work of Haqqi and Salih” Ikram Masmoudi proposes that twentieth-century Arab fiction is marked by the theme of the journey in literal and figurative ways. The Saint's Lamp by Yahya Haqqi and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih depict two different kinds of enigmatic arrivals. Their arrival is the opportunity to adjust and assess their positions and their cultural differences. Although the two arriving protagonists in these novels have different attitudes vis-à-vis the West and their local culture, the structure of arrival in both novels is not straightforward and immediate, but instead reflects a negotiation between two attitudes and a transition from an immediate, physical arrival to an inner, mental arrival. This leads to a new understanding of and an adjustment to a fuller sense of arrival.

In the middle of his life and experience as a writer living and writing in England, the main character and narrator of V. S. Naipaul's autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival, an Indian from colonial Trinidad retires to the English countryside to heal and reflect on a series of aspects of his life: his metropolitan encounters, his career, and his early attempts at writing. In the cottage he rents he stumbles upon a few books left there by pervious tenants. Among them was a booklet with reproductions of famous paintings.