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This volume represents the first time that one of contemporary
Arabic literature’s bestselling novels, Season of Migration to the
North,
has been thoroughly studied and analyzed. The violence of Tayeb Salih’s
story has no precedent in modern Arabic fiction. The book’s hero, Mustafa
Said, an orphaned child of colonial Sudan, who spends thirty years of his adult
life in London, becomes the prototype of the “Stranger” who belongs
nowhere, torn between north and south, black and white, emotion and intellect.
Here twelve writers offer their interpretations of various aspects of the book.
About the Author
Mona Amyuni, the editor of
Tayeb
Salih's Season of Migration to the North: A Casebook (Beirut: American
University of Beirut, 1985), teaches in the Civilization
Sequence Program of AUB. She has been with the university's faculty since 1968,
when she began as an instructor of European literature and the French language.
Completely French-educated to the baccalaureate level, but having decided to
add studies in English in pursuing her higher education, Amyuni enrolled in the
Beirut College for Women (BUC, now LAU), where she received her BA in English
Literature in 1968. She then went on to earn an MA in English Literature from
AUB and a Maitrise in French Literature from the Ecole Supérieure des
Lettres in Beirut. She holds two doctorates from the Université de
Paris, Sorbonne, both awarded with high distinction: one in Comparative
English-French Literature (1976) and the other in Modern Arabic literature
(1990). In looking back on her undergraduate years at BUC, Amyuni remembers the
tremendous impact that one young Lebanese professor had on shaping the future
directions of her studies: "I had returned to college at the age of 28 and was
auditing a course on twentieth-century European literature given by George
Khairallah, a fresh graduate of Columbia University who had just returned to
Beirut. He was such a brilliant teacher that I gradually took all his courses
for credit and, four |
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ever done before. Although she had the support of her parents,
members of the extended Druze family to which she belonged were fiercely
against the union and some of them, she recalls, threatened to kill her for
dishonoring the family name.
That early act of defiance molded much of
Amyuni's future attitudes and actions in life, especially on issues related to
gender equality and the status of Arab women. She was chief editor of the
Bahithat II special issue on Women and Writing (Beirut: FMA, 1995, pp. 498) and
her frequent articles on women include "Images of Arab Women in Najib Mahfouz's
Midaq Alley and in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North" (Washington,
D.C.: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. XVII, February 1985).
Combining marriage and family with professional aspirations throughout the
years since she married, Amyuni became the mother of three children while
preparing herself to become an academician. One fated misfortune, however,
interfered to tip the scales in that wonderfully balanced equation of marriage
and career. In 1989 during the war in Lebanon, her husband Fouad was killed by
a piece of shrapnel that flew into their home. In one swift stroke, she lost
the "pillar" of her family and the one person who had been the most constant
support in her aspirations for a career.
One could say that the sustaining
"pillar" of Amyuni's life today is her work. "For many years," she comments, "I
have been teaching the great books, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the Greeks
and Romans, to the Islamic and Christian philosophers and poets of the Middle
Ages, and down through various courses in modern philosophy, political science
and literature. My mind and heart have been so much enriched by the great
humanists of the past; and, in teaching, I try to penetrate the totality of
each student's personality, with the hope that each will experience the same
enrichment through a similar thirst to know more and, in that way, inherit the
tolerance of humanism that such knowledge engenders." |
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