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In most of his works, Tayeb Salih contemplates the complex issue of tradition versus modernity. He eloquently demonstrates the resilience of traditional society in the face of the challenges of modernisation. At the same time the confusion of those who were enticed and tempted by the lure of the west is examined against the background of the dignity and relative stability of traditional village life. In his works, and particularly in Season, Salih tackles the issue of tradition and change within the context of the ever controversial East-West theme. He ingeniously presents the bewilderment and dilemma of having to choose between adhering to the original identity and following the example of western civilization at the expense of the original culture and its values. It has been argued that the central theme in Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is the death and destruction which Sa’eed spreads in his wake wherever he goes. Having been infected with the germ of perpetual alienation, the hero becomes an unstoppable destructive force for the societies that rejected him (Subhil 984: 73). Season has also been widely regarded as Salih’s distinctive contribution to post-colonial writing, “a radical intervention in the field of postcolonial Arab discourse, which has long been centred on the debate between ‘traditionalism’ and ‘Westernism’” (Makdisi 1994: 535-6). Rather than reiterating the dualisms (tradition- modernity, East-West, etc.) Season “defies and deconstructs such categories,” dialectically breaking them down and synthesising them into “an endless variety of shades of grey” (Makdisi 1994: 543). Season, however, is not such a radical departure from the rest of Salih’s work. Concerned with the broader theme of the disruption of traditional ways of life by the forces of modernisation, colonialism and foreign cultural influences, it does offer a slightly different perspective on these themes. However, it also seeks to put the village life in focus in the same way as earlier and later works do. Modernisation, and the response to it, and to social change in general, especially in the context of cultural exchange and the drama of encounter between different or rival cultural worlds, thus appear to dominate Season and most of Salih’s work. The fight for cultural survival by traditional communities threatened by forces beyond their control is his major preoccupation. We find this in his treatment of tradition versus modernity, the response of traditional society to change, the power struggle within the village community and around it and the role of women in traditional society. In this regard, Salih echoes themes that have dominated modern Arabic fiction and literature, and also postcolonial literature in general. Waging the equivalent of the liberation struggle in literature, postcolonial writers have laboured to counter the “orientalist-hegemonistic” perceptions promoted within and by dominant imperial cultures which tend to treat peripheral communities as if they had no history or culture, but were an addendum of the dominant metropole and the object of its cultural hegemony (Parker and Starkey 1995; Young 1998; Boehmer 1998; Said 1993). There is a sense in which Salih, as mentioned before, does not fit neatly into the category of postcolonial writers. However, he does to some extent reflect some of its preoccupations, themes and techniques. The way the village rural community is made the centre stage of his work is a deliberate attempt to foreground Arab- African rural experience and bring the margin to the centre, so to speak. One is reminded here of Chinua Achebe’s Igbo rural setting in Things Fall Apart, and also of the fact that Achebe was Salih’s contemporary in literary terms, as both were writing their celebrated works at the same time, though under different influences. In this article we will try to follow some of the themes treated by Salih with relation to modernisation and examine the way Salih dealt with them, and how this relates to similar treatment of the same themes in modern Arabic literature as a whole, and to the overarching theme of cultural identity. These themes are not tackled only in literature, but continue to dominate modem Arab discourse as a whole, and also modern discourse on the Arab world in the West. The latter has been the subject of intense contestations of late. Led by Said’s now classic Orientalism (1978), the simplistic discourse about the dichotomies of East-West has been questioned and become the subject of radical rethinking (Turner 1994).
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