Research in African Literatures

ABSTRACT:

In the fall of 1966, Ḥiwār magazine published al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ's novel Mawsim al-hijrah ilā al-shamāl [Season of Migration to the North]. Arabic literary critics both hailed the novel in the Arabic press and mourned that it had been published by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom's Ḥiwār. The CCF had been revealed just months before to be a global covert cultural front of the Cold War founded and funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, maintaining an extensive list of high profile literary magazines, including not only the Beirut-based Arabic magazines Ḥiwār and briefly Adab, but also the London-based Encounter, Bombay's Quest, and the African journals Black Orpheus in Ibadan and Transition in Kampala. In response to the 1955 Bandung conference for Afro-Asian solidarity, the CCF established a formidable network of its own, founding and funding African and Asian magazines, putting on conferences, art exhibits, and handsomely paying a significant cadre of intellectuals, writers, and artists worldwide. It would be more than a decade later that the CIA's domination of Afro-Asian literature would give way to the publication of the Afro-Asian Writers Association's trilingual (Arabic/English/French) journal Afro-Asian Writings (later to be called Lotus), a broadly imagined legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference for Afro-Asian Solidarity and its celebration of decolonization, various forms of communism and socialism, and resistance literature in the third world.

Drawing from Encounter, Ḥiwār, and other journals of the CCF, the Arabic press, letters exchanged by Ṣāliḥ and Ḥiwār's editor Tawfīq Ṣāyigh, and the archives of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, this article argues that Season of Migration to the North, oft read as a postcolonial novel, is better understood as a product of American Cold War cultural imperialism. If its protagonist, Mustafa Sa'eed, might aspire, as though taking a page from Frantz Fanon, to liberate Africa with his penis as he beds a series of British women, seducing them with Orientalist fantasy, and if the novel's unnamed narrator might see that the newly independent Sudanese government was being corrupted by American cars, air conditioners, and opulent conferences and government ministries, the novel itself is doing something still more. As it reaches back intertextually to pre-Islamic poetry, the wine odes of 'Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās, and the tales of A Thousand and One Nights in British translation, Ṣāliḥ's novel exposes the long chain of empires subtending the dissemination of Arabic literature that left it vulnerable to becoming a terrain of cultural Cold War after Bandung's call for Afro-Asian solidarity.