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Analysis Of Tayeb Salih 's ' The Occasion For Speaking '

Satisfactory Essays

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North shows the reader the complicated relationship between England and it’s ex colonies. It forces us to think of the remnants of control it leaves. One of these remnants is the idea of England, as described by George Lamming in his essay “The Occasion for Speaking”. Using these two sources, we can answer the questions of what cutting down the African man into an English ideal really does. Through Lamming’s three important events, we see the timeline of colonial control and how it destroys the African man. The character of Mustafa Sa’eed represents the effects of Lamming’s idea of England on the colonized man, and how the realization of its falsehood creates an identity crisis that, eventually, kills the dedicated believer.
In his essay, “The Occasion for Speaking”, George Lamming focuses on explaining the idea of England. He writes that this idea is a seed in the brain of every colonized person, stemming from his or her English education and subjugation under colonization. He writes:
This is what I mean by the myth […] It is myth as the source of spiritual foods absorbed, and learnt for exercise in the future […] It begins with the fact of England’s supremacy in taste and judgment: a fact of all non-England. (15)

This idea of England is a kind of myth that is passed down from generation, but one that it treated as a fact. The main theme is England is superior in every aspect. The example Lamming gives contains one part of this

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