Season of Migration to the North

In Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, it begins with the narrator coming back from Europe to the village he grew up in. He describes his homing as warm and welcoming. "I felt not like a storm-swept feather but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose." This feeling of assurance swept over him, and engulfed him. In lecture today, professor Mufti assured us that this optimistic attitude that the narrator carried in the beginning slowly turns into this sense of a weird, and almost scary attitude towards his village as the story continues. This novel has a non-linear narrative as professor Mufti pointed out in lecture. This means that, unlike in Untouchable, there is a complex time structure. You may be reading, and my not know if this is a moment in narrators past or present.