C^apter-m

T(fe Book of Secrets

 The Book of Secrets

The disporic entity continuously negotiates between two lands, separated by both

time and space - history and geography - and attempts to redefine the present

through a nuanced understanding of the past. Almost all Vassanji's works take the

diasporic discourse which largely involves the predominance of such feelings as

alienation, dispersal, longing for the ancestral homeland, the experience of

migrancy, a double identification with the originary homeland and the adopted

country, strategy of mystery and revelation in his narratives. In all his novels

taken up for study there is variety of different subject positions within diaspora

communities. One of the abiding concerns is to focus on complex hybrid and

hyphenated identities emerging among members of diaspora communities

particularly of the first and second generations. There is an element of surprise

and curiosity in his works. He is a master storyteller who uses history as a tool in

his narratives to embark upon a journey of discovery of roots and reasons; the

more of the one he unearths leaves him with less of the other.

His novels generally deal with personal as well as public history. In The

Book of Secret too he narrates the struggle of the Shamsis- a Muslim Community,

immigrants from India, trapped in British-German border struggle, besieged for

Independence alongwith the incidents that occur in the diary of Pius Femandes.

All the human characters in the novel are held in secondary importance to the

Book of Secrets, they are all seen in relation to it. Even people who have no

apparent connection with "the book" are slowly drawn into its votex and absorbed

by it. On one level it is about Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, for it is these three

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nations which were bom of the former East Africa and the time span of the novel

is stretched far into their postcolonial, independent existence. The novel is about

cities of Mombasa, Voi, Kikono and Nairobi in Kenya, Moshi, Taveta, Tanga, Dar

es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania for it is here that action takes place, and the

characters are either bom or brought up here. The novel is set in Africa and the

politics are both imperial and postcolonial. Vassanji's text is located at the

intersection between story and history, between the fictional and the factual as

well as between realism and the representational character of all art (Ball 90).

The Book of Secrets is one of the finest novels of M.G. Vassanji. The stor}'

begins in east Africa at the time of World War I, as German Tanganyika and

British Kenya are about to go to war, and stretches to the present day. It has a

complex narrative including omniscient storytelling about the past, quotations

from letters and journals, and the first person narration of a Goan school teacher

named Pius Fernandes. The Book of Secrets is the diary of Alfred Corbin, a junior

colonial administrator in an Indian community in British East Africa in 1913. Half

a century later, in 1988, Pius receives an old diary found in the back room of an

east African shop. Pius Femandes, a retired school teacher who has served

decades at a community school in the former German colony and British

protectorate of Tanzania, becomes interested and begins to research the coded

history he encounters in its terse, laconic entries. "You taught history sir, can you

write it?"(10) was the question when Feroze handed the diary to Pius Femandes.

He, perplexed by the puzzle of the incomplete diary, tries to fill the gaps to make

a meaningful story out of it. The diary uncovers a story of forbidden liaisons and

simmering vengeances, family secrets and cultural exiles - a story that leads him

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on an investigative journey through his own past and Africa's. The Book of

Secrets story is Wkt a journey exploring the past as well as present. It explores the

border between the self and the Other, between giving voice and remaining silent,

between the centre and the periphery as well as between the pure and the hybrid.

It is as much about the past as it is about the present.

Simatei explains:

Vassanji [. . .] is not interested in constructing a discourse overtly

oppositional to the colonial one. This certainly has something to do

with the position occupied by the East African Asians in the racially

layered colonial system where they were more part of the colonising

structure than a colonised people. (19)

It has a neat structure, the novel falls into two parts, capped with a prologue and

closed with an epilogue. The two sub divisions in Part I and three sub divisions in

Part II are separated by small intersections. Vassanji employs a variety of

strategies and ploys such as first person narration, third person interruptions,

entries from diaries, journals, correspondence, and excerpts from actual govt

orders, appendices, riddles and excerpts from Quran and Shakespeare. The

"Prologue" begins with these mystical words:

They called it the book of our secrets, 'kitabu chai sirizetu'. Of its

writer they said: He steals our souls and locks them away; it is a

magic bottle, this book, full of captured spirits.... Even now it

makes protagonist of those who would decide its fate. Because it

has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it and so it

grows. (1-2)

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These lines insinuate on what is going to be spread out in the coming pages. Pius

Femandes, accidentally gets hold of the diary of Sir Alfred Corbin, Governor of

Uganda in the late 1940s from his former student Feroz, who runs a store in Dar

es Salaam which was once owned by Pipa. When he starts treating Corbin's diary

he does not know that the Amin Mansion where he is lodged by Feroze was the

property of one of the persons mentioned in the diary - Pipa. He reads the diary,

the records and order of events take him on a journey of the characters mentioned

in it as well as of his own life. Pius' historiographical project originates with the

diary of Alfred Corbin. The fact that the starting-point for Pius' history is a diary

is significant. First, a diary is a discontinuous genre. It does not need markers of

cohesion or plotting of any kind and can display considerable temporal gaps. A

diary is not only a form of describing events, it also is a highly selective and

eclectic genre which credits only those events with the status of memorable facts

that the writer deems worth recording. The function of the diary is to record and

order events, and thus to discipline reality for an individual. The unity of the diary

is provided by the unit}' of the writing subject. A diary is an exploration of a

person's character rather than a reliable access to the past; it is subjective rather

than objective.

It should not be overlooked that while the genre of the diary as such is

always discontinuous, discontinuity in the case of Corbin's diary figures in other

respects also. Series of pages are missing, while others are barely legible. The

diary comes upon Pius as a fragment. He makes attempts at reconstructing the

fragmented accounts in Corbin's diary by inserting sections between two separate

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entries and speculating on the possible meaning of corrupt orelliptic syntactic

structures. Bakhtin writes:

the unfinished nature of self is no mere subjective license; like an

importer it is also a limit.... In the realm of culture, outsideness is

the most powerful factor in understanding. (Holoquist 26)

In order to establish cohesion, the process of reading the diary becomes

inseparable from commenting on it. Thus subsequent diary entries require Pius to

infer a possible or probable connection. The nexus between events has to be filled

in order to enable a coherent story, and it is only Pius' imagination that can

interpolate the gaps within Corbin's discourse. The need to imagine what could

have happened becomes even more pressing when entries are separated by a

considerable time span. For Pius the writing of history is associated with

embedding Corbin's diary. Not only does he fill gaps matter-of-factly, he makes

use of the means of story-telling in order to order Corbin's diary, too. Pius is a

scholar who becomes a narrator. Put differently, he is an editor who cannot elide

that he is also an author, i.e. a story-teller. Reconstructing the history of an East

African country entails constructing a possible but of necessity fictitious context

for the fragmented diary of a colonial officer. Historical sources demand to be

engaged with it in a subjective way so that fact and fiction blend and become

inextricably intertwined. This is of course problematic to the traditional

historian's mind, for incorporating constructions into a construction, too. Such

kind of textual practice constitutes a provocation to history as a discipline, as

historiographical scholarship becomes an act of poetic imagination. Literature and

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historiography are related enterprises because both rely on related metaphors and

tropes and make use of similar strategies. History, strictly speaking, ceases to be

an expository form of writing because on a deep structure historiographical

discourse can no longer be distinguished from narrative discourse. Vassanji deals

in what Linda Hutcheon calls 'historiographic metafiction'. She states,

Historiographic metafiction self-consciously reminds us that, while

events did occur in the real empirical past, we name and constitute

those events as historical facts by selection and narrative

positioning. And even more basically, we only no of those past

events through their discursive inscription through the traces in the

present. (31)

That this nexus is crucial for an adequate understanding of The Book of Secrets is

not least of all underlined by the fact that Pius Femandes is a teacher of both

history and literature. It revolves on the relationship between the colonial masters

and the first generation diasporas with exploration of the consequences that these

non-native servants of the imperial masters faced when the British withdrew. The

novel defines what Mary Louise Pratt calls contact zones: "the space of colonial

encounters in which the people who are geographically and historically separated

come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations" (6).

This novel is a journey of displacement, physical and emotional, and one of

a search for importance, love and safety in the face of dramatic worldly

machinations. The Book of Secrets is written, particularly in those times of

shifting borders and alliances and of emergence of the so-called new world order.

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"Mediocrity was the new order, and ideological correctness," says the book's

narrator to his new students. "The new generation of students who came was sent

by a government seeking bureaucrats, not, as in the past, by a community eager to

get ahead in the world" (55). It is a journey of the essentially homeless. Vassanji

explores community rather than the individual, he creates two white characters

whose humanity is credible. Asked in a CBC interview during the writing of this

novel if he felt bitter towards the Corbins, Vassanji replied he did not see them as

vicious: "it's how the world was."

The diary introduces Pius to the local Indian, African and Arab

communities. Corbin discovers many interesting facets to the ways of the Indian

Shamsis - how they are able to negotiate their spaces and safeguard their interests

as a community. The text is located at the threshold of story and history, between

the fictional and the factual as well as between realism and the representational

character of all art. The outer action involves the history of the Shamsi Muslim

community, immigrants from India, from World War I, when the community is

helplessly caught up in the British-German border struggle for and the road to

Independence for Tanzania and the subsequent remigration or dispersal of many

Shamsis.

Pius, the narrator, with the help of diary tries to reconstruct the seventy five

years old colonial history of east Africa. He becomes apprehensive in the

beginning of it that the diary is not just going to unfold the life of a colonial

administrator but much more.

Even before I began to pore over Corbin's entries which would

subsequently so grip me, I could not help but feel that in some

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 mysterious manner the book touched our hves; was our book. There

was, I felt, much more there than the contents of its pages; there was

the story of the book itself. (7)

He reads the diary, the records and order of events and they take him on a journey

of the characters mentioned in it and as well as of his own life. It provides him an

opportunity to pierce into the life of a colonial master who believes in Winston

Churchill's ideology in giving "heart and soul" to Empire, exercising "dominant

yet generous force". The diary is in the form of journey in to the mysterious

beauty of the African landscape, to the ways of the Shamsi community as well as

into the psyche of a man who contends the quest for identity, emotional as well as

practical and caught in between imperial enterprise and a war. The diary

introduces him to the local Indian, African and Arab communities. Part One 'The

Administrator', begins with following lines:

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us:

There is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

(Sir Thomas Browne)

This part of the novel narrates in detail Corbin's stay in Kikono, as ADC. The

diary contains events from 1 March, 1913 - 24 July, 1914 in fragments. Corbin

reaches Kikono and this what appeared to him as he approached the town:

The Indians stood in a row, somewhat solemn-looking in white drill

suits and red or black fezzes, or in dhoties and turbans. Next to them

formed a shorter line of Swahili, in kanzus and embroidered caps,

some in waistcoats. There was a third, large group of vendors,

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 servants, and occasional labourers, and, with them, tribesmen and

women from neighbouring area. Thus they stood waiting,

occasionally looking up, turning or craning their necks towards the

road that entered town and would bring the new represenrative of

the King. (26)

Kikono, seems to be "an Indian haven" inhabited by the Sahmsi sect. The town

had emerged from a single duka into a prosperous business centre under the

leadership of its mukhi Jamali "like mukhis everywhere, he was paid not

financially but with honour and respect, and promises of reward in the

hereafter"(27). They proved themselves as loyal British subjects and thus applied

to the government for the official township status. So to make up their mind, the

government had sent an Assistant District Commissioner. Thus, Alfred Corbin

joined this town to initiate this work.

Corbin seems to develop a fascination towards the countryside beauty of

the small African town as well for the Indian Shamsi community. In spite of being

an ambassador of British government he tries to help the locals and assist them in

achieving their goals. While executing his colonial duties he takes care of the

interests of the locals. He is a man of great composure who tries not to assert his

superiority on the people but tries to win them over by simple ways. He patiently

and quietly observes their ways of living before imposing the British laws and

justice on the natives. While executing his duties he learns a lot about the history

of Shamsis, their culture and their own laws. He discovers many interesting facets

to the ways of the Indian Shamsis - how they are able to negotiate their spaces

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and safeguard their interests as a community. The diary describes in detail how

this community has maintained its identity integral in the alien land. They have a

strong network and remain in touch with their people and occasionally arrange

events to be together and nurtured their tradition which they carried along while

leaving their homeland. They obser\'ed all the festivals with same fervour and

gaiety as back home.

They are in touch with Voi, Mombasa, Nairobi, even Bombay and

German East. Once or twice a year it seems they hold large feasts,

and when they do not go to Voi for that purpose they collect in

Kikono community members from the neighbouring town and give

themselves a regular jamboree. There are also Hindu, Punjabi, and

Memon families but quite often the distinction blurs. (46)

The Shamsis, as they appear in The Book of Secrets, are a tightly-knit community

with its own channels of communication (158). The close ties between its

members are indicative of strong bonds of solidarity, which have also

characterized the brotherhood of the Ismailis historically (40). The maintaining of

specific identity is of utmost importance and the assimilation into the host land

culture is never thought of "Powerless though the individual Indian is beside the

European, as the community they have a voice that is heard" (49).

The Shamsis helped and assisted each other with material support or in

finding suitable marital partners. An example is Pipa who is married to Mariamu.

The Shamsis adapted easily and welcomed outsiders. The friendliness of the

Shamsis as well as their inside knowledge of the country and the lingua franca

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Swahili made them valuable for the British. By supporting the colonizers in many

ways, the Ismailis and other Indian communities settling in east Africa were

accorded privileged status by the British. They eventually acquired the status of

colonial elite because "they had learned the colonial game well" (267). In the

context of the colonial system of Indirect Rule, which for pragmatic more than

ideological reasons attempted to leave indigenous power structures intact, the

Indians proved to be indispensable as cultural translators (41). The Asians might

not have been important politically, but they were of considerable importance for

the economic structure of the region. Coming to east Africa in order to

supplement Britain's work force as indentured servants, the diligent and ambitious

Indians acquired wealth quickly once their contracts had run out. In the east

African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania they became an economic

power to be reckoned with and thus attained considerable political influence.

Vassanji tries to give the Ismailis a voice in order to disclose the economic

underpinnings of British colonial discourse. As the British needed them

desperately they tolerated the Ismailis and other Asian communities in the coastal

region of east Africa. Churchill, himself under secretary for the colonies at an

early stage of his career, was wiser than east African rulers who rule later. How

much damage to the colonial economy could be caused by antagonizing the

Indians of east Africa became evident in the early 1970s when Uganda's Idi Amin

provoked a severe economic depression by nationalizing rental properties and thus

letting racism and greed prevail over tolerance and economic/political

farsightedness.

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 The first three or four generations of the colonial diaspora evidently were

too disjointed, tormented, and marginal to produce any documented literature and

Vassanji too feels that history cannot be constructed in absolute. Recreating

history requires a keen observation and a passionate proclivity. In an interview

with Shane Rhodes, Vassanji avers:

Histor)' is very much an accident of time and person. In The Book of

Secrets, you have the diary, the book of secrets, but you also have

the novel that the author has produced. In the same way, you also

have the gunny sack, which is the real, but you also have the gunny

sack, which is in the narrator's mind. History is a play between all

of these different objects: created and the creating, the real and the

imagined. In another sense, the narrator and the historian both play

a kind of game with history. (29)

The interface between history and literature has been the sbject of historiography

and is widely debated in the contemporary literary discourse. Frederick Jameson's

critique of third world literature as national allegories (30) also refers to the same

thin line between history and literature. Vassanji too addresses the issue in these

lines in his own way. "History drifts about in the sands, and only the fanatically

dedicated see in and recreate it, however incomplete these visions and fragile their

constructs" (175).

In demonstrating the importance of Asian co-operation with the British

colonial administration, Vassanji underlines the potential powerfulness of

indigenous resistance. While the English naturalist Henry Johnson requires a cook

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and porter, the Shamsi sect sends Jamal Dewji to spy on the coloniser: "In his

country he may be king [. . .] but here I trust nobody" (26). When Corbin

questions the mukhi who invites him to their festival about what his people sought

in this country, this wilderness, so far from their own country and culture, the

reply he gets is: "Peace and prosperity"(49). During this festival Corbin sees

Mariamu "A striking young woman in white frock with the red pachedi around

her shoulders was approaching, then receding ... Her features were markedly

distinct from the other women's" (43).

Corbins curiosity was roused by this beautiful girl who was being secretly

followed everywhere by Simba. Once Corbin saved her from the hands of an

exorcist who was beating her up and put her up at the Christian mission from

where the Mukhi brought her to Corbin as is cook and housekeeper. She was to be

there till her marriage to Pipa. During her stay at Corbin place, they develop a

friendly relation and she seems comfortable in revealing herself and he too

confides in her, knowingly that she is unable to understand he projects his own

fantasies through his transgression upon her. Although Corbin seems to have no

clear predatory feelings towards Mariamu at this point, his interest in both her and

the community anticipates his later need to control both Mariamu as a character

caught in a web of gendered power relations that extend beyond her status as a

symbol. This attraction, like the Great War the Shamsis suffers, is part of the

"great riddle" Pius offers to unravel. Mariamu was fascinated by the mysterious

book in which Corbin made entries everyday; her curiosity was roused when he

told her that he had written about her too. The growing intimacy between Corbin

and Mariamuis hinted at in the entries, especially where she nursed him during his

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illness. Soon Pipa came from Moshi and the marriage was celebrated but on the

very first night itself Pipa found that his wife was not a virgin.

The secret that the title of Vassanji's novel alludes to refers to a gap in

Mariamu's biography. Apparently, Mariamu on being married to Pipa is no longer

a virgin. When she conceives, the question arises as to who is the father of her

child. The son Ali Akber Ali from Mariamu raises many silent voices questioning

the ancestry of the prodigal son. The text, however, resists a definitive answer to

that question, just as it refuses to shed light on the circumstances of Mariamu

death in the course of the novel. The reason why she steals Corbin's diary remains

a mystery. Pius becomes involved in the history he is about to write. He has fallen

in love with Rita who at that time is married to Mariamu's son Ali. Moreover,

Pius finds out that he is linked to his historiographical project through an English

friend and fellow teacher, Robert Gregory, who is friendly with Corbin and his

wife. His journey originates with the letters, written by Pius wife and Pius himself

to Gregory, he finds in the box received by him after the death of Gregory.

Rashid or Simba, the stepfather, guided his anger to Alfred Corbin and saw

that he had seen them sleeping together. The community turned against Corbin

and he decided to lie low and apply for leave. But before they leave for sanctioned

Britain declared war on Germany, no one could leave the town. The entries in the

diary stopped here abruptly with more than four months of empty pages.From

these empty pages, from where the diary indirect, begins Femandes quest for the

truth. Even though the distance of 75 years is between him and the diary

Femandes feel impelled "to follow the threads, expose them in all their

connections and possibilities, weave them together". (32)

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 The Book of Secrets also foregrounds proverbs and myths as ways of

making sense of the world. The outbreak of World War I, for example, is not only

talked about in terms of riddles in order to underline the cryptic quality of warfare

on that scale, the uneasy position of the indigenous African and Indian cultures,

among them the Shamsis, is also epitomised by the metaphorical speech of

proverbs: "How do the little people fare in a war between big powers? In answer,

the Swahili proverb says, "When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers"

(149). Pius' representation of indigenous African and Indian reality accounts for

the mythopoeic quality of alternative ways of structuring reality. Mythopoeic

means that the stories told tend "to create or recreate certain narratives which

human beings take to be crucial to their understanding of the world" (25). An

example of how the Shamsis talk about German-British hostility can serve to

illustrate the point:

The German man-of-war Konigsberg prowled the ocean from Lamu

to Kilwa with its fearsome guns, appearing like a spectre in the mist

and destroying British warships. The terrible German demoness

Bibi Malkia went around with a troop of her own, appearing from

behind hills and trees to wreak havoc on British forces, leaving

hacked, mangled bodies behind, especially of the white settler

troops. (150)

Indigenous riddles, proverbs, and other stories in The Book of Secrets

explain the world, which is alien to a European or American readership. The

terror of warfare is understood in the terms which are at the disposal of the

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indigenous culture, in this case the world of spirits and demons. Needless to say

that the indigenous belief in an animistic universe is radically different from

Western approaches towards the world; in an act of subversion, Vassanji's novel

inscribes different cultural practices in order to counter the rationalists' rationale

of colonial discourse (25). Other voices, which are also voices of Otherness,

undermine the hegemonic discourse and preclude an unproblematical reading of

the world. Mariamu's husband Pipa, long after her unexplained rape and murder is

caught in this riddle. The liaison between the white master and his wife is a source

of constant heart ache. Pipa struggles lifelong with the possibility that his son by

Mariamu's is actually Corbin's.

Shane Rhodes divides the text into two halves roughly corresponding to

"the natives belonging to its two major characters, Corbin and Fernandes" (188).

It is but one strand in the unreadable pattern of lives that cross, touching or nearly

so, in the narrator's "history". Pius himself acknowledges, "Ultimately, the story

is the teller's, it's mine." Thus, his search leads him further into his own life, and,

as Pipa struggles lifelong with the possibility that his son by Mariamu is actually

Corbin's, Pius embarks on a journey down his own mindscape.

At one level-it is the stor>' of Mzee Pipa- Nurmohammed - that "Mhindi

urchin from Moshi who did not have the dignity of a father's name attached to

his" (46). Pipa enters the novel when he comes to kikono - one of the most far-

flung outposts of British east Africa-to fix the date of his wedding to Mariamu,

the niece of the Mukhi - Makhija Jamali. Pipa is so-called because of the name

given to the family by the neighbourhood, he is in the eye of a storm immediately.

Alfred Corbin, the ADC of the Kikono notes in his diary:

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 Pipa, it seems had come from German to East Africa for the

celebrations. The morning after they ended he took to the post

office a sack of mail. Which he had brought with him from across

the border. The postmaster showed annoyance, naturally, at the

unusual quantity of mail. Thomas, hovering nearby, started scolding

and abusing Pipa, who gave him a box on the ears. I gave orders for

Pipa to be put away in the lock up for the day. (47)

From here onwards begins the journey of Pipa in the novel and the novel

practically ends with the death of Pipa in Dar-es- Salaam:

Pipa, a cynical old man after the death of his son, Amin, upon

hearing that much of Amin Mansion was the people's property now,

said, "Bas? Only this? Let Him take away me too," now the next

day he died (312).

In the course of the novel, Pipa marries Mariamu, raising shindy on his wedding

night about her not being a virgin, reconciling himself to it, planning to move

back to Moshi, extends his stay, due to the outbreak of the war, is blackmailed

into acting as a spy on behalf of the British as he had once done for the Germans.

However, Pipa finds himself on the horns of a bigger dilemma when the son is

bom to him and Mariamu. "Three months earlier, Mariamu had given birth to a

boy and it seemed then Pipa was being ridiculed again, for the child was fair and

had grey eyes, which didn't prove anything against his fatherhood, as the Mukhi,

who was the boy's great uncle, said. But would he ever know if he was

otherwise? Would he, Pipa, ever be certain? The child was called Akber AH,

Akufor short" (156).

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 Pipa, who had come to know that his wife Mariamu had at one time -

before their marriage - worked for Alfred Corbin and stayed at his house and who

had earUer been told that "it was the Mzungu who deflowered the girl", was now

intrigued: "Was Aku his son? Was Corbin the father of his son?" In a way, this is

the great secret being sought to be unravelled in the rest of the book through the

personal opinions voiced from time to time by Rashid, Mariamu's stepfather,

Mariamu's mother Kulsa, Mukhi's wife Khanoum, Mukhi Jamali's grandson, the

young Mukhi of Moshi - also called Jamali - and many others. This is the mystery

sought to be resolved by Pius by analyzing the entries in the diary, by scrutinizing

the records of officials, through innumerable meetings between Pipa and the spirit

of Mariamu- there is the touch of magic realism in which he entreats with her to

tell him the truth and she like a spirit, is elusive. A second-slightly less significant

is murder of Mariamu at Kikono during the height of the war. Unfortunately, Pipa

dies without finding out the truth about either of these two secret incidents.

Mariamu is a girl who is uncontrollable, untamed and a constant source of

worry for her guardians. Betrothed to Pipa, she is given to wild ways that makes

the community think that she is under the spell of evil spirits. It is striking that

while Pipa is given abundant scope, Vassanji denies Mariamu an independent

voice. At the same time, there is no denying, the fact, that she is at the centre of

the fictional universe created by Vassanji. In fact, she becomes an obsession for

Pius' as well as the main character Pipa. The secret that the title of Vassanji's

novel refers to a gap in Mariamu's biography. Apparently, Mariamu on being

married to Pipa is no longer a virgin. When she conceives, the question arises as

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to who is the father of her child. The text, however, resists a definitive answer to

that question, just as it refiises to shed light on the circumstances of Mariamu's

death. In the course of the novel, Pius becomes involved in the history, he is about

to write. We learn that he has fallen in love with Rita who at that time is married

to Mariamu's son AH. Moreover, Pius finds out that he is linked to his

historiographical project through an English friend and fellow teacher, Robert

Gregory, who is friendly with Corbin and his wife. Pius narrates how the Asians

in east Africa had always been in an insecure position. Needed by the Germans,

they always had to struggle for formal rights and recognition nevertheless. Despite

their riches, they remained mere colonial subjects regardless of what they achieve:

However rich an Asian merchant, to the Germans he was a native

because he could not observe German civil law. This greatly

offended Asians among whom colour racialism was deeply

engrained. Their chief political aim throughout German times was

to secure a higher legal status than Arabs and Africans. (43)

Under the British, the Asians were treated with more respect and became British

subjects, although they still occupied a somewhat awkward position. However,

from insecure and uncomfortable the fate of the Asians in East Africa deteriorates

to untenable one by 1972. With the advent of the nationalization of properties in

the context of Tanzania's socialist phase, many members of the Shamsi

community migrate once more. The refusal to exchange elitism for socialist

mediocrity forces the community to migrate into the US or Canadian diaspora.

The notion of the diaspora is a recent term in postcolonial studies. While

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colonialism has suppressed the assertion of indigenous identities, postcoloniality

has not automatically led to the reclamation of that identity. Recent postcolonial

literature and theory has advocated the futility of nostalgically looking towards

origins and roots. The postcolonial condition said to be inevitably characterized

by hybridity, thereby denying that there is an unbroken native tradition and a pure

cultural essence to lay claim to. For some postcolonial critics, diaspora has

become a concept which describes non-essentialist identities, i.e. identities which,

for example, do not depend on history, tradition and place. The global migrations

taking place with the advent of postcoloniality make issues of diaspora, place and

identity particularly pressing questions (44).

Every major and minor character in The Book of Secrets migrates at least

once. While Corbin, Maynard and Mariamuare displaced, the three most

interesting instances of migration in Vassanji's novel are Pipa, Pius and Gregory.

Pipa was bom in Moshi, moves bet^^•een Moshi, Tanga, Dar es Salaam and

Kikono. He migrates to escape shame, to marry, to escape German and British

agents, to forget Mariamu, and, finally, he also migrates for economic reasons.

Pipa is not only a restless character but also a homeless one. Interestingly, home

does not translate as place for Pipa but figures as a location that becomes home

only by virtue of his recognition by the society he lives in: "His given name was

Nurmohamed - Pipa was the nickname given to the family by the neighbourhood,

and it had stuck. It made him feel a lack: of respectability, of a place that was

truly home" (127). Pipa longs for status and respectability in his hometown

Moshi, something that he was not bom with. His doubtfiil origins are

88
psychologically crippling: The fact that his father leaves his family behind is

experienced as a "hidden deformity" (127). Because he is "simply an Indian"

(127), i.e. an Indian without a community and with a mother who is a prostitute,

Economic rise and status do not come easy within the conventions of the society

Pipa is bom into. His allegedly inferior social background is responsible for the

fact that it ingrained in his personality an inferiority complex which becomes

manifest as "guilt at his inadequacy" (129). Pipa's rise in the world is not

conceivable without the support and protection of the Shamsi community. The

new respectability the Shamsis endow him with allows him to rise economically

and to acquire social status:

Whether he was of the Shamsi community or not, Pipa could not

say with certainty. Like many others before him, he accepted the

Shamsis and the rewards that followed: a job and a place to stay;

eminent men to vouch for him; and, if he wanted, a bride. So he

could become the camel who at last stopped his endless journey and

found a home (133).

Eventually, it is status and not place that becomes an approximation of home for

Pipa. He attempts to go back to Moshi several times but has to find out that

"leaving home had been easy, not so the return" (134). When Pipa finally

manages to go back to Moshi, he does not find the home that he had left, because

he did not belong to any community. Pipa's wanderings, ending in Dar es Salaam

and not in Moshi, illustrate that the recuperation of home as essence is a futile

endeavour. Home, in fact, has become a psychological category. Through Pipa

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Vassanji has aptly portrayed the journey of diasporas. Rima Bems McGown in

her "Redefining Diaspora" observes:

Internal integration allows for shifts in identity and shifts senses of

connection and belonging overtime. One does not lose one's old

culture or have it replaced by a new one; one combines cultures and

worldviews in ways that are unsurprisingly, complex and constantly

shifting. (28)

The example of "blindfolded camel" suggests that life is not a one-way tour to an

unknown destination but a deliberate journey into selves of each other for fixed

and unfixed destinations. Pipa has suffered a literal geographical displacement

and is confronted with social and cultural alienation. While obser\'ing the camel

working he wonders "Where could the beast think it was going - did it see

rewards at the end of its journey, did it hope to meet a mate, did it hope for

happiness, children, old age?"(112) Such is the dilemma of diaspora as Van der

Veer puts it:

The theme of belonging opposes rootedness to uprootedness,

establishment to marginality. The theme of longing harps on the

desire for change and movement, but relates this to the enigma to

what one has left. (18)

Pipa ends his dislocation and disorientation by giving up his struggle to make Dar

his home. He sets up a small provision store in Kikono. He gets involved in the

political intrigue between two warring sides namely Britain and Germany. On

being exploited by both sides his position is reduced to the level of a rolling ball

90
kicked by them and the only thing he wishes is the end of war. But it must not be

concluded from this that his story is therefore that of a failure. While on the one

hand his story meets a tragic end, on the other, he succeeds economically, which

renders his fate ironic. The mystery over number of incidents that haunted him

throughout his life as to who has murdered Mariamu? Who has raped her? Has

she really lost her virginity prior to marriage (after all there is a trickle of blood)?

Is blood an indicator of the proper consummation of a marriage? (121), if she had

an affair, did she have it with Corbin or with someone else? Did Mariamu become

pregnant from Corbin and would thus have given birth to Ali as the representative

of a new, hybrid generation? Is Aku's allegedly lighter skin colour a reliable

indicator for an affair of his mother with a European? All these questions are

raised but never find pertinent answers. Mariamu is raped and murdered. The

whole incident remains and engulfed in mystery as none from the community

talks about the shame. Later while going through her belongings Pipa finds the

book, the diary of Alferd Corbin. "As he extracted the Green garment whose

shimmer had once thrilled him so, he felt a hard fiat object wrapped inside it.

And he unfolded the slippery cloth, he found himself holding the book. The book

... Bwana Corbin's book, he thought, which he himself would have liked to

steal" (171).

After her demise he transforms her into an idol, worshipping her he dies very

same day that the socialist government of Tanzania nationalises its (rental) properties

and thus robs the Asian communities of their income. Deprived of the foundation of

his living, Pipa, the representative of the Shamsi community, dies (312).

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The Book of Secrets is a polyphonic novel offering a variety of stories. The past

and the present gets so intermingled that at one point the narrator becomes the

character and as Pius admits "And so I know, am forewarned. Ultimately the story

is the teller's, it's mine" (92). Pius fernandes, is a Goan, he comes to the former

German now British colony of Tanzania form a small Portuguese colony in India.

He does not belong to one of the Indian communities who have settled in east

Africa, and there can be no doubt that he is to some extent an outsider.

Although Pius Fernandes is a man with a university education, this does

not protect him from racism. Paradoxically, he is to train colonial subjects but is

himself trained on the premises of colonial discourse: "The African ser\'ant, like

the Indian, we learned, did not have a sense of 'mine' and 'yours' "(238). His

training, informed by colonial discourse, has consequences when Pius and his

fellow teachers leave India in the early 1950s with hopes for freedom and

modernity. Pius' colonial education has crippled him psychologically in so far as

ingrained in his personality is a hatred of his own culture:

We were sailing to freedom: freedom from an old country with

ancient ways, from the tentacles of clinging families with numerous

wants and myriad conventions; freedom even from ourselves

grounded in those ancient ways" (239).

Pius migrates because of the political instability and economic crisis in his

homeland. Like Pipa, he is disoriented and has lost his sense of belonging. He is

also ; surrounded by cultural differences translating as discrimination. As a

colonial subject, he migrates to a place where he cannot hope for an adequate

92
recognition of his subject status. From the position of one formally colonized he

moves to that of an in-between in Tanzania. However, unlike Pipa his marginal

status allows him to understand those who are in a comparable situation. Thus, the

shared experience of displacement links Pius and the British, despite the fact that

their very different experience of colonialism should alienate them from each

other. Although essentially on opposite sides of the divide, Pius, Corbin and

Gregory are in the same situation in east Africa. For each of the three a change of

place raises questions of identity. This is what induces Pius to feel empathy for

Corbin. Moreover, that might possibly be what attracts him to Gregory, one of the

most interesting characters in the novel. The reserved Pius discovers how his

emotional life is involved with the English expatriate homosexual poet teacher

Gregory, one who like him cannot however he may desire it, belong fully to any

community or to another person, it also places him at par with the central

characters Mariamu and Pipa. Pius is instrumental in connecting the past with the

present. When the diary abruptly ends without answering the major questions he

takes it as a challenge and decides to unravel this riddle:

There are many paths to choose from. And no one path is quite like

any other, none of them will return to quite where it began. The path

one takes is surely in large measure pure accident; but in equal

measure, it must be determined by predisposition. And so I know,

am forewarned. (92)

Preparing his history, Pius does not only read Corbin's diary and letters but

also his memoirs and the manuals instructing British colonial officers in the

93
1910s. Through his friend and former pupil, the historian Sona, he also follows up

on the scholarly literature on Tanzania's colonial period as well as drawing on

Robert Gregory's poems about Dar es Salaam and the country of his adoption.

Through Feroz Pius comes to know about his former student, Rita, daughter-in-

law of Pipa. Feroz fixes a meeting between them, Femandes meets Rita, in past he

was attracted to his student, Rita, but his love was unrequited. Rita eloped with

Ali to the more sophisticated London (252). When they met, the past again

unfolds between Pius and Rita. Rita recalls how she had eloped with Ali to

England but gradually succeeded in making a good life for them. Soon the fairy

tale romance wore out and Ali hopped on to a new love in Rosita. Pius' meeting

with Rita brings back memories of immigrant experience then he had first set sail

for Tabora - "we were sailing to freedom of freedom from an old country with

ancient ways, from the tentacles of clinging families with numerous wants and

myriad conventions: freedom ever from ourselves grounded in those ancient

ways" (239).

Pius seeks help of Rita in unveiling the past connection of Corbin,

Mariamu and Pipa. Trying to establish the connection between Aku and Corbin,

the one broken link for which the diary does not provide any clue, Femandes

meets Rita. Her claim to the diary is that she is the daughter-in-law of Pipa; she

had married Akber Ali, Pipa's son by Mariamu. Rita fills in the gap and kind of

completes the story by providing the missing links. Her arrival takes Femandes

down memory lane and makes him drown in the valley of the years. She is

prepared to tell him all she knows about Ali in return for the diary and the silence

94
of Femandes. The other person who comes into Femandes' Hfe is from the future,

the younger Jamali, the grandson of the old Mukhi, who takes Femandes to visit

his 80-year-old father. The old Jamal laments of his fair skinned brother (son of

Pipa) who had been taken back by the father. From Rita and Jamali, Femandes

collects a few more missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Thus The Book of Secrets

offers two altematives of constmcting meaning. The first one consists in

forgetting, the second one in remembering; thelatter position is associated with

Pius, the former with Rita. Intmding into other lives, disclosing their private

character and arbitrarily connecting them so as to arrive at an allegedly tmthful

story is presumptuous to Rita. She holds that to claim that it is possible to explain

other people's lives is hubris, especially if one does not understand one's own.

Insinuating that Pius is latently homosexual, Rita confronts Pius with a blank spot

in his own biography. Her point is that not everything must be known about one's

own life as well as about the lives of others. Rita advises Pius against spying into

the lives of others and illustrates her point metaphorically: Rita accuses Pius'

project of shallowness and, by implication, of speculation, when she maintains

that his "history is surface" (297). Rita's function is to criticize the

methodological shortcomings of Pius' historiographical project. While Pius'

access to the past is likened to vision, the semiotic value of the picture he is

constmcting of the past is limited according to Rita because the parts that the

picture is made up of are in themselves pictures which are in themselves pictures

again and so forth. As "each dot is infinity" (297), tmth is never arrived at but

deferred in an infinite regress. Drawing on chaos theory, Rita suggests that there

95
is too much complexity in real life to be ever captured in representations. The

logical conclusion for her is to dispense with representations altogether. Pius'

position ftindamentally differs from that of Rita. While Pius comes to believe in

the truth of the poetic imagination, Rita condemns the imagination as speculation

and as unethical because it intrudes into other people's privacy and has the

potential to harm. While Pius narrates a story, Rita argues for forgetfulness. Rita

is influenced by Pipa whose attitude towards the diary changes from worship to

burial, from voice to silence. For Rita, the project of giving voice is immoral and

should be abandoned in favour of an ethics of silence. This ethics figures as an

explicit rejection of story-telling: "Let it lie, this past. The diary and the stories

that surround it are mine now, to bury" (298). While Pius believes that the past

should be represented (even if it cannot be fully known), Rita draws a

diametrically opposed conclusion: "Of course the past matters, that is why we

have to bury it sometimes. We have to forget to be able to start again" (298).

Whereas Pius assumes that his archaeology of knowledge is beneficial, Rita

rejects the historiographical practice of discovering and demands that the past is

be laid to rest. Rita suggests that it is more important to look towards the future

and not into the past. Metaphorically, the new is approached from the outside,

while the old should not be plied into.

Akbar AM was bom during the war and after the death of Mariamu; Pipa

left him in the care of the mukhi and his wife, Khanum. Pipa remarries on the

condition of abandoning his son of previous marriage. After the death of the

mukhi, the boy is handed back to his father Pipa, both father and son treads

96
cautiously in the newfound relationship. Mariamu's ghost, that haunts Pipa, finds

happiness in the reconciliation of the two. Pipa makes a shrine in the store of his

house as a mark of love and respect towards his long lost wife. The shrine homes

'The Book', which is discovered and is read by Aku and through this book, Aku

meets his mother Mariamu, who until now had not existed for him. After meeting

his grandmother Kulsa and Mariamu, his mother, became real for the boy. "She

had had a mother and grandmother of her own; what else? He began to feel that he

belonged to more than just his father".(214) This belonging to more than just his

father can be translated into the belongingness that the second generation

diasporas felt, fed upon with stories from the past the grandparents that narrated to

them of the lost home land and the nostalgia that percolated from one generation

to the other. Vassanji himself belongs to the second category writers who have

grown up listening to the stories of their motherland from their parents and

grandparents. The confiisions, problems and yearnings become less intense as the

second generation get influenced by the culture of that country and also adapt

themselves to it.

By withholding the identity of All's father, Vassanji keeps the paternity of the

postcolonial son a mystery. Amin Malak makes an important point about the

symbolic resonances of All's heritage:

Significantly, All's mongrelized triple parentage, together with his

subsequent triple marriages, symbolizes the three sources of cultural

identity for the novel's Indian Muslim community in East [Africa]

(the Isma'ilis, fictionally referred to here as the Shamsis): Asia,

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 through historical roots and religion; Africa, through settlement and

trade; and Britain, through education and colonial affiliation. (176)

Akbar Ali grows up into a handsome young man and a dandy finds a job at the firm

and marries the dark daughter of his employer and became rich. After a certain

period of time when his wife is unable to conceive and have children, he loses all

interest in her and elopes with Gulnar Rajni, nick named Rita after the brown-haired

American beauty Rita Hayworth. Rita becomes the meeting ground where the past

and the present inter\'ene and overlap each other. The past that had started in the

year 1913 slowly but surely reaches the present wherein Pius makes entries in his

diary and chronicles the events that took place in his past. "In short a world that

begins to look familiar emergesfi"omthe waters of the past, integrated" (226).

Journey becomes the underlying theme of the whole narrative spending the

years during 1932-1988. Pius himself becomes a witness to changing times and

rewriting of history. "Times were moving fast for all of us. In Kenya, the Mau-

Mau war was on and there were fears it would spill over into Tanganyika"(264).

Ali and Rita move to East Africa for better prospects, Pius migrates from

India to Africa because of the political instability and economic crisis in his

homeland. Like Pipa, whose name he echoes phonologically, he is disoriented and

has lost his sense of belonging. He is also surrounded by cultural difference

translating as discrimination. As a colonial subject he migrates to a place where he

cannot hope for an adequate recognition of his subject status. From the position of

one formally colonised he moves to that of an in-between in Tanzania.

98
 Another important character who is displaced in the course of story is

Richard Gregory, one of the most interesting characters in the novel. By giving up

his British passport at the time when Tanzania becomes independent in 1961,

Gregory, like Pipa, subscribes to the notion that home is a place of affiliation

rather than of origin: '"I've lived here most of my life, now,' he said. 'This is

home'. (305). It is no wonder then that Gregory has gone local. He has identified

with Dar es Salaam, literally 'heaven of peace,' to such an extent that the colony

has become a haven for him. It is on the margins of empire that Gregory has

found a space of rest from migration and displacement as well as from

discrimination and prejudice.

Furthermore, Dar es Salaam, culturally different from England as well as

internally diversified, has also become a source of artistic inspiration to Gregory

as the gendered 'Other'. His poetry collection 'Havin' a Piece' does not merely

echo the English translation of Dar es Salaam ('Haven of Peace'), and employs

phonologically almost homophonous sounds in order to testify to the influence of

the foreign city on Gregory's imagination. The title of his collection also suggests

that Gregory encourages his reader to immerse into the culture of the 'Other' by

way of art. Reading his poems becomes a way of partaking of his perspective on

Otherness ( 317). Where the body fails, Vassanji seems to suggest, art can be of

epistemological value. Poetry becomes a means of bridging cultural gaps, a way

of transcending cultural boundaries. After the dangers and pitfalls of cultural

translation, i.e. the implications of appropriation, have been disclosed by

99
Vassanji's fiction, the title of Gregory's fiction reminds us of the benefits of

translating culture. After the postmodern lesson of The Book of Secrets, it goes

without saying that, while offering a piece of the 'Other', the process of

translation also includes the translator. 'Havin' a Piece' not only interprets another

culture, it also projects the identity of its writer, i.e. Gregory. In this way, the book

of poems reflects the private nature of Gregory's book of secrets as represented in

Vassanji's The Bookof Secrets (103). Pius Femandes's relationship to poet and

fellow teacher Richard Gregory is another major unsolved mystery in the text,

working to interrogate gendered power relations while also troubling notions of

compulsory heterosexuality. Femandes refers to their relationship as "a long

friendship I could never quite explain" (233), indicating either his blindness to his

own desires, his reluctance to reveal his own secrets, or both. At the end of The

Book of Secrets Pius' position is characterised by the insight into the limitations of

his historiographical project. Making a case for a history of respect and dignity, he

says:

What better homage to the past than to acknowledge it thus, rescue

it and recreate it, without presumption of judgment, and as honestly,

though perhaps as incompletely as we know ourselves, as part of the

life of which we all are a part? (332)

The Book of Secrets, is associated with secrets, withholding, and all that cannot be

revealed. Belonging is a recurring theme in Vassanji's novels. This is the creative

burden of the writer who becomes in Vassanji's own words:

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 a preserver of the collective tradition, a folk historian and myth

maker. He gives himself a history; he recreates the past. Having

reclaimed it, having given himself a history, he liberates himself to

write about the present. (GauriM)

As a conscious inhabitant of a multicultural society it is the present that concerns

Vassanji. The novel is an account of not only the colonial past, but also the post-

colonial and of present, it is about the three races whose intersection in that place

and at that time shaped the present reality. The journey - both historical and

personal - that the fictional narrator of The Book of Secrets embarks on in his

search to unveil the secret of the diary takes him to those scraps of memory and

nuggets of information and make sense of sweep of history. He finds it quite

complex and wishes to penetrate deep into it. The diary seems to be an intricate

web of human relationships. The enormity of the book lies in the style, structure

and accuracy in making the tale of human idiosyncrasies thought provoking and

soul searching. Vassanji does not explicitly point out the remedy. He has

presented people as they are, but it teaches the lesson of humility, equality and

motivates them to retain the good of past in the face of the challenges of life with

the head held high. Vassanji's novels lay a lot of emphasis on issues of identity

and as a writer wishes to understand his present and considers it his duty to locate

displaced and the other marginal communities in shifting power stations. It is

important for Vassanji to talk about the past and the present that is changing fast.

He loves to travel in past as well as present and so his characters are always in a

state of movement. The journey never stops nor is the past completely left behind.

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This pattern of repetition continues in all his works. Vassanji looks at the relations

between the Indian community, the native Africans and the colonial

administration.

Not uprooting and moving boundaries, but simply setting them

alloat. And free, for an identity, a literature, in the broad sense, to

grow, explore, find and define itself; and perhaps keep on defining

itself (Aziz viii).

102