Aakriti Pant

B.A. (Hons.) English

2406

Literature of Indian Diaspora

Discuss the significance of the diary as history.

The first thing that strikes a reader as soon as he would associate the two words ‘Diary’ and ‘History’ together is ‘Can
the diary be a reliable source of information’? The most prominent yet contradictory thoughts are: maybe not in the
conventional sense since a diary is an object of reflection limited to personal history but then there is nothing like
objective reading. Diary entries aren't entirely subjective and are also influenced by the environment the writer
writes it in, the perspectives aren't just personal but a representative of the period and people of a certain time. We
have ‘The diary of a young girl’ by Anne Frank to substantiate the correlation between personal and public history as
well as to form a link between diary and history. The diary in question was found in a deserted storeroom by one of
Pius Fernandes' former students who then gave it to him. It belonged to Sir Alfred Corbin, a British colonial officer
who was sent in 1913 to administer an area in Kikono, British East Africa and gives the reader an insight of the newly
appointed governor’s fresh experiences and largely of the colonial machinery’s operations.

There’s no modus operandi for a subject position in association. And since modernism takes into account the
artificial sense of memory, the plurality and multiplicity of meanings and the subjectivity of truth become a matter of
teleology. Where the explanation of the phenomena in terms of the purpose it serves is rather important than the
cause by which they arise. The reliability, meaning or truth is primarily governed by Vassanji’s perspective in ‘The
Book of Secrets’. As much as modernist literature opens the gate to look for meanings for the anxious reader it
doesn’t necessarily allow the reader to have a different point of view from the writer. Which makes the diary a tool
for re-construction as well as re-tracing of history. But before discussing the significance of the diary as history one
has to take in account that Africa doesn’t have a written history. The continent where oral history has served as
tradition as well as the coloniser’s weapon of identity politics has to perpetually consider what survived all these
years as the evidence of history. It is relevant for them both chronologically and mythologically as it helps them in re-
working and re-stating of a myth to carry forward the past. Because there’s no space for the representation of native
voices except the working of the colonial machinery howsoever it be. The diary is an object of past but the re-
construction is done in present. “Even now it makes protagonists of those who decide its fate. Because it has no end,
this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows.” (prologue) The changing subject positions bring
forward the different versions of a story. The title itself is Vassanji's defensive yet self-explanatory statement where
he wants the reader to be open and free to interpretations.

If the differences and similarities in opinions framed in the diary questions its reliability then it also puts history in a
critique of subjectivity. The prologue begins with a dated entry just like a diary but is eventually a prologue. Which
questions the expectations of the reader, whether they consider it history or fiction or “historical fiction”. Because
ever since mankind exists differences and similarity have an interplay and there’s nothing called pure past, we just
have confluences. The underlying power structure is real. Suggesting that the reader shouldn’t have a doubt about
the purpose or the intentions/seriousness of the critique but rather about the narrative and the content-with an
element of fiction. Vassanji’s curious approach makes us question: (1) How history is presented? (2) How it could and
should be reconstructed? (3) How it influences the characters’ identities and principles. The unreliability supports
the fact that no truth is complete. Which brings forward the argument that even if the reader holds onto the
significance of diary as history, can he believe the writer?

The truth always lies somewhere in between.

The gaps and holes which the diary leaves are connected by Pius using his imagination and his understanding of
events. But the novel withholds many secrets, articulating a complex postcolonial vision while refusing closure on
any number of issues, including its own narrative. As there are two different complex ways of saying it (1) Vassanji’s
(2) Corbin’s in the first few chapters forming the microcosm for this argument. When we decipher the possibilities of
“the predatory gaze”, from Corbin’s perspective it is the anxiousness of a newly appointed official but from Vassanji's
point it is a metanarrative. Thus, the personal/political/colonial history can’t be separated from the diary. In the
typical post-colonial way of writing, Vassanji also adds a true fact and later brings forward the other point of views.
Which are centrally challenged throughout the novel. The Book of Secrets depicts colonial habitation as a movement
synonymous with the writing of history itself. Both processes—the one of colonizing and governing a "savage" and
the other of making comprehensible the "savage" past of East African colonial rule—operate as functions of
"frontier."

In conclusion ‘The Book of Secrets’ is a historical metafiction, partly history and memory and partly an interpretative
fiction. As John C Ball observes that “Although the text freely makes use of postmodern conventions, particularly
with respect to its status as historiographic metafiction, it ultimately seeks to articulate a nuanced and politicized
postcolonial vision. The text of the novel through the use of diary entries seeks to blend a fictional account with the
historic conditions in Colonial Africa to present the reader with a wholesome outlook to the period and the area.”