Book Of Secrets Analysis

The Narrative of Violence as a Metaphor of the Colonial Project in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets

By

Remmy Shiundu Barasa, PhD

Pwani University, Kilifi- Kenya

Email: [e-mail]

The Book of Secrets is a bi-layered textual discourse comprising relics of information obtained from Alfred Corbin’s diary, on the one hand, and Pius Fernandes’ reconstruction of those disjointed messages into a narrative. But within these spaces, there are multiple mini-layers of stories of other characters: Mariamu, Pipa, Rita, Sola, Kim and others. A diary is known for its fragmented and incoherent nature. By trying to fill in the gaps of Corbin’s diary, Fernandes comes up with a new narrative whose truth become the discursive subject of the novel. Imbedded in the search of the truth between the constructed (Corbin’s) and the reconstructed (Fernandes’) diaries, there are metaphors of violence that manifest narratives.

The Book of Secrets is a story of two parallel narratives: one casting Africa as a land of savages, primitive people and another—which is a redefinition of the first—which radically shifts and even collapses the borders of the first thus rendering the narrative a discursive one as the frontiers are now permeable. There are border wars between the colonizer and the colonized. This, according to Rhodes (1998:180) figures away the otherwise unbearable effects of British colonization in East Africa. This approach, according to Rhodes, irrespective of its objectivity, is clearly “a fictional process of mastery over a silent and mute body of knowledge,” a body that must be invaded and subdued.

To begin with, Fernandes’ history – having been himself a subject of colonialism – and the mention of the World War I depict a m...

... middle of paper ...

...a possibility of three pivotal structures of engagement composed to the native Africans, the immigrant Indians and the colonizing whites. This cast is further complicated by “withinist” borders such as Goan versus Shamsi Indians. The two Indian groups differ in terms of religious affiliation and geographical location. The narrator, Fernandes, is of Goan extract himself and this problematizes his withinist engagement with other Indians before he engages their collective past. The presence of immigrant Indians in the narrative is important in at least two ways: they are a colonized group as well as an important factor in East Africa’s colonizing process and racial structural engagement.

By filling in the gaps, Fernandes engages in some form of narrative violence when he dismantles the centre and fogs the borders. Each frontier is blurred and is presented as a common