“I wonder at this intrusion of the personal

through Homi Bhabha’s theories concerning the dualism of culture and the moment of the “unhomely,” as the moment when the enormity and smallness of the world come sharply together. This will be done at two levels primarily – firstly, through the cultural negotiations of the characters in the text and secondly at the level of the symbolic “book of secrets” which is written as the narrative advances but also exists in a history of events.

The text, set in East Africa, focuses on Pius, a schoolteacher who emigrated from Goa and settled in Dar es Salaam, and the investigative journey he undertakes into the colonial past of East Africa and subsequently, his own after encountering a British colonial administrator, Alfred Corbin’s diary, written in 1913. The coded histories and unarticulated silences he encounters in this journey form the central trunk of the text, with the beginnings of one story tying its end to another. Through this journeying into the past, Pius creates a meshwork of lives connected to each other until he finds the same threads reaching towards himself. The entire narrative of The Book of Secrets, thus, becomes an exercise in subjectivity itself – wherein the very act of looking back to one’s past, and making sense of it through its retelling becomes a method for narrating the self and for reconstructing past events through imagined landscapes. This is a chaotic history given definition through the power of memory.

The narrative, in this sense, does not simply take a group of characters and place them in a multiplicity of time periods and settings which occurred in the past. It becomes much more than a simple spatial and temporal movement of people, but is a re-imagining of their very experiences and how these may be connected. This concept of “looking back” and retrospection runs pervasively throughout The Book of Secrets, building up a monolith to the causal nature between moments of history and the repercussions that ripple throughout time due to the same. This is an act of historical reclamation, a process through which Vassanji lifts the very veil of a layered past to give precedence to the way individuals experience history. Thus, Pius’s revisitation of the past becomes a space for not only exploring the unknown, but also imbuing it with a sense of the self as he begins forming these connecting threads. The novel becomes a personal memory house, wherein the continuity of history is explored as Pius engages in his private myth-making.

Homi K. Bhabha, in his essay titled “The World and The Home,” uses the word “unhomely” to capture, what he says is, “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place.” This unhomely moment is located in what Bhabha believed to be the essential dualism of culture – that is, the manner in which culture situates itself in a norm and aspires towards stability and consistency, while at the same time changing rapidly due to the demands made of it by its environment, and by individuals who constantly construct it with multiple, diverging meanings. This dual understanding of culture imbue it with a sense of change as well as constancy, an intersection of time and space wherein individuals “home” themselves as well find those homed selves “unhomed.” This conception of culture locates itself as a fundamentally modern phenomenon, where a chaotic culture is characterized of numerous, chaotic histories, each building a cause-andeffect relationship with the personal stories of the numerous individuals located around them.

Bhabha believed catastrophic moments in history often lead individuals towards this sense of the “unhomed” – a point in time wherein personal and public histories merge and interweave to create a world of dislocation and imbalance. At such a moment, the boundaries between the home and the homeland blur, wherein the structure of the home, symbolizing one’s personal histories, is thrust into the domain of the public, or the impersonal and the homeland invades the space of the personal and the intimate. “In a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic spaces become sites for history’s most intricate invasions,” writes Bhabha. Thus, the domain of the private expands, while the public shrinks, reversing the two binaries. “In that displacement,” Homi Bhabha says, “the border between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (141).

If history is the public chronicles of modern nation-states and the movements which went into their making and unmaking, then memory becomes the personal repository of individuals wherein they locate their personal losses, gains, and sense of identities. Thus, “history” and its meaning references the public or the political invariably in the minds of people, while memory is a concept much more suited to the small, individual lives history is peppered with. This general conception of both the categories is challenged in The Book of Secrets, until both the categories bleed into each other, signaling to formation of the public and the private as mutually intermixing entities as given in Bhabha’s theory. The keywords here become the public and the private, as well as the past with the present. Each takes place and is mirrored at two levels in the text, firstly in the cultural locations and negotiations of the characters in the novel, and secondly at the level of the writing of the “book of secrets” through the course of the narrative as a book which comes into being during the corresponding investigation of Alfred Corbin’s diary. Each significant character in The Book of Secrets encounters and engages with diasporic movement through cities or continents – Corbin moves from England to the small East African town of Kikono as a colonial adminstrator, Mariamu belongs to the Shamsi Muslim community which came from Gujarat to Africa, Pipa, her husband, is an Indian born in the German town of Moshi in East Africa who later becomes a Shamsi, Ali, Mariamu’s son, runs away from Dar to London with Rita, his future wife, and Pius – investigating these histories, is himself a Goan who moved to Dar es Salaam in East Africa for teaching. Thus, each of the characters signify a hybrid, meshwork of identities whose instability lies in their shaky foundation. For these characters, the diasporic moment becomes the unsaid catastrophe of their lives, throwing their lives into the domain of the public, signifying the ever alive tussle between the home and the homeland, the self and the public, memory and history. This merging of identities, thus, reinforces the sense of the unhomely in the narrative.

The “book” of The Book of Secrets is written throughout the course of the narrative and presented to the reader as the text at hand itself, and not the elusive Corbin’s diary whose investigation forms the major portion of the novel. This feature, known as historiographic metafiction, becomes even more interesting in the novel due to the symbolicism of Corbin’s diary as belonging to the “past” whose historical unmaking or unfolding leads to the making of another diary about its investigation, which belongs to the “present.” The past and the present, thus, become joined ventures, in these memory projects, wherein journeying to the past becomes a metaphor for locating oneself in a public history, in that “unhomely” moment of being. History and memory, thus, break down as watertight compartments for the public and the personal respectively. This is done by challenging the categorization of history as objective and factual throughout the course of the narrative by showing how history and the events it encapsulates are as much about silences and the exclusion of details as memory is. History, thus, as a narrative of facts, opens itself up to analysis, interpretation and discursiveness in the novel, and breaches its own central sense of objectivity. At the same time, the novel’s fragmented and broken structure of recalling and recollecting memories builds upon an alternative understanding of history as a curated repository of memories. The very barrier between the two is removed, thus creating a matrix in which the characters of the novel locate their personal, subjective narratives.

The narrative engages with history at the level of historiography or the way history-making and formation takes place. This conception of historiography is broken apart into two kinds of history, the first being state-sponsored history, or one that the narrator encounters in newspapers and archives, and the other being experienced history or the way individuals deal with events and narratives and shape as well as are shaped by them. The first carries the air of objectivity, while second is a fundamentally subjective approach to history, wherein the lives of individuals, their memories and their experiences are treated as significantly as the event itself. With such a flexible

understanding, it is easy to say memory is a false and problematic thing which sometimes betrays us by presenting narratives which might be untrue or differently formed. If history is equally subjective as memory, then history too follows the same pattern: of being false, problematic, a thing to doubt. In such a landscape where no objective realities exist, the best is to bury the past. For Rita, this becomes her argumentative point as she asks Pius to give her the diary, so she may bury it along with the histories it was re-opening. For Rita, “history is surface,” a project of no fruits, a speculative study, a concept wrought with subjectivity. For this very reason, she wishes to forget it.

The faultlines created by the disorientation of diasporic movement form a central portion of the narrative, from which branches out the numerous stories and histories of individual characters. This is an individuated approach to history, to see how each character engages with the sense of history which surrounds them – thus bringing history down to the level of subjective reality. Therefore, the memory project which Vassanji engages in becomes the attempt to find words for countering and reconciling the silences of personal and public histories and giving breath to them, such that a process of healing could begin.

This notion of travelling to the past and merging the past and present does not hold up without an exploration of the way time is shaped in the novel. The narrative jumps numerously in both space and time, wherein the multiplicity of subjective realities present in the text – Pius’s, Corbin’s, Pipa’s, Rita’s, Gregory’s and the ever elusive Mariamu’s, - become markers of the way time is experienced individually rather than historically in the text, thus becoming almost unreal in its conception as linear. This repetitive jumping of space and time, hence, loses meaning as the novel continually denies itself and its characters a chronological sense of history which occurs in a nexus. This is reflective of Bergson’s understanding of time as psychological, as existing in the consciousness of individuals. Similarly, strands of events find their endings elsewhere, giving the pattern of a time which doubles back upon itself repeatedly. This defamiliarising, alienating sense of time is given rhythm and definition in the pages of The Book of Secrets, a definition which opens up the text to a dialogue which not only explores the way individuals interact and react to cultures, but the trajectory their lives follow as they get caught up in the flow of history surrounding and resounding around them. It is perhaps this characterization of the novel which becomes its greatest strength.

WORKS CITED

Homi, Bhabha. “The World and the Home.” Third World and Post-Colonial Issues. No. 31/32 (1992), pp. 141-15. JSTOR. Web. 1 Feb. 2019.

Nehru, Jawaharlal. “The Past in Its Relation to the Present.” The Discovery of India. Oxford University Press, 1989. Print.

Vassanji, M.G. The Book of Secrets. Picador, 1997. Print.