THE BOOK OF SECRETS: A STUDY
M.G.
Vassanji’s third novel, The Book of
Secrets, was published in 1994. It’s a fine piece of work that foregrounds
the themes and ideas that recur throughout M. G. Vassanji’s fiction. It is an
engrossing account of Asians in East Africa. Rich in detail and description,
this award winning fiction magnificently deals with immigrants and exiles. It
appears as a story of displacement, physical and emotional, and one’s search
for identity and a promised land. It explores the state of living in exile from
one’s home and from oneself.
This
third novel, The Book of Secrets, is a spellbinding novel of generations
and the sweep of history. The story of it is a memorable cast of characters,
part of Asian community in East Africa, whose lives and fates we follow over
the course of seven decades. It is an encompassing tale that flows through
lives. It delves deep into the personal lives, loves and cast system
surrounding African Indian society. It investigates notions of history and
memory; enquiries into how much one can know about the past; ideas of home and
community as they extend across time and space; and the insidious legacies of
colonialism, war, race, prejudice and religious tolerance.
The Book of Secrets is a novel
of the in-between. It explores the border between the self and the other,
between giving voice and remaining silent, between the centre and periphery as
well between the pure and the hybrid. Its text is located at the intersection
between story and history, between the fictional and the factual as well as
between realism and representational character of all art. It is a
“post-colonial as well as post-modern novel.”1
The world of The Book of Secrets
is part fiction - part memory, a history of the people who left Indian shores
in search of a dream for Eastern Africa. Here the author focuses on the
interaction between the Shamsi [Indian] community and native Africans, as well
as the colonial administration. Even though none of the characters ever return
to India, the presence of the country looms throughout the novel. Here M.G.
Vassanji’s engagement with the history is very significant. With it he has
attempted to explore his own past and the past of Indian community in East
Africa. He has brilliantly and skillfully woven the past with the present. He
discusses “how history affects the present and how personal and public history
can overlap.”2
The Book of Secrets is an
eloquent story of the diary of Albert Corbin, a junior British colonial
administrator, who has served many years in various East African colonies.
Immediately before outbreak of World War I, he represents the British Empire as
Assistant District Commissioner. He is posted to Kikono, a tiny fictitious
Kenyan town near the border of Tanganyika. Immigrants from India, who had come
to East Africa in the second half of the 19th century, had founded this town.
They became traders and over the generations, some of them prospered. They
lived through two world wars, married within their community and lived within
their faith. When independence came in 1960s, they were destroyed by the native
powers. Thus M.G. Vassanji gives us the history of Indian settlements
practically from their beginning to their almost destruction. Pius Fernandes,
the narrator of this fascinating novel, uses this description to refer to an
old diary on which the novel is based.
Entries into the diary commence at the
dawn of the 20th century as British imperialism was setting its root
in East Africa. Around the diary is woven the captivating story of a young
Asian African, Nurmohamed pipa and his mysterious wife Mariamu, as the forces
of the First World War and African Nationalism break down their doors. The
effects of these happenings subsequently haunt three generations of Asian
Africans beginning with Pipa’s generation.
The colonial history of Kenya and
Tanzania serves as the backdrop of The Book of Secrets. Here M.G.
Vassanji tells a rich tale complete with historical dates and vivid
descriptions of Asian African experience in East Africa in 1913 to 1988. In
telling this tale of displacement, the author demonstrates an easy familiarity
with history of East Africa.
The novel begins in 1988 when 1913
diary of Alfred Corbin is discovered hidden in an East African shopkeeper’s
backroom in Dar es Salaam. A local expert, a retired Goan schoolteacher of
history named Pius Fernandes is requested to see if it is worth anything. It is
he who has served for several years at a community school in the former German
colony and British protectorate of Tanzania. He is entrusted with this diary
that details the experiences of Alfred Corbin. This diary interests and
inspires him personally as well as professionally. It flames his curiosity. The
diary introduces Pius and Vassanji’s readers to the local Indians. The events
described in it connect with chains that span three generations and spread over
three continents. Pius Fernandes sets out to tell its story but is ensnared by
its plot. He reads it and attempts to trace the events that occur after the
diary stops.
After the initial examination of the
diary, the book of secrets, Pius soon looses his scientific temperament as he
finds himself continuing the story that this diary begins. He feels that the
story of the diary deals with its writer’s life and at the same time the story
of his own life. He finds himself re-examining his own life as an immigrant. He
attempts to illuminate the past. Along the way he finds more puzzles than he
thinks he solves. Ultimately he learns, “the story is the teller’s, it’s mine.”3
In the prologue he says:
……….because
it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it
grows. 4
The plot of The Book of Secrets
has two major strands. Writing with economy and precision M.G. Vassanji first
gives portions of Corbin’s diary itself, with its fresh views of colonial life.
Then comes what Fernandes discovers in tracing the history of the book and the
lives it has touched. There is a wonderful account of the World War I in East
Africa. Around the diary are woven a fabulous yarn about a young Shamsi Indian,
Nurmohamed Pipa, and his mysterious wife Mariamu. They are the central
characters. Nurmohamed Pipa is given abundant scope in the novel. Mariamu had
been Alfred Corbin’s housekeeper. This Corbin fell in love with Mariamu who was
betrothed to Nurmohamed Pipa. Apparently, Mariamu on being married to Pipa is
no longer a virgin. After marriage when she conceives, the question arises as
to who is the father of her child. She bears a son, Ali, who has suspiciously
light coloured skin and grey eyes. The second part of the novel follows
Mariamu’s son Ali’s adventures as a successful salesman. He moves to London
with his young wife named Rita. It is she who as a girl was a student of
Fernandes and with whom Fernandes was in love.
The evolution of Asian African
community as migrant people settled in East Africa is an important theme in The
Book of Secrets. The perseverance of Asian African characters such as
Nurmohamed Pipa and the attempts at making sense out of the geo-political
tumult and social dynamics of change are also other narrative strands that are
woven into M.G. Vassanji’s thematic web. The story line of this novel is
actually allegorical of Asian African personal and communal quests for success,
stability and rootedness in the face of dramatic terrestrial machinations.
Indeed, M.G. Vassanji uses Pius Fernandes to narrate The Book of Secrets.
Whereas the narrating voice is that of Fernandes, the chief character of the
novel is actually Nurmohamed Pipa. The tale of this novel revolves round his
character. Most of the narratives of The Book of Secrets is about life
experiences of Nurmohamed Pipa, on whom we place our focus in this chapter to
show Vassanji’s diasporic articulation.
Nurmohamed Pipa is a metonym of the
Asian African in East Africa. M.G. Vassanji has developed his character as a
true diasporic figure. He is built around the stereotype of Asian African
diaspora. However, his character is not developed in the way that Ngugi does
Ramlagoon Dharmasah in Petals of Blood or Karen Blixen does Choleim
Hussein in Out of Africa. The development of Nurmohamed Pipa’s character
must be observed in the light of his historical experience as a member of
migrant, racially distinct Asian African
community. It would be better to mention that we are going to focus on
Nurmohamed Pipa not only because The Book of Secrets chiefly revolves
around his life but also because as Bhabha notes, within postcolonial studies
“the stereotype, which is [a] major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge
and identification.”5 It is very interesting to know that Pipa is
not fixed stereotypical in the sense of Blixen’s choleim or Ngugi’s Ramlagoon.
On the contrary, Nurmohamed Pipa’s actions and character can’t be isolated by
the contexts and spaces that make them logical, human and meaningful ones. He
is not presented as a stock character out of his social matrix and contextual
locations that render him meaningful. Without hesitation it may be added that
his depiction gives us a fuller and conceptualised image of human being with a
life, family, an origin, passions, ambitions, nightmares and challenges. He is
cast in the ambivalent and ambiguity of the many worlds he occupies.
In Nurmohamed Pipa’s character M.G.
Vassanji creates an Asian African character that can’t be treated as a lifeless
piece of wood. He is a living being caught in the webs vicissitudes of his life
as a colonial subject and postcolonial citizen in East Africa. He can be read
as an authoritative symbolic vehicle that articulates the various discourses of
marginality, diasporality, migrancy and dispossession. Although the narrative
worlds of The Book of Secrets is populated with many familiar Asian
African figures such as men and women, children and adults, Muslims and Hindus,
rich and poor, strong and weak, interstitiality appears to be an enduring
principle in all these categories of being. Nurmohamed Pipa is a useful case in
point because as M.G. Vassanji points out below, this character achieves his meaning
within his community of other Asian African characters. Vassanji acknowledges:
My stories are about individual
characters, but they must be seen in the context of their community. 6
M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack
appeared five years before The Book of Secrets. It is here we first see
Nurmohamed Pipa through the narrator’s explanation:
Mzee
Pipa, Old Barrel, was the oldest resident on the corner of Kichwele and
Viongozi-streets. Also called Pipa corner…. 7
Interestingly, the Pipa we meet in The
Book of Secrets is the young Pipa. This Pipa is a character described in
the diary of a colonial administrator, Alfred Corbin. As Pipa grows up, dreams,
achieves, loses and dies. The narrator of The
Book of Secrets is reconstructing him:
The younger Pipa is a burly,
quarrelsome youth travelling from the border town Moshi in Tanzania to Kikono
on the Kenyan side to attend Shamsi community celebrations in a bid to see a
girl he intends to marry. 8
Struggle for identity is one of the
important features of diaspora. M.G. Vassanji always attempts to establish the
quest for identity through his works. His novel The Book of Secrets is a
beautiful example of his fictional efforts to resolve the enigma of identity.
Through the vivid description of historical events like World War II, Vassanji
portrays the cruel brutality that the people of East Africa underwent. The
characters of Pius Fernandes, Pipa, Mariamu, Ali and Rita -- all are trying to
establish their own relative identities with authenticity. The differentiation
between Africans, Indians and White people projects the subtlety of the quest
for identity.
The identity that M.G. Vassanji
portrays for all his characters comes from the theory of discrimination. This
theory is based on colour. But in The Book of Secrets the discrimination
is tinged with staunch orthodoxy. The following passage in The Book of
Secrets focuses the real feeling of the White for the people like
Nurmohamed Pipa:
“The
Indians are half savages”, Mrs. Bailey observed, beginning an explanation she
had obviously thought out conclusively and in detail.
“And,
therefore, worse”, said her companion.
“You
can do nothing with them.”
“Gone
too far the other way”, she means.
“At
least the African you can mould. But the Indians and that Mussulman are
incorrigible in their worst habits and superstitions. They will always remain
so.”9
Nurmohamed Pipa is a typical case of
racially migrant born in East Africa -- though native; his alien origins make
him simply impossible to belong to Africa. Pipa like his community in real life
forever finds himself at the nexus between political discourse and identity
formation. In other words, he can’t define himself out with the racialised
political and socio-historical backgrounds that nurse him. His estranged sense
of being starts from the very early moments of his life. It is visible in the
following excerpt from The Book of Secrets:
His
name was Nurmohamed Pipa….Pipa was the nickname given to the family by the
neighbourhood, and had stuck. It made him feel a lack of respectability, of a
place that was truly home. He was simply an Indian, a mhindi, from Moshi, a
town in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro whose masters were Germans.10
Referring to Pipa’s father and mother
Vassanji mentions:
He
didn’t know where he himself had been born and when, in any calendar, German,
Arabic, or Indian. Of his father, he remembered only a tall thin man with a
scraggly beard, a kindly grin on his face as he pulled the boy’s cheeks saying
‘Dhaboo’. His father had not died… Nurmohamed Pipa could not recall grief, a
graveyard. His father had gone away, and the boy carried this knowledge within
him like a hidden deformity. He remembered him as Dhaboo, and for many years
lived in the expectation that his father would return that one day when he came
home from play Dhaboo would be there waiting.
Of his mother, he remembered the long rains
in the wet season falling through the cracks in the thatch roof, himself
standing with her, shivering in a pool of water, his sister holding his hand.
Another scene: squatting in the latrine with his mother, watching a fast and
furious stream hit the ground under her and joining with his own wavering
spurt. He looked in vain at her darkness for a member corresponding to his own,
had had his arm smacked for pointing at that mysterious shadow….The boy was big
and thickest, and nicknamed Pipa, meaning, ‘barrel’, described him so well that
it became exclusively his. Boys teased him by running fast and jeering,
‘Pip..Pippip..Pipa!’11
In this rather inauspicious
way, we are ushered into the worlds of Nurmohamed Pipa. From the passages
mentioned above we can contrive two important details. Firstly, from the last
description in the passage above we are invited to the denial of belonging that
is to later emerge in the life of Pipa and other Asian African characters in a
more apocalyptic manner at the end of M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets.
Secondly, the unfortunate origins of Pipa mark the difficult preliminary
environment that bred early Asian Africans and gave them stimulus to forever
quest for identity, belonging, home, development and security. In this context it is possible to read in
this originary point of time of Nurmohamed Pipa’s life as the general
conditions that inform the migratory sensibility in the Asian African psyche.
The
origin of Nurmohamed Pipa makes the toughness of diasporic origins clear. It is
central in M.G. Vassanji’s fictional world. The novelist is of the view that
the early Asian Africans tried their best to come out from the conditions of
deprivation, unhomliness and insecurity but in vein. These conditions are the
ones that drove many an early migrant from India to Africa. These same
conditions form the beginning point of self-definition when Mrs. Gaunt at the
start of Vassanji’s first novel The Gunny Sack challenges Salim Juma’s
identity. In the originary moment of
Nurmohamed Pipa’s life we thus notice the beginning of a narrative of location
and dislocation. His early life develops nothing in the character of Pipa but
the sense of estrangement.
Nurmohamed
Pipa is treated as an unfortunate child in Moshi. He had inauspicious growing
up without a father but with an immoral mother. His surly and burly nature
marked him out for misfortune. It is these childhood events that loom large for
him later in life and in the novel. Unfortunate circumstances appear as part
and partial of his life. They follow him like a shadow. As a teenager he
decides to abandon his so-called home. He serves as a porter. Moshi then
becomes an imaginative location of origin, a site of dislocation. This tiny
border town is an interstitial place between Kenya and Tanzania. It gives an
interstitial mark on the life and identity of Nurmohamed Pipa.
With
the depiction of Nurmohamed Pipa’s early life M.G. Vassanji prepares a strong
base for a moving tale. This tale develops as a tragic tale of a man whose
major sin was to be born a native of racially alien ancestry in East Africa.
Vassanji does this by giving us the view that Nurmohamed is a person denied his
place in the world or actually disowned by the very world that he lives in.
Pipa is driven away from home due to lack of stability and security. He seems
to emerge from a world that fantastically has already set a destiny for him.
M.G. Vassanji sums up this:
…. a burly youth with an angry glower
for a world that did not want him. 12
Here
M.G. Vassanji’s Nurmohamed Pipa becomes an extended metaphor. This extended
metaphor clearly articulates the origins of Asian African migrant status at the
margins.
The
plot of The Book of Secrets deals with Nurmohamed pipa’s tragic mission
of quest for a kind of belonging. In search of good fortunes Nurmohamed Pipa
plunges from the borderland town Moshi into the other interstitial settings
such as the coastal towns of Tanga and Dar es Salaam. In Tanga he gets an
opportunity:
He found a job as a sweeper in the big
hotel called Kaiserhop on the promenade. He would clean under the tables and
chairs after they had gone, sweeping away cigarettes stubs and crumbs, scraps
of paper. On rare but not impossible occasions, they left something behind.
Once he returned a wallet not before removing one note from it, a modest one….
And was rewarded…. From this sweeper’s job he moved on to pulling a rickshaw
rented from an Indian.13
Later
in search of his development, Nurmohamed Pipa moves Dar es Salaam. There he
engaged himself in a number of odd jobs for a few months. Due to his movement
from one location to another, he has to face a lot of challenges. The most
significant of them all is that he feels the need to belong, the need to
identify with certain people, a certain place. Vassanji observes:
Dar es Salaam was all that he had been
promised it would be…. Her, surely, was opportunity; yet how was to go about
finding it? Who was he in this town, who knew him? As he was to find out, you
had to…be somebody. Of his savings only a little remained, and certainly not
enough to go back home the way he had come.14
The
sorrow and pain of Nurmohamed Pipa is that as a migrant he can never really belong.
Underlying every action, thought and dreams in the life of Pipa, there seem to
be ever rising hurdles, to be surmounted, making it really impossible to him to
ever achieve the measure of comfort and security which he seeks. The breakout
of such tensions and hurdles on the way to Pipa’s destination places the
painful lesson that his past can’t be shed.
The
passage mentioned below clearly, magnificently and suitably reflects the gloomy
life of Nurmohamed Pipa:
Often the afternoon he would sit
before the blindfolded camel that drove the mill as it walked perpetually in
circles…. patient, doggedly persistent, in the illusion that it had a
destination…. And he would feel a surge of pity for it. Where the beast thinks
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? 15
Here
M.G. Vassanji clearly states that the journey undertaken by a migrant or a
migrant community in search of identity, belonging, security and home in foreign
locations is normally marred by challenges, doubts and never ending feelings of
despair.
Solidarity
is one of the important characteristics of diaspora. In The Book of Secrets
it finds beautiful reflection and articulation. We know that the Shamsis are
M.G. Vassanji’s fictional rendering of the Ismailis, a Muslim community that
migrated to East Africa from the north west of India in the 19th
century. The Shamsis, as they appear in The Book of Secrets, are tightly
knit community with its own channels of communication. The close ties between
its members are indicative of strong bonds of solidarity, which have also
characterised the brotherhood of the Ismailis historically. The Shamsis
endeavours to help and assist each other with material support or with finding
suitable partners. A beautiful example in The Book of Secrets is Pipa
who married to Mariamu.
The
narrator of The Book of Secrets narrates how the Asian in East Africa
have always been in an insecure position. They occupy a somewhat awkward position.
However, from insecure and uncomfortable fate of Asians in East Africa
deteriorates to untenable in 1970s. With the advent of nationalism the
properties in the context of Tanzania’s socialist phase, many members of the
Shamsi community migrate once more. It finds its clear reflection in The Book
of Secrets. Every major character of this novel migrates at least once.
Pipa who was born in Moshi moves between Moshi, Tanga, Dar es Salaam and
Kikono. He migrates to escape insecurity, shame and poverty.
Nurmohamed
Pipa, a metonym of Asian African community, is not only a restless character
but also a homeless one. It is a deep sense of unhomliness that makes the
forefathers of Asian Africans such as Dhanji Govindjhi in The Gunny Sack
to migrate from the borderlands of Cutch, Kathiawar and Punjab. It is the same
deep sense of unhomliness that drives Nurmohamed Pipa away from his borderland
birthplace of Moshi in search of comfort, home and security. It is still the
same deep sense of unhomliness that drives scores of post-Pipa generations of
Asian Africans from the borderland that is postcolonial East Africa. East
Africa is a borderland, a world in-between India and the new Asian African
homelands in North America and Western Europe. The similitude of the unhomliness
of the characters in the novels, and in the actual circumstances that led
Vassanji to self-exile out of East Africa, is a uniting bond. This bond makes
the narrative of his stories credible account of the experience of his
community.
In
The Book of Secrets Nurmohamed Pipa can be seen struggling for home. He
feels compelled to run away from spaces that stand in the way of his desire for
homely life. This is why Pius Fernandes expresses his view:
Pipa was home now, yet lived in fear.
He was a marked man, known both to the agents of Maynard and the allies of
Germans; any of them could call on him as they had done in Kikono.16
This
illustrated feeling of unhomliness that Nurmohamed Pipa feels after his
interstitial experience of the First World War later becomes the hallmark of
his state of being as well. No matter where he goes or what he does, he never
gets comfort or feels at home. It is for this reason that he rents a house with
a shop front in Dar and that’s how the famous Pipa begins anew. Soon after the
devastating war and the losses that he incurs, Pipa finds it essential to move
back home and revise his life. But his home like that of many other Asian
Africans throughout the novel is quite unhomely and as soon as he reaches
Moshi, he is off again, in search of homely space:
He had grown to love his wife [before
she was raped then murdered by some unknown assailants]. He felt cheated, felt
her memory somehow violated by the quick resolution in the matter of her
murder. But his elders had ruled; and there was no other authority…. Save the
military, which he feared…. To which he could turn. The town of Kikono now held
for him the bitter reminder of a happy beginning cut short. Within days, as
soon as the British armies had finally broken into German East Africa. Pipa set
off from his hometown of Moshi.17
Here
we are brought to share in the pains and searching for homes and the pains of
losing these homes. Pipa’s tragic identity as a racially migrant in a changing
East Africa is beyond his control. So is his interstitial sense, which is
interpreted by the postcolonial government as ‘fence sitting’ leads him to that
abyss of dispossession as he loses all his wealth in the nativist
Africanisation programmes of the 1960s. Finally, with all strength, youth and
vigour spent on a null and void journey, Pipa succumbs to the pressure of his
diasporic identity as an Asian African in East Africa and dies. He dies at the
very same day that the socialist government of Tanzania nationalises its
(rental) properties.
Memory is also an important
characteristic of diaspora. This characteristic has a significant place in The
Book of secrets. The world of memories has always been the germ of
Vassanji’s fiction. The author’s engagement with the past and heritage through
memory is very significant. The past according to Pius Fernandes should be
represented because it can offer meaning:
And so I would construct a history, a
living tapestry to join the past to the present, to defy the blistering
shimmering dusty bustle of city life outside which makes transients of all.18
For
Pius Fernandes, the narrator, the past is an aesthetic necessity; it has great
sacral heuristic value:
Of course the past matters, that’s why
we need to bury it sometimes. We have to forget to be able to start again.19
In
The Book of Secrets memory negotiates the colonial and postcolonial
history of East Africa to underscore its contradictions and contingencies.
Throughout the novel the history of the struggle of imperial powers of Europe
like Germany and England over colonies in Africa, the World Wars, their impact
on the Indian diaspora in the African East Coast, and finally the
decolonisation of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zanzibar and other nations
constitute the troublesome destiny of the people. They are forced to migrate
and re-migrate to the place both imaginary and real.
REFERENCES :
1. John Clement Ball, “Locating M.G. vassanji’s The Book of
Secrets: Post Modern, Post-Colonial, or Otherwise?” Floating the Borders:
New Contexts in Canadian Criticism, ed. Nurjehan Aziz (Toronto: TSAR,
1999), p. 90.
2. Amin Malak, “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Post-Colonial
Condition: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji”, World Literature Today 67.2.
(Spring 1993), p. 279.
3. M.G. Vassanji, The Book of Secrets (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1994), p. 92.
4. Ibid., p. 2.
5. Homi K Bhabha, “The Other Questions: Stereotype Discrimination
and the Discourse of Colonialism”, in The Location of Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 66.
6. Ray Deonandan, An Interview With M.G. Vassanji. Www.
Deonandan.com <Accessed on 12 Feb. 2004>
7. M.G.Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (London: Heinemann, 1989),
p. 99.
8. M.G. Vassanji, The Book of Secrets (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1994), p. 46.
9. Ibid., p. 39.
10 Ibid., p. 127.
11. Ibid., p. 127-28.
12 Ibid., p. 128.
13. Ibid., p. 130.
14. Ibid., p. 151.
15. Ibid., p. 132.
16. Ibid., p. 200.
17. Ibid., p. 200.
18. Ibid., p. 18.
19. Ibid., p. 298.
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