Trauma, History and Desire in the Indian Ocean Imaginary. A Reading of M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets as Material Culture

ABSTRACT

We can determine small truths about what happened in the past, but they coalesce into a large falsehood

Jules David Prown

‘Trauma, History and Desire in the Indian Ocean Imaginary. A Reading of M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets as Material Culture’ proposes an analysis of Vassanji’s novel based on what I envisage as the domineering thread of the text, namely, its material-cultural approach to the ‘object’ that shapes and un-shapes the narration, Alfred Corbin’s colonial diary. The dramatisation of Pius Fernandes’s — the narrator — material culture approach to the object under analysis deploys the metafictional terrain upon which the novel is constructed and unmasks the ambivalences and ambiguities that configure the Indian Ocean imaginary. The transformation of ‘the book of secrets’ — Corbin’s diary — into The Book of Secrets exposes the limits of historical discourse to articulate successfully the individual and communal trauma of a specific group of people from the East African coast. Without undermining historical narrative, the aim of this article is to reveal how trauma and desire impinge on the historical recreation of an Indian Ocean imaginary that addresses literature as an interconnected subfield of material culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Indian Ocean
• trauma
• desire
• postcolonialism
• African literature
• material culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Further references to this book are henceforth indicated as Secrets followed by page number.

2 In ‘East African Literature and the Politics of Global Reading’, Peter Kalliney uses The Gunny Sack as the means to interrogate globalization theory and transnationalism. Vassanji’s text, he argues, unmasks the Eurocentric thread of these theoretical apparatuses. In my case, I use The Book of Secrets as the means to interrogate historical discourse and unmask its limitations when trauma enters the scene. It is interesting to note how in both novels, Vassanji utilizes objects ─ the objects inside the gunny sack and Corbin’s diary ─ as the propellers of his fictional/historical narrations. The prescience of the objects is highlighted by the very title of the novels, The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets.

3 The Book of Secrets consists of two parts: Part I, which covers the period comprised between the immediate years preceding World War I and the whole of the conflict, and Part II, which covers the years prior to Independence up to the 1980s.

4 Miscegenation, the outcome of interracial desire, is a recurring theme in the Indian Ocean imaginary. An outstanding example of the terrible consequences of interracial desire in the colonial context is provided by Abdulrazak Gurnah in Desertion, published in 2005. For a detailed analysis of desire in Gurnah’s Desertion, see Pujolràs-Noguer’s ‘Desiring/Desired Bodies: Miscegenation and Romance in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion.’

5 For an analysis of the pernicious consequences of European-made borders in East Africa at the backdrop of World War I, see Pujolràs-Noguer’s ‘The Scramble for Home: World War I in the East African Imagination’, in David Owen and Cristina Pividori (eds.), Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War. That Better Whiles May Follow Worse.

6 In ‘Refusing to Tell: Gender, Postcolonialism, and Withholding in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets’, Toron examines the lack of agency surrounding Mariamu which renders her, eventually, voiceless. I agree with her that Mariamu is not given the chance to fully articulate her desire and this, together with her romance with Corbin, is an unfinished thematic thread. However, I would like to mention how another East African/Indian Ocean writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, provides a fully-fledged development of the romance between a European man and an indigenous woman in Desertion and how, in this case, the woman, Rehana, is given full license to desire and articulate this desire within the novel. The similarities between the two novels are striking to the extent that Rehana also reverentially keeps a manuscript, a possible diary, which belonged to her European lover, Martin Pearce.

7 Aku and Ali are the same person, namely, Pipa and Mariamu’s son. The change of name responds to Aku’s upper social mobility and his attempt to erase the humble ─ and paternal ─ origins attached to ‘Aku’. He finds in the newly acquired name of Ali Akber Ali an identity more in tune with, as Fernandes suggests, ‘his new mobility (and nobility)’ (Secrets, 243). This change of name also alludes to the real name of Prince Aly Khan, the ‘glamourous’ (Secrets, 243) spiritual leader of the Shamsis/Ismailis. As Fernandes observes, ‘And so there was born the legend in Dar es Salaam of the handsome boy who looked like Aly Khan but who had changed his name and denounced his father’ (Secrets, 243).

8 LaCapra’s use of the ‘middle voice’ is highly influenced by Hayden White’s and Roland Barthes’s respective studies in the linguistic/literary arena. It is interesting to indicate how LaCapra’s discussion of the middle voice is an integral part of a wider deliberation on the difference between ‘empathy’ and ‘identification’. When applied to The Book of Secrets, I contend that Pius Fernandes, via a process of empathic unsettlement, is capable of empathizing with Corbin and therefore he has access to his thoughts and his feelings but he never identifies with him.

9 For a definition of self-restraint as the defining trait of the ideal masculinity encoded in the gentleman, see Gina M. Dorré’s Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science , Innovation and Universities [Project PGC2018-095648-B-100].