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Refusing to tell
Toron, Alison
Toron, Alison
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n935-5032-1-PB.pdf
Adobe PDF, 193.73 KB
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"M.G. Vassanji’s enigmatic novel The Book of Secrets (1994) certainly lives up to its name. Compiled of textual scraps, including the colonial administrator Alfred Corbin’s diary, the novel withholds many secrets, articulating a complex postcolonial vision while refusing closure on any number of issues, including its own narrative. Critically, the central mysteries of the text—including the paternity of Akber Ali (a.k.a. Aku or Ali), the identity of Mariamu’s murderer, the nature of the relationships between Mariamu and several men, and narrator-historian Pius Fernandes’s sexuality—all have gendered components. Yet while previous studies have examined the text in light of such concepts as postmodernism (Ball), history (Jones), memory (Simatei), and space (Romić), there has been no sustained feminist analysis of The Book of Secrets to date. The character Mariamu is particularly notable from a feminist perspective. Allegorically associated with Africa and conflated with the diary itself, Mariamu serves symbolic purposes in the text while also functioning as the key locus around which gendered power relations operate. By using a female character as an allegory for Africa, Vassanji panders to traditional colonial discourses that view the land as a feminine entity to be penetrated and conquered while also subverting those discourses through the process of withholding. In the text, Mariamu’s silence is ambiguous: she often uses it as a means to protect herself, but her rape and murder indicate that this voicelessness is ultimately fatal. Her demise transforms her into an idol worshipped by her husband, Pipa, foregrounding the enigmatic power of the feminine made possible only in the absence of an actual female body. Moreover, Mariamu’s silences and secrets occur against the background of competing masculinities that range from the hegemonic to the disruptive. Vassanji also deconstructs gender norms by suggesting a homoerotic relationship between two of the male main characters, thus furthering the case for reading The Book of Secrets from a postcolonial feminist perspective. By exploring gender issues and colonial discourses in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, Vassanji engages with recent debates in postcolonial feminist theory and provides a subtle and even covertly feminist revision of standard narratives of female victimization and exoticism."(pg 1)
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2009
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With permission of the license/copyright holder