Secrets and a New Civic Consciousness

Farah’s works have often used Somalia as an example to frame their critique of the postcolonial state by declining the cult of the merely unique that Somali nationalism posits. Especially since his last two novels, Maps and Gifts, he has so absorbed the lessons of postmodernism, ¹ namely, subjectivity as the disavowal of “collective affiliation” and “general rules, comprehensive norms, or hegemonic systems of thought” (Rosenau 54), as to undermine the linguistic or mythological foundation of Somali nationhood. Secrets is of course a mysterious family saga whose action seems to focus on the hero, Kalaman, especially his struggles against family scandal and the seemingly unreasonable demand of a boyhood love, Sholoongo, that he give her a baby.

Notwithstanding its domestic preoccupation, Secrets is still a sequel to Maps and Gifts in that, like them, it deals with conflicts and movement of signs depicting the problematic of Somali nationhood. Generally, the shared cultural codes on which the Somali society depends for defining marriage, kinship, and statehood are somehow questioned, if not renegotiated, in all three novels. As in Maps, the all-embracing national community with its utopian promises of social harmony and individual freedom again delivers death and violence in Secrets. In fact, rather than concluding on solid signs of home and community, Secrets, like Maps, ends on exile and flight. In all of them, moreover, there is a sharp turn to discursivity as narration establishes its own point of departure and seems to register the limitations on and the problems of novelistic discourse in a culture in crisis. In short, the problematic of the postcolonial state in Secrets is grounded in and enhanced by the unusual focus on the status of and struggle over the resources of fiction itself.

Important in this regard are the levels of narration and the distribution of narrative authority. The novel is built on a series of temporary first person narrators, including Kalaman, the principal narrating character; his grandfather, Nonno; Sholoongo; Damac, his mother; Yaqut, the father; and Arbaco, a family friend. Enveloping Kalaman and the tertiary narrators is a transient third-person narrator who is of limited omniscience in that he or she profusely cites the I narrators, as if Farah wants the narrative to incestuously feed on itself. All narrators thus give startlingly different accounts of the events.

Complicating the narrative further are myths, folkloric elements, and historical references that coexist and nurture each other. The text becomes a carnivalesque discourse, as language is used extravagantly, expending its resources beyond its referential needs in ways that are analogous to the economics of the potlatch or the kind of primitive exchange celebrated by Mauss and Bataille. ² The result is a novel that undermines “mimetic expectations,” especially as the reader is assailed by details that, at first, are not allegorically significant or clearly referential. Farah, in other words, appropriates what Culler would call “a variety of rhetorics” (196), and thus foregrounds the artificiality of the text.

The limit of narration, however, is not to naturalize the artificiality of the text. In fact, although his works have often shown an uncanny fascination with rhetoric, Farah has never presumed to speak from a position outside history, or Barre’s Somalia. Secrets speaks from the same site and it manifests a degree of historical knowledge that is uncommon in works that underscore artificiality. Secrets, in short, responds to a particular moment in the elaboration of Somali national discourse, namely, the early 1990s or the eve of the civil war, when the nation entered a period of accelerated militarization, sporadic but growing insurrection, guerilla activity, and bloodshed. Narration thus seems to follow history to the end of the state and provides us with many ready connections between history and representation. Secrets is thus a skillfully textured narrative, but it still remains a discourse on fate of a nation: Somalia.

How history and fiction are made to intersect and enact the dilemma of a troubled political community could be demonstrated through Kalaman’s role in the text, his relationship with Sholoongo, and their opposing ideologies at the end of the novel. In the parabolic pattern...