The Colonial Diary as a Time Capsule in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets

Abstract

The novel, The Book of Secrets, based on a single powerful object, the personal diary of Alfred Corbin, a British colonial administrator in East Africa in 1913, won the Giller Prize in 1994. The diary re-emerges one hundred and seventy-five years later in the hands of Pius Fernandes, a retired schoolteacher from Goa, who lives in the postcolonial city of Dar es Salaam and which becomes more than a historical record. It becomes a time capsule that makes the past and the present converge, forcing the living to account for what the dead failed to say. In this paper, as a researcher, will look at how Vassanji has used the diary as a creative tool to examine the connection between official documentation of colonialism and the missing narratives, that is, what is recorded is as interesting as what is not. The diary is Corbin’s, but the real subject is the Shamsi Indian community, the traders, the spies, the women, the children, whose lives are caught up in his colonial gaze yet never fully grasped. The diary is no longer Corbin’s possession as Fernandes reads, annotates and investigates, but becomes the community’s recovered voice. The paper suggests that, following Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative time, and Hayden White’s ‘historical emplotment’, Vassanji has called the construction of colonial history as a kind of historical counter-memory.