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Secrets, by Nuruddin Farah
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It is the week before the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia. Kalaman, a successful young businessman in Mogadiscio receives an unexpected house guest—the wild and sexually adventurous Sholoongo, his childhood crush returned from America. She announces that she intends to have his baby. Confronted by this dangerous interruption from his past, Kalaman starts to investigate his family's history, and uncovers the startling key to his own conception. Hailed by Salman Rushdie as "one of the finest contemporary African novelists," Farah writes in a rhythmical, sensual prose reminiscent of García Márquez's best fiction. Evoking the beauty and tragedy of Africa, Secrets is a remarkable portrait of a family disintegrating like its country, its ties dissolved by exposed lies and secrets.
- Sales Rank: #1170958 in Books
- Published on: 1999-12-01
- Released on: 1999-12-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.40" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
In Secrets, Somalian author Nuruddin Farah has conjured a densely woven tale of betrayal, hidden agendas, and tangled relationships that is both a deeply personal story in and of itself and emblematic of the greater problems that continue to tear his country apart today. As a boy, young Kalaman used to creep into the bed of his childhood playmate, Sholoongo, and the two would engage in secret games of sexual discovery. A quarter of a century later, Kalaman is a businessman in Mogadishu on the eve of Somalia's civil war when Sholoongo arrives unexpectedly from America, bringing with her the reminder of an old, half-forgotten promise.
The secrets start early in Farah's novel: As a child, Kalaman questions even the origins of his own name, wondering if his unusual appellation in a world of Mohammeds and Abdous is an indication that he is not, after all, his father's child. Then there is the question of why his mother seems to dislike Sholoongo, whom his grandfather, Nonno, describes as "a duugan, that is to say, a baby to be buried." If Kalaman's origins are slightly murky, Sholoongo's are mired in mystery. One version has her abandoned by her mother and raised by lions. Whatever the truth of the girl's history, it is generally agreed by most people in Kalaman's village that she is probably a witch, and therefore trouble. Certainly Kalaman's mother, Damac, mistrusts her, believing her to have "animal powers" and designs on her son. Farah reveals all this in a tantalizing introductory chapter before fast-forwarding 25 years to Mogadishu in the early 1990s, one week before the official outbreak of civil war; Kalaman, now a successful young businessman, comes home to find the long-lost Sholoongo waiting for him in his apartment. Kalaman's first reaction to his old playmate's reappearance is fear: "There was no way of knowing what her visit might bring forth, what mysteries it might unravel, what manner of disastrous debates it might generate.... In other words, there was no telling how much havoc Sholoongo would cause." As it turns out, a great deal.
From here on out, Farah caroms between past and present, alternating chapters narrated by Kalaman, Damac, Sholoongo, and Nonno as he inexorably unravels a skein of lies, secrets, and corruption. As Kalaman learns the truth about himself and his family, that family's destruction mirrors Somalia's hellish descent into sectarian violence and long-simmering tribal hatreds. Politics, passion, sorcery, and myth are just a few of the threads Nuruddin Farah spins into mesmerizing whole cloth in this remarkable, award-winning novel out of Africa. --Alix Wilber
From Library Journal
In this new novel from the author of Close Sesame, Sardines, and Sweet and Sour Milk (all LJ 5/15/92), Farah tells the story of Kalaman, a young Somali man who seems plagued by the secrets of his childhood sexual acts. His former childhood infatuation, Sholoongo, appears at his apartment one day, and all the memories of what they did together overwhelm him. The author attempts to tie the problems of Kalaman and his family to those of modern-day Somalia, but the result is disjointed and hard to follow. At one point early on, Kalaman's father tells his son that Sholoongo is "as cheap as a popular rag dishing out pornography in the sophisticated idiom of a highbrow program," a comment that seems to sum up the whole novel. Not recommended.?Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Kalaman is a successful Somalian businessman. At nearly 30, he owns his own computer firm and spends his spare time with his current girlfriend, Talaado. But his life is disrupted completely when his first love, Sholoongo, reenters his life, asking that he father her child. Appalled, Kalaman asks his family for advice, becomes enmeshed in family intrigue, and learns of lies of omission, deliberate indirections, discreet confidences, and hidden truths concerning his own childhood. He comes to question his identity, his sanity, and his understanding of his family. Paranoiac and voyeuristic, sexually charged and profoundly sinister, Secrets compellingly limns the social and biological structure of a family and the ways in which truth and lies both support that structure. It explores the limitations that secrets impose and the ways in which they ultimately reveal themselves, despite the intentions of their keepers. Farah is the author of several other novels, including Sweet and Sour Milk (1992), Sardines (1992), and Close Sesame (1992). Bonnie Johnston
Most helpful customer reviews
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Birthed in Blood
By A Customer
Before its independence in 1960, Somalia was the bloody battleground for power between the fading British and Italian empires; in the late 70s it became a staging ground for the cold war maneuvering between the US and the USSR. In 1991, after Somalia's genocidal dictator was overthrown, equally bloodthirsty warlords began vying for control and, tragically, Somalia collapsed into anarchy. Ironically, this racially, ethnically, religiously and linguistically homogeneous people are now controlled by clans and subclans. Unless and until the country confronts its past, Somalians will render Somalia into nothingness.
Nuruddin Farah places responsibility for Somalia's plight on Somalian's themselves: "If you take the Somali nation as a family, the betrayal is no longer that of colonialism, it is no longer from outside, but from within. And the cure must also be found from within."
Farah strives to keep his homeland alive through his writing and his most recent trilogy, culminating in Secrets, is polemic disguised as obituary disguised as parable disguised as local drama.
In Secrets, one family serves as a metaphor for Somalia, itself; a family whose own checkered past and its members failure to understand one another tears apart and destroys their lives.
Kalaman, the protagonist of Secrets, has always wondered about the secrets surrounding his origins, beginning with his own name. For the name, Kalaman, came from the cry of a bird heard at his birth and, as such, is devoid of any sense of history or family heritage. Family heritage, though, is essential to Kalaman, for he was a child who had always been "interested in the origins of things, how rivers came into being and why they ran and where."
As a result of the secrets surrounding both Kalaman and his family, his grandfather, Nonno, cannot die, his mother suffers from violent nightmares and Kalaman's world is filled with an ever-increasing emptiness.
On the eve of Somalia's collapse into anarchy, Kalaman's sensual and demanding childhood sweetheart, Sholoongo, appears in his home and announces her intentions of bearing his child. Her presence incurs the wrath of Kalaman's mother and pulls Kalaman back into a despair-filled past where he disassembles the myth that represents his family and unleashes all of its long-held secrets.
Secrets displays Farah's superb talents to the fullest. The plot is rich, the language sophisticated and exotic without being overwrought. Displaying elements of magic realism, totemic animals drift through scenery, dreams are symbolic, folktales, prophetic. When Kalaman asks Nonno about Sholoongo's own secrets, Nonno gives him the enigmatic reply: "A man shuts himself away in a dark room, raises his index finger, pointing at the ceiling. Reemerging, he challenges the community members to tell him what he did in the dark room. Another man describes accurately what he did in the dark room when alone."
Conceived in violence rather than in love, and ignorant of his own history, Kalaman is a metaphor for Somalia, itself. Sholoongo, who was born a "duugan," a baby to be taken to the desert and buried, represents Somalia's festering, unspoken history and like that history she "lived to haunt the villagers conscience." Sholoongo is the book's catalyst and her arrival brings back an ugly past for each of Farah's characters, yet, once confronted and embraced, this ugliness is transformed.
Nonno tells Kalaman his "undealt-with troubles began the instant he introduced a decisive element of blame-the-other syndrome into his guilt ridden sorrow." Nonno then begins to associate Kalaman even more closely with Somalia: "There are moments in a person's or a nation's life when collapses can be avoided, even if at first they seem inevitable...Kalaman could have brought an end to this rigamarole sooner, if he had been true to his own instincts, if he had been forthrightly frank with Sholoongo herself: the Somali collectivity could have reversed the coming decline. He had no right to blame his parents or Nonno or others for his own failure...Give people a chance to speak their pieces, and many will display their personal and collective hurts: they all see themselves as ill-used by the dictatorship. Press them further into the corner, ask them for their contributions to the struggle against one-man tyranny, and they fall silent, many unable to deny being accomplices in the rain."
Secrets is a magical story, evocative of the beauty and tragedy that is Africa today. Its politics are metaphorical and never intrusive, for Farah is not a politician but a storyteller extraordinaire.
His life-affirming message, however, to the family that is Somalia is clear: Heal your wounds, Sister. Shout your secrets from the rooftops as loud as you can.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A Fine Example of an African Novel
By R. M. Calitri
I learned about author Nuruddin Farah while researching contemporary African writers and was immediately intrigued by him. This novel won the 1998 Neudstadt International Prize for Literature which has also been awarded to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, and this year to David Malouf. Secrets is well-deserving of this prize for a multitude of reasons.
Not many people have read African authors, especially contemporary African authors, and this is a shame. Nuruddin Farah's work is a perfect representation and a very strong introduction to the obscure African literary canon. This is a bold and challanging work--one that will teach readers an awful lot about Somalian life and engage them in a brilliant story, as well.
The story is set in Mogadiscio, Somalia during the horrific civil war, but readers should not let the setting frighten them away. One need not know anything about the conflict in order to enjoy the book. Farah has taken care of all of the details readers require. The plot involves the protagonist Kalaman's experiences upon receiving a visit from a childhood friend Sholoongo who wishes to bear his child. Her mysterious appearance causes Kalaman to confront his past's secrets and discover his own true identity.
Farah's writing almost outshines his own story with its jewel-like descriptions and sensuous, organic details. His poetic and magical writing is engrossing as are his curious characters who are unlike any I have met in other novels. This is a novel that will transport the reader to a particular time and place in Africa and fill it with spellbinding details that are both very real and very magical. Animals have totemic significance and secrets, as the title suggests, are the focus of many, many mysteries in the book. In fact, the word "secret" appears hundreds of times and is used in as many ways in this book. That, in itself, is amazing indeed.
This is a multi-layered, and multi-faceted novel, and its subplots, magical realism, and variety of speakers make this a challenging book, but if you are intrigued with African or are looking for an extraordinary story written in a very unique style, this book will not disappoint you.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Worth the effort!
By Penny de Vries
While this book is about secrets, as its title proclaims, so is it also about family; family and the ties that bind its members sometimes into convoluted knots, sometimes into neat unison. Early in the book we are thrust into the fable-rich nature of this culture where dreams are the life-blood, myths inform decisions and names have significance beyond the obvious.
The central character, Kalaman, is the only son of Somalian Muslim parents. A childhood lover, Sholoongo, returns to Mogadiscio to seek him out and hold him to a childhood promise. This event stirs up a hornet's nest, ` making the family behave like scorpions whose hiding place has been disturbed.' Many old grievances rise to the surface and many previously unanswered questions now demand resolution.
Kalaman embarks on a search for answers by returning to his roots through his own and his family's memory. An undercurrent throughout the book, that runs parallel but submerged, is the civil strife in Somalia. The question asked is whether the breakdown in Kalaman's family is a symbol or a cause of the breakdown in greater society. In trying to make sense of himself, Kalaman, is also trying to make sense of Somalia.
The story is intriguing and whets the reader's curiosity regarding these secrets and what they could be. In the first half of the book, one feels quite bemused as many of the allusions are yet to be explained. Perseverance through this deliberate maze will be amply rewarded as things fall into place in the second half of the book.
Another striking aspect of this book is the convincing way the writer represents the relationships between the different characters. Kalaman's relationship with his grandfather, Nonno, hit a particular chord of recognition with me. It is Nonno that has coloured his life from birth onwards with myth and legend, tradition and values. His grandfather is his touchstone and his security and he cannot imagine `what life would be like if [he] ceased to see Nonno in [his] dreams'. Kalaman too holds a special place in his grandfather's heart and mind. This renders the outcome of the secrets all the more poignant as well as highlighting the tragedy and irony when brother rises against brother.
This story is a universal one but what makes Secrets a special and remarkable read is the beautiful, sonorous, lyrical language. Never have I read a book as rich in metaphor and simile as this. Every phrase is finely crafted yet none seem contrived. The whole flows with a beauty and elegance that is startling. The characters are colourful yet realistic. A strong theme of sexuality sometimes bordering on the erotic runs through their lives and many taboos are transgressed. This all adds to the rich fabric of Secrets, making it a real find.
Farah possesses that rare ability of drawing the reader into the lives he has created until one believes that one is part of the action, indeed thinking the thoughts of the narrator. I only discovered after reading this book that it is the third in a trilogy, the first two being Maps and Gifts. I will certainly be doing my best to find them.
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