Farah, now exiled in Nigeria, became persona non grata in Somalia upon publication of his third novel two decades ago. He returned home for the first time in as many years just prior to finishing Secrets. The novel's transgressive bent and cultural indiscretions will likely retarnish his local image. The notion that sex and greed drive the world is a common enough tenet of European and American fiction, but a significant body of African fiction places more emphasis on the role of the individual in history than the case-history of the individual. The unbashedly bawdy Farah casually flips the script, inverting the usual ratio of social realism to psychosexual analysis.
Secrets is a novel drenched in vomit, excrescence, blood, sperm, scandals, and entrails.
It both titillates and irritates, daring to be read as a prophecy of Somalian apocalypse and as pornography. Farah surgically examines his protagonist Kalaman's childhood traumas and existential unraveling. Our conversation had a profound effect on my subsequent relations with other human beings. It would take a long time before I could approach any other woman. Structurally circumlocutious, Secrets is a narrative snake set on eating its own tail.