@misc{10481/107692,
year = {2021},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10481/107692},
abstract = {In Witi Ihimaera’s fiction, the Maori community is systematically portrayed as an ancient, patriarchal milieu that needs revision to accommodate the subaltern voices of women and sexual dissidence. Community theory, particularly through its elaboration of the notion of secrecy, offers an apt field from which to approach Ihimaera’s ethnic and sexual enigma. Ihimaera’s novel The Uncle’s Story (2000) will be a case study to explore his view on community and secrecy, particularly in the imagination of a queer marae (i.e. Maori tribal meeting place). The novel is constructed on what Derrida calls ‘[t]he classical concept of the secret,’ which ‘belongs to a thought of the community, solidarity or the sect’ (Politics of Friendship 35-6). This is the secret upon which the excluding character of the community is built, a secret that is clearly associated with Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of the operative or traditional community with its fusional tropes in the form of sacredness, violence, sacrifice or political conspiracy. The critique of this traditional secret often involves unmasking the manipulation of the operative community (Nancy, Inoperative). 
Beyond this classical secret that is systematically questioned and ultimately exposed, Ihimaera explores another type of secrecy that takes the form of silence, marginality, alterity or death and materialises as proscribed identities, illicit social bonds and marginal voices opposing normative forms of community. This secrecy has been mainly theorised by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who oppose immanent and essentialist communities through an exploration of the secret with a political and ethic dimension that dismantles unequivocal ontological affiliations and opens locations for alterity. Blanchot thus argues that what characterises this community is ‘the sharing of the secret … nocturnal communication’ where no substance or essence is shared … where nothing is owned’ (19-20). This idea is also heralded by Derrida in A Taste for the Secret, where he opposes it to the act of belonging (59). For all of them, secrecy involves the rejection of a totalizing communitarian space based on homogeneity. A community of secrecy is, then, the community of those without a community, without any specific identity trait, essence or aim, but just their common exposure or sharing. The challenge for Ihimaera’s LGTB community will be to claim for a visible space within the Maori clan, but at the same time to avoid essentialism and coercive belonging.
Derrida makes a distinction between the conditional secret, which ‘can and must be made known under other circumstances’ and is the only one accepted by the authorities of religion, philosophy, morality, politics or the law (Derrida ‘Passions’ 25) and the absolute or ‘messianic’ secret, which is ‘a terrible secret, an infinite secret’ (Derrida, Taste 57; what Miller calls a ‘true secret’, 310). Derrida concludes that ‘if the right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space’ and that ‘[i]n conventional terms, there can be no democracy without secrets’ (Taste 59). In Ihimaera secrecy goes through the ‘absolute paradox’ theorised by Eduardo Barros Grela and José Liste Noya (3-4): on the one hand, it stands for the classical secret that involves totalitarianism for the subaltern LGTB voices of the Maori clan, who, in order to survive, must accommodate to the heterosexual matrix and remain silent through the years. On the other, that abrasive secrecy evolves first towards conditional secrecy and then towards absolute secrecy, as the queer Maori members transform their forced silence into an empowering, ethno-political one that is ultimately cried out but not totally revealed or materialised. Miller clarifies that ‘[o]ur responsibility to that democracy to come takes the form of a promise that is endless because it can never be declared fulfilled. It always remains future’ (299), which is exactly what happens in Ihimaera’s novel and its promise of a new LGTB community that remains unfulfilled, a partially lost manuscript, that of Uncle Sam, which serves as the foundation of the queer clan. 
In The Uncle’s Story, secrecy is the architectural principle that vertebrates the communitarian dyad ‘operative – inoperative’. In Ihimaera secrecy is not ‘merely a matter of plot construction’ as an example of what Leila Silvana May calls ‘MacGuffins,’ that is, ‘plot-driven secrets’ (1, 5), nor just a way of producing ‘(intellectually) satisfying reading, reading that is more than merely “sequential,”’ following Kermode’s terminology (Calinescu 445) – indeed the novel is heavily grounded on these secrets that keep the reader’s suspense. But additionally it demands ‘overreading’ (Kermode) or ‘reflective rereading’ (Calinescu 445) and, as argued by May in relation to Victorian fiction, but aptly extended to Ihimaera’s narrative, secrecy ‘contributes – indeed is essential – to the formation of subjectivity itself’ (1). In Ihimaera’s novel secrecy is the liminal motif that freely moves between the private and the public and becomes the powerful locus of socio-political impact. Thus, ‘secrecy mediates between competing needs for privacy, on the one hand, and sociality on the other – a conflict that perhaps subtends modern subjectivity in general’ (May 1). 
This paper explores secrecy to understand Ihimaera’s depiction of a queer marae by analysing the two central characters in The Uncle Story and the different generations they represent; namely, Uncle Sam and Michael. Derrida’s 'crypt,' Michaud’s 'lost manuscript' and Rashkin’s 'phantomatic haunting' will be central tropes in this study.},
organization = {Proyecto I+D+i 'Secreto y comunidad en la narrativa contemporánea en inglés' (Ref. FFI2016-75589-P)},
keywords = {secrecy},
keywords = {hauntology},
keywords = {queer theory},
keywords = {Maori fiction},
title = {Queering the Maori Crypt: Community and Secrecy in Witi Ihimaera’s The Uncle Story},
doi = {10.5040/9781501365560.ch-007},
author = {Rodríguez-Salas, Gerardo},
}