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 nar? ration establishes its own point of departure and seems to register the lim? itations 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.