The Secret

Diana Rahim

At the heart of the country was a secret. The secret had been born the same time the country was, 40 years ago, when it gained independence from its colonial masters. It was said that only the elderly prime minister, the single person who had been ruling the country since its independence, knew what the secret was. No other person  – whether they were a citizen, oligarch, or political leader – ever had the privilege to know even a sliver of its truth. Only one thing had been disclosed by the prime minister on this matter; if the secret was revealed, the country would be destroyed.

Citizens were left to formulate their own theories. Since the prime minister was the only person who knew what the secret was, some believed that it pertained to him. A fundamental failure, weakness, or lack, perhaps. For the more patriotic who could not believe that their leader was deficient in any way, different communities were attributed to be the subject of the secret, depending on who were seen as the main agitators at the time. Maybe it had something to do with the socialists, or maybe it was the immigrants, perhaps it was the Muslims, or maybe it was the homosexuals. Of course, these claims were only a veiled way for them to express their belief that these communities, these people, were the source of the country’s possible ruin.

Power sedimented around the secret over the decades, giving it the kind of mythic, total power given to things so elusive and immaterial they bordered on nothingness – like faith, like love, like God – how these invisible forces, seemingly created and given life through the miasma of one’s own mind, could regulate our lives in ways as intimate as what is said before bed, and as eternally permanent as how one chooses to die, whether through the earth or through fire. And so it was with the secret. The threat of its revelation became an organising structure through which every aspect of a citizen’s life was dictated; guiding the way political language was shaped and the way state narratives were communicated. It influenced the way their politics were practiced, and the way they were told how to live their lives.

The secret’s power grew so potent that it became a tactic for political hopefuls to reference it in their campaigns. The ruling party alluded often to the need for their continued rule, to ensure that the secret remained unknown and did not fall into the imagined hostile hands of opposition political parties, or foreign agents keen to see the downfall of the country. It was the same narrative employed by the prime minister in his annual national addresses – the offer of continued stability; an insurance from the country’s ruin, which citizens were meant to understand that they would not survive. Though the secret was alluded to often, it was never openly discussed by the state or through the media, which the state took great pains to control. The threat of its revelation was the single most powerful governing principle of the country, yet it was never spoken of directly.

In the first couple of decades after independence, citizens were more frugal, both in how they lived and in their political participation. Having survived more ruinous things – like the violence and plunder of their former colonial masters – a state secret seemed minor and bearable in comparison. If citizens did revolt, they revolted against what they felt were greater threats: wages, the price of food, the issue of education for women. For those who stood close enough to the question of the secret, however, they were not treated so kindly – particularly during a time when repudiating brute force and abiding by human rights were still more matters of theory than practice. This changed as time flowed on. The citizens’ children, and their children’s children, were increasingly alarmed at the idea of having their lives steered by something they did not know or understand.

So, it was then that the unthinkable happened. The question ‘what is the secret?’ left the realm of the mind’s internal wanderings, the realm of whispers, and began to be spoken aloud. First amongst lovers, then at the dinner table, during gatherings of friends, amongst bored colleagues at the workplace, until finally, as momentum gathered with a force only possible with repression, the question was asked aloud by an opposition politician campaigning to be the next prime minister.

In truth, he was indifferent to the secret. He was curious, of course, just as much as anyone. But he did not feel as strongly as the more passionate groups of citizens who talked of the secret as a convenient tool of repression and cudgel that demanded their obedience. He did not feel as strongly as the citizens who were beginning to turn the sharp edge of their curiosity into anger at being distrusted with the full knowledge of what it was that completely governed their lives. He was a politician, after all, and sensing that the secret’s power had shifted from its protection to revealing its truth, he acted according to what would propel him to the position he so desired. Having lost the previous two campaigns, he wanted to believe in the resolution of his own political trilogy. He took all that had been expressed by the people, expanded the seed of anger and anxiety, shed the intimacy of their personal struggles, and leapt to promise the unthinkable. He declared: Place me in power, and I will reveal the secret. What people had expressed with fervour, he reshaped into a promise with the clarity and the fragility of glass. So clear, yet so breakable. So hollow, yet so seductive.

When true freedom is alien, unknown in mind and experience, even the shadow of it can feel like the real thing. To hear the political hopeful speak aloud about the need for the secret to be revealed in his speeches, debates, and interviews signalled to the people that a great break had occurred – as if air had rushed into their political environment, returning blood to a declining body. Upon him was heaped the symbol of emancipation, as if he had been the one to single-handedly turn reality around. The people had forgotten, or perhaps simply did not realise, that it was they themselves who first wondered and talked about the secret among themselves. That it was their words in his mouth, their hope and courage, that he had mutated into a political language that could fit the playground of electoralism at which he met the incumbent, elderly prime minister.

And so, because the people did not realise that his power was borrowed, that it was their force that he gathered, he alone took the seat of power that could have been theirs to take together. He alone was to be noted down in history as the one to bring about the end of the elderly prime minister’s decades-long rule. Of course, it would have been a lie to say that there was no fear amongst the people as the transfer of power was set to happen. When the results of the vote were announced, the ruling party and their supporters were riddled with anxiety, and felt in themselves an almost apocalyptic fear of the ruin they believed was to come. The cabinet ministers had decided to watch the results together at the Law Minister’s home, and as they saw the inevitable unfold on the television screen, they could only stare, as still as owls, while nursing the various alcoholic drinks sweating across their palms. What do we do? the Minister of Home Affairs asked after two full minutes of stunned silence had passed. It was a dangerous question, one that implied that there were other options than the acceptance of the election results. They were not akin to thinking dangerously, for better or for worse, and so even though the dreaded moment had arrived, they did not act to stop it, for the peaceful transfer of power was necessary in a democracy, and to the world a democracy was what they were. Far worse than their prime minister losing the election, would be their country losing face.

In truth, even the new prime minister was afraid. After all, he not only inherited the responsibility of governing the country, but had to deliver on the promise he made to reveal the secret. He registered the finality of his victory when the elderly and now former prime minister came on to give a speech to address his loss and his voters. As was expected, he spoke with equanimity and grace in the face of a crushing defeat, and yet, against the backdrop of what he had always warned his citizens would be a catastrophic event, he seemed eerily calm, acceding to his loss with a peace that confused citizens and politicians alike.

An hour later, the new prime minister received the awaited call from the former prime minister. Though it was a private call, it was a public gesture; each of them would later ask their assistants to write in their respective social media pages about how the former prime minister graciously congratulated his successor. Before the expected congratulations however, he said: The secret is in a red box on the prime minister’s desk. Only you as the reigning head of state have the right to look into its contents. You are free to do with the secret as you wish; that is your power now.

The new prime minister, no longer afraid now that his power was legitimised by his predecessor, placed his hand on the box, encased in red weathered leather. As he opened the golden clasp, fear shot through him; for even though he spoke often about wanting to do this for the people, he now stood alone, without concern for them at all. Was this necessary at all?

The elderly former prime minister wanted to be there when his successor opened the box to the secret. Yet he looked away as the lid opened, smiling at the knowledge that he was soon to be released from his duties. He smiled because he knew that the new prime minister would open the box and see nothing. For there had always been nothing. There had never been a secret; except for the pretense of one. He smiled knowing that the people would not believe it when told that there was nothing. He knew that this revelation would cause them to revolt against the new prime minister, believing themselves to have been cheated of the liberty they were promised, believing that the secret was being kept hidden once again – for it would be unbearable to believe they had been dominated, and had been subservient to nothing, to air in a box, to a simple idea that he had for a bloodless, more sophisticated way to maintain his absolute authority.

Nothing ruled the citizens, absolute nothing. There would be others who would turn this knowledge into the liberation that the people had sought for so long, to say that this truth was proof that they could indeed govern themselves, that they could choose a different story, a different kind of invisible faith to decide their lives. But the new prime minister was alone, and although he had spoken much about removing the shackles created by the secret, those were borrowed words from people whose devotion and fire did not run in his blood. He stood there only as a symbol. Soundless, without fury, signifying nothing.

Diana Rahim is a writer, editor, and visual artist whose day job is in the social service sector. Her recent essays have been anthologised in Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays, Best New Singaporean Short Stories and Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore. She dreams of autonomy and decentralised futures.