Secrets We Kept depicts the very essence of living conditions in rural parts of Trinidad, allowing you to almost detect the stench of extreme poverty, from which Krystal A. Sital’s grandmother sought to escape. “House, lan, and motohcah,” my grandmother says, “dah is all meh evah wanted.”  This sentiment is repeated several times in Sital’s tale of her grandparents’ and parents’ courtships and domestic unions, demonstrating the hold the men had over women and their daughters.  The emotional and physical brutalities these women were forced to endure from their husbands was considered the lesser of the evils on offer.  The women in general didn’t stand up for one another, however, because there was a constant threat that they would suffer a beating of their own if they did.

When this book begins with Sital’s grandmother, Rebecca, hesitating to give the American doctors the go-ahead for treating Shiva’s (Sital’s grandfather) life-threatening condition, the reader might well conclude that this old Trinidadian woman is heartless, as her children believed her to be.  However, Krystal is certain there is more to the story.  Isn’t there always?

Amidst descriptive renditions of aromatic Trinidadian home-cooking, heavily influenced by their Indian ancestors, Sital’s mother, Arya, along with Rebecca, release and reveal the years of torture they both faced at the hands of Shiva.  We discover that history does in most ways repeat itself, as Arya sought the same, “house, lan, and motohcah,” like her mother, in an unrequited quest to escape the subservience of women within their culture.  Some of the prose is hard to read, not because parts are written in raw Trinidadian vernacular, but because the physical battering these women took is difficult to stomach.  That said, every adult human being should read this book, or at least one like it, for it relates the reality of millions, perhaps even billions, of women and girls around the world.

Whilst poring over the pages of this well-written book, one cannot help but feel the need to be a better parent and person, wondering if the last time you scolded your own child might have been a little harsh, for the damage could be irreparable.

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