La plus secrète mémoire des hommes/The Most Secret Memory of Men
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Review by Isabelle Dupuy
I’m in the increasingly common position of having grown up in one language (in my case two) and living my adult life in another. I left Haiti and the French Lycée to study comparative literature in the United States. A few years later, I emigrated to Britain where I have made my home. I first read Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021) in French and opened my copy with trepidation and excitement. Mbougar Sarr is the first author from sub-Saharan Africa to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize. The jury declared, after a single round of voting, that Mbougar Sarr had written ‘A hymn to literature.’
The Most Secret History of Men, as it is called in English, is a post-colonial, post-independence take on the classic story of the lost manuscript and the quest for its missing author. The protagonist, Senegalese student and writer Diégane Latyr Faye, is in ‘the terminal stage of immigration’ in Paris. He and his fellow exiled friends reassure each other that they will somehow escape the fate of the first wave of African authors: ‘The elders had fallen into the salve hold that was complacent exoticism.’ Yet, they too must contend with ‘the silent realization that we were unhappy and unmoored Africans in Europe.’
When Diégane is loaned a copy of a legendary novel, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, he’d read about as a schoolboy in Senegal, he is warned by the book’s owner, renowned Senegalese writer Siga D.: ‘You’ll see.’ Reading the novel leaves Diegane ‘shattered’ indeed. ‘Great works impoverish us. They rid us of the superfluous.’ He emerges from the book ‘emptied: enriched, but enriched through subtraction.’ Diegane then embarks on a journey to find the mysterious author of The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. At this point, Mbougar Sarr introduces us to the author, T.C. Elimane, a Black writer born in a Serer village in colonial Senegal during the First World War whose novel, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, would have been published in pre-war Paris to short-lived acclaim, followed by disbelief, disgrace, and destruction.
Inspired by the true story of Malian author Yambo Ouologuem’s 1968 novel Bound to Violence, Mbougar Sarr raises a mirror to our current debates about identity and appropriation with this cautionary tale from the 1930s. T.C. Elimane is a gifted young man who absorbs the proclaimed values of the French coloniser. He moves to the metropolis confident the French will recognize his work and his talent, especially as he’s doing it all their way. Diégane understands Elimane all too well. Ninety years later, the dream of ‘induction into the French literary world’ has not evolved but ‘No African writer established in France will admit that publicly.’ Despite independence, Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, and the eroding of French power, the fantasy of being recognised by France is still alive. For a brief moment, T.C. Elimane lives the dream. He becomes the ‘Negro Rimbaud’. Soon enough, however, the white establishment turns on Elimane, and accusations of plagiarism force the publisher to pulp his book. The Black author disappears.
Through fictional accounts by witnesses, diaries, and letters, we follow the trail of a writer whose talent now focuses on revenge. Mbougar Sarr, in seamless and precise prose, tilts the reality of The Most Secret Memory of Men so that voices become burnt, raw, and yet sound more reliable than the detached one Diégane uses to begin his journal. T.C. Elimane’s book begins with a story about a murderous king, but he himself is a son of grief; his father and his uncle were twins who came to hate each other because one looked up to Europe and the other one didn’t. Colonisation affected African societies so deeply, it hacked at the heart of families, at ‘The Most Secret Memory of Men’.
The balance of power between the French and T.C. Elimane changes once the African writer stops writing. An elderly white journalist ends up believing in ‘Black magic’. Yet all she describes is the power of thought, yielded in a non-European way. Breaths blow over water, carrying thoughts of death, desire, or marijuana.
All human beings in this story have agency, whether in the 1930s or today, in Senegal or in France, but are blinded by their perceived lack of power. They struggle to matter to each other and to the world around them: ‘Reality has no opposite, everything that occurs in the human experience is reality.’ Whether it’s the Jewish publisher risking his life in Nazi-occupied Paris to find his friend Elimane, or Diégane’s reluctance to get involved in his own country’s current struggles, the characters face their destiny with whatever tools they have. Diégane Latyr Faye, for example, has the pen. Throughout The Most Secret Memory of Men, Mbougar Sarr asks if writing matters. By the end of the novel, we suspect the best shortcut to understanding what it means to be human is through the creative process: the making and sharing of literature.
The Most Secret Memory of Men in the English version, unfortunately, reads like a translation. I found myself tripping over phrases such as: ‘driven less by courage than by an obscure desire to experience a crushing vanquishment.’ Or ‘Perhaps the redoubtable prescience that some among us will face off with the beast of literature.’ This is a shame both for Mbougar Sarr and for his readers in English. The music producer Rick Rubin, in his 2023 book The Creative Act, talks about the ‘artists’ intent’. Carrying that intent, rather than merely translating words into another language, is a creative process of its own. Societies are rarely meritocratic but languages are. Mbougar Sarr ends The Most Secret Memory of Men with Diégane coming home to Dakar and traveling to the Serer province where his own family hails from to find out what is left of T.C. Elimane. Diégane is welcomed by an old widow who can neither read nor speak French. As most writers from ex-colonies do, he translates. He translates into French the names of the trees, the sounds, the food and the dysfunction of this Serer family. It works. French may have started as an instrument of alienation in sub-Saharan Africa but it has evolved into a language that Dakar-born Mbougar Sarr can write his truth in. In my opinion, this is what earned The Most Secret Memory of Men the Prix Goncourt. The fictional book within the book couldn’t do this back in 1938 but Mbougar Sarr in 2021 claimed French as a Senegalese language, as fully as Serer or Wolof.
https://www.babelio.com/livres/Sarr-La-plus-secrete-memoire-des-hommes/1332606