(Agence Ecofin) – If he does not appreciate the label of new genius of African literature sometimes affixed to certain writers, Mohamed Mbouga Sarr will certainly no longer be able to get rid of it after “The most secret memory of men”. Goncourt 2021, the book constitutes a real feat on various levels.
From the first lines, we notice the excellent work of Editions Philippe Rey and Jimsaan in not altering the prose of the Senegalese. And what prose! In his desire to show us that all the books in the world feed off each other and that in reality the authors are inspired by their peers, Mohamed Mbouga Sarr reveals his singularity: the universality of the style.
Mohamed Mbouga Sarr
No forced reference to irritating tom-toms or other African symbols. Before being an author, he is a reader, a book lover who made his novel an ode to universal literature. Then there is the story, a magnificent mise en abyme in the original sense of the concept popularized by André Gide, consisting according to the latter of giving a work the capacity to refer to itself, to speak about itself, to judge or even comment on oneself.
Over the years, the expression began to be used for the smallest reference of a book or film to itself. But throughout “The Most Secret Memory of Men” Mohamed Mbouga Sarr tells with the veil of fiction, the story that inspired his text.
The book tells the story of the young Senegalese writer Diégane Latyr Faye and his investigation into another Senegalese writer, who enjoyed success before disappearing under accusations of plagiarism for his book “The Labyrinth of the Inhuman”. A plot which recalls the very real one of the Malian Yambo Ouologuem, awarded the Renaudot Prize for “The Duty of Violence”, then accused of having plagiarized Graham Greene and André Schwarz-Bart.
The inevitable Yambo Ouologuem
Mohamed Mbouga Sarr also manages to avoid all the classic traps linked to his status as a promising African author. He evokes the African book scene, but very quickly, his Goncourt Prize for novel confronts us with questions which push us not to essentialize literature, to lock it into boxes like that of “African Literature”.
His falsely arrogant and pedantic prose draws attention to the fact that an African writer does not have to be an pedagogue, nor even write for a particular reason. And he does this without losing even a little of his identity, even daring a few words in Serere (a dialect of central Senegal). All with a style which, although very original, can be read, far from the pedagogical-bobo-intellectual author, but without ever falling into the caricature of the literary populist and clumsy defender of access to the text for all.
“The most secret memory of men” is a literary feat which largely finds its place among the best books ever written by an author from French-speaking Africa, and 3 years after his Goncourt, the work deserves to be read and reread.
Servan Ahougnon
