The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel

by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Lara Vergnaud

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

A gripping literary mystery in the vein of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, this coming-of-age novel unravels the fascinating life of a maligned Black author, based on Yambo Ouologuem.

The first Sub-Saharan African winner of France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt.

In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer in Paris, discovers a legendary book from the 1930s, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. No one knows what became of its author, once hailed as the “Black Rimbaud,” after the book caused a scandal. Enthralled by this mystery, Diégane decides to search for T.C. Elimane, going down a path that will force him to confront the great tragedies of history, from colonialism to the Holocaust.

Alongside his investigation, Diégane becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. Together they talk, drink, make love, philosophize about the role of exile in artistic creation. Diégane grows particularly close to two women: the seductive Siga, who holds so many secrets, and the photojournalist Aïda, impossible to pin down.

The Most Secret Memory of Men is an astonishing novel about the choice between living and writing, and the desire to transcend the divide between Africa and the West. Above all, it is an ode to literature and its timelessness.

 

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Release date: September 26, 2023

Publisher: Other Press

Print pages: 489

Sample

 

I

T.C. Elimane offered the African authors of my generation, who can’t be described as young for much longer, the chance to tear each other limb from limb in pious and bloody literary jousts. His book was both cathedral and arena; we entered it as if entering a god’s tomb and ended up kneeling in our own blood, offered as libation to the masterpiece. A single page was enough to assure us that we were reading a writer, a hapax, one of those celestial bodies that only appear once in the literary heavens.

I remember one of the many dinner parties we spent with his book. The discussion grew heated, and Béatrice—the sensual, dynamic Béatrice Nanga who I hoped would one day asphyxiate me between her breasts—had said, ever combative, that only the works of true writers merited venomous debate, that they alone boiled the blood like wood alcohol and that if, in an attempt to conciliate that flabby, spineless creature we call general opinion, we avoided the impassioned clashes they provoked, we were doing a dishonor to literature itself. A true writer, she had added, sparks fatal disagreements among true readers, who are forever at war; if you’re not willing to fight to the death for an author’s carcass, like in a game of buzkashī, then fuck off and go drown yourself in that warm puddle of piss you take for quality beer: you’re anything but a reader, much less a writer.

I had backed Béatrice Nanga in her dramatic charge. T.C. Elimane wasn’t classic, he was cult. Literary mythos is a gaming table. Elimane sat at that table and laid down the three most powerful trump cards there are: first, he chose a name with mysterious initials; then, he only wrote a single book; finally, he disappeared without leaving a trace. So, yes, it was worth sticking your neck out in an attempt to grab hold of his carcass.

It was possible to doubt whether a man named T.C. Elimane had truly existed at one time, or to wonder if that was a pseudonym invented by an author to mess with (or escape) the literary world. No one, however, could have disputed the powerful truth of his book: after reading the final page, violent, pure life would come coursing back through your veins.

Knowing if Homer was a real person, yes or no, remains an interesting question. But in the end, it changes little of his reader’s marvelment; for it is to Homer, whoever or whatever he was, that the reader owes thanks for having written The Iliad and The Odyssey. Likewise, the person, hoax, or legend behind T.C. Elimane mattered little; it was to that name that we were indebted for the work that changed our perspective on literature. Perhaps on life. The Labyrinth of Inhumanity: that was its title, and we went to its pages like manatees straight to the water’s source.

In the beginning, there was a prophecy and there was a King; and the prophecy told the King that the earth would grant him absolute power but demand, in return, the ashes of old men and women, to which the King agreed; he immediately started to burn the elders of his kingdom, before scattering their remains around his palace, where, soon, a forest, a macabre forest, grew, which would be called the labyrinth of inhumanity.

II

How did we meet, this book and I? By chance, like everyone else. Though I haven’t forgotten what the Spider-Mother told me: chance is always merely a fate unknown to us. My first reading of The Labyrinth of Inhumanity is very recent, just over a month ago. But to say that I knew nothing about Elimane before that reading would be wrong: in high school, already, I knew his name. It was listed in The Reader’s Guide to Negro Literature,one of those ineradicable anthologies that have been used as reference books for schoolchildren in francophone Africa since colonial times.

It was 2008, my junior year at a military boarding school in northern Senegal. Literature was beckoning, and I developed the adolescent dream of becoming a poet, a completely banal ambition when you’re discovering the greatest among them and living in a country still haunted by Senghor’s cumbrous ghost; in other words, a country where a poem remained one of the most reliable tools in the arsenal of seductions. It was an era when you could pick up a girl with a quatrain, memorized or made up.

Accordingly, I began to immerse myself in poetic anthologies, in dictionaries of synonyms, rare words, rhymes too. Mine were terrible, interspersed through wobbly hendecasyllables full of “tears bereft” and “skies dehiscent,” of “hyaline dawns.” I parodied, perverted, plagiarized. I frenetically leafed through my Guide to Negro Literature. Which was where, alongside classics of black literature, between Tchichellé Tchivéla and Tchicaya U Tam’si, I first stumbled upon the unknown name of T.C. Elimane. The corresponding commentary was so distinctive from the rest of the anthology that I lingered on it. The entry read (I kept my textbook):

T.C. Elimane was born in Senegal. He received a scholarship and moved to Paris, where, in 1938, he published a book whose fate proved unusual and tragic: The Labyrinth of Inhumanity.

And what a book! The masterpiece of a young African Negro! A first in France! The novel ignited the kind of literary quarrel for which that country alone has the aptitude and the appetite.

The Labyrinth of Inhumanity counted as many supporters as it did detractors. But though there was talk of prestigious prizes destined for the author and his book, a mysterious literary scandal stopped the rumors cold. The work was pilloried. As for its young author, he disappeared from the literary scene.

Then the war broke out. After 1938, no one heard from this T.C. Elimane again. His fate remains a mystery, despite some interesting hypotheses (on this topic, see, for example, the short but edifying account by the journalist B. Bollème, Who Was the True Negro Rimbaud? Odyssey of a Ghost, Éditions de la Sonde, 1948). Besmirched by the scandal, the publisher took the book off the shelves and destroyed all its remaining copies. The Labyrinth of Inhumanity was never reissued. Today, the work is unobtainable.

It bears repeating: this precocious writer had talent. A touch of genius perhaps. It’s unfortunate that he used it in service of a portrait of despair: his bleak book nourished the colonial vision of Africa as a place of darkness, as violent and barbaric. A continent that had already suffered so much, that was suffering and would continue to suffer, was entitled to expect its authors to paint a more positive picture of it.

Those passages immediately sent me down Elimane’s dusty trail, or rather, his ghost’s trail. I spent weeks trying to find out what became of him, but the Internet didn’t tell me anything that the textbook hadn’t already. There were no photos of Elimane. The few sites that mentioned him did so in such an allusive way that I quickly understood they didn’t know any more than I did. Nearly all of them spoke of a “shameful African writer from the interwar period” without noting what, exactly, was the source of his shame. I wasn’t able to learn more about his book either. I couldn’t find a single account that explored it in depth; no studies or dissertations on it existed.

I mentioned the book to a friend of my father’s, a professor of African literature. He told me that Elimane’s fleeting existence in French letters (he made sure to emphasize “French”) prevented his novel from being discovered in Senegal. “It was written by a eunuch god. People sometimes talk about The Labyrinth of Inhumanity like it’s a sacred book. The truth is that it didn’t inspire a religion. Nobody believes in the book anymore. Maybe no one ever did.”

My search was limited by the fact that I was at that military boarding school in the middle of the bush. I stopped looking and resigned myself to a simple and cruel truth: Elimane had been erased from literary memory, but also, it would appear, from all of human memory, including that of his compatriots (though everyone knows that it’s always your compatriots who forget you first). The Labyrinth of Inhumanity belonged to the other history of literature (which is perhaps the true history of literature): that of books lost in a corridor of time, not cursed even, simply forgotten, and whose corpses, bones, and solitudes blanket the floors of prisons without jailers, and line infinite and silent frozen paths.

I pulled myself away from that sad history and went back to writing love poems in my shaky lines of verse.

In the end, my only major discovery, on an obscure online forum, was the long first sentence of The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, seemingly the sole survivor of the book’s obliteration seventy years prior: In the beginning, there was a prophecy and there was a King; and the prophecy told the King that the earth would grant him absolute power but demand, in return, the ashes of old men and women, and so on.