With his fourth novel, which won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious book prize, in 2021, the Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has erected a literary headstone for the Malian author Yambo Ouologuem. In 1968, Ouologuem won the Prix Renaudot, another celebrated French literary honour, for his debut Bound to Violence, reissued this month by Penguin Classics, and was nicknamed the African Proust. But his career was wracked by accusations of plagiarism, and after Graham Greene filed a lawsuit against him, Ouologuem’s novel was pulled from the shelves. He retired to Mali, and spent the rest of his days as a recluse.
“Erased from literary memory” is how Diégane Latyr Faye, the Paris-based Senegalese author at the centre of The Most Secret Memory of Men, describes Ouologuem’s stand-in. Faye becomes obsessed with a 1938 novel, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, and its author, TC Elimane, who vanished after being accused of plagiarism. “Who is Elimane?” “Where is Elimane?” “Why did he disappear?” These are the recurring questions in Faye’s diary entries, through which Sarr renders intimate portraits of the young writer and the legend.
In the journals, Faye describes how his own debut suffered the treatment reserved for African litfic writers in France: a tiny review in a prominent paper which hailed him “a promising young African writer”, and then he was promptly forgotten. He also documents the meetings of the Ghetto, a group of African writers with varying levels of success and discontent, who discuss literature and sometimes vent at the oppressive publishing measures to which francophone writers are subjected.
Back in 1938, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity had received the acclaim Faye longs for: extensive media coverage, with critics hailing the writer as the “Negro Rimbaud”; prestigious prizes; thousands of copies sold. Many of these successes were awarded on the premise that his book could not have been written by a black man; one paper suggested that if Elimane is black, then “Colonisation may well have performed miracles in education in the African colonies”. When the accusations of plagiarism surface, Elimane disappears. Eight decades since, no one knows for certain what happened to the writer praised and then shunned.
Sarr’s novel, published in an English translation by Lara Vergnaud, starts out as a love letter to writers of a distant generation, becomes satire, then noir and thriller, then infused with magical realism, borrowing heavily from Senegalese mysticism. The form switches between epistolary, verbatim accounts, news clippings and book excerpts. There is oration, meditation, sermonising. The structure is as elusive as the main character’s object of pursuit.
But whatever the form, Sarr’s incisive critique never relents. In one section he demands accountability for Ouologuem’s fate. Would the term plagiarism have been used if Ouologuem was white? Do white writers receive the same fallout when accused of “theft”? (Unsurprisingly, Graham Greene recovered from legal troubles endured early in his career.)
In another section, Sarr scrutinises the position of the African writer within the literary ecosystem. When literary criticism focuses on an author’s identity rather than their style, what is lost? What do publishers owe to their writers, critics to their readers, readers to authors? What does France gain from the ghettoisation of its African writers, while patting herself on the back for being an egalitarianist haven for all ethnicities? Beyond the business of books, Sarr contemplates themes such as self-immolation as protest, to offer a postcolonial viewpoint of Senegal and its discontent with autocratic leaders.
At times Sarr focuses more on the experimental aspects of his prose than on the story itself. Some chapters read like second world war-period filler, lacking his otherwise sensory attention to detail; some of the backstories are lengthy in areas where the plot deserves urgency.
But despite its weaknesses, this very meta jab at the racist systems – publishers, press, prizes – that govern literature is a brilliant effort at welcoming readers into the work of an author whose career was interrupted, as well as posing an important question: What do we owe the African author? Hopefully, Sarr’s concerns aren’t just received with lip service.
• Kobby Ben Ben’s No One Dies Yet is published by Europa (£14.99).
• The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated by Lara Vergnaud, is published by Harvill Secker (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
