The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel

by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

a desire as pretentious as it was certain: to become a novelist. They warned me: You might never succeed in literature. You might end up bitter! disappointed! marginalized! a failure! Yes, it’s possible, I said. The relentless “they” insisted: Maybe you’ll end up suicidal! Yes, maybe, but life, I added, is nothing more than a series of “maybes,” a slip of a word and yet it can carry so much.

I said something grandiose, sentences rife with capitalized words,

I’m going to be a writer! But then that terrible moment always comes, en route, in the middle of the night, when a voice rings out and strikes like lightning; and it reveals to you, or reminds you, that desire isn’t enough, that talent isn’t enough, that ambition isn’t enough, that being a good writer isn’t enough, that being well-read isn’t enough, that being famous isn’t enough, that being highly cultured isn’t enough, that being wise isn’t enough, that commitment isn’t enough, that patience isn’t enough, that getting drunk off pure life isn’t enough, that retreating from life isn’t enough, that believing in your dreams isn’t enough, that dissecting reality isn’t enough, that intelligence isn’t enough, that stirring hearts isn’t enough, that strategy isn’t enough, that communication isn’t enough, that even having something to say isn’t enough, nor is working tirelessly enough; and the voice also says that all of that might be and often is a condition, an advantage, an attribute, a strength, of course, but then the voice adds that in essence none of those qualities are ever enough when it’s a question of literature, because writing always demands something else, something else, something else. Then the voice stops and leaves you to your solitude, en route, with the echo of something else, something else that rolls along and then away, something else in front of you, writing always demands something else, in this night without the certainty of dawn.

Obviously, as was to be feared, and since literary incontinence is one of the most widely spread diseases of our time, she couldn’t stop herself from writing.

And thus emerged from the darkness Love Is a Cocoa Bean, which I consider to be a methodical negation of the very idea of literature. The novel is soporific and dull and it was a huge bestseller.

Stan looked at me for a few seconds, a smile of commiseration on his lips. I knew what he was about to say, which is exactly what he did a second later: “You’re naïve.”

I looked at Jesus, and the same thought that always came to me when I saw him like that, on the cross, absorbing all of man’s evil, struck me again: He’s wondering what the hell he’s doing there.

“Faye, women sometimes forgive a man who forces the opportunity, but never a man who misses one.” “Rocco Siffredi?” “No.” “Robert Mugabe.” “No.” “I know: DSK!” “Nice try. But no. Talleyrand.”

But it’s obvious you’re not a writer yet. Or rather: you don’t know what kind of writer you want to be yet. I can’t find you anywhere in your book. You’re missing. You don’t haunt it. It doesn’t haunt you. There’s no evil or melancholy. The book is too pure. Too innocent.”

You enter a book like it’s a lake of black, icy pain. But at the bottom, you suddenly find yourself at a party: the joyful ambience of sperm whales tangoing, seahorses zouking, turtles twerking, giant cephalopods moonwalking. You always start with melancholy, the melancholy of being human, and any soul that can penetrate to the core of that feeling, and make it resonate in each and every one of us, that soul alone will be the soul of an artist—of a writer.

It was cruel, perhaps, but had the advantage of being simple and credible enough to justify my father’s distance, his harshness, his deliberate refusal to respond to my childish games, my childish mischief, my solicitations, to anything that I made up or did to earn his undivided attention, not his tenderness, which he dispensed as frugally as a skinflint, but merely his simple, ordinary, undivided attention to my existence. Sometimes I succeeded: he would violently scold me or give me an unsparing beating, and those days were some of the most reassuring of my childhood. Those were days when he saw me, when he remembered that I existed and showed me his nonlove with a vengeance. I clung to that violence, because it allowed for the rare physical contact I had with him. And so I exaggerated my insolence. I tested his limits. I broke his rules. I cultivated my bad manners. My unabashed tongue. I fought. I stole. All that so he’d see me. He would hit me. I would go further. I would provoke him. So he’d see me.

Not all sick people want to get better, not everyone knocked to the ground wants to get back up, because getting back up sometimes guarantees them another fall, deadly that time, not everybody wants to return to a normal life that sometimes has nothing on death. I’m not interested in getting back up, it’s a daydream, a dangerous illusion. I don’t want to be saved, Ousseynou. I don’t want to come back. Let me go.

He would feign, when we were being watched, a bond that in reality didn’t exist. As soon as we were alone, his true nature reemerged: he’d lose interest in me, look down on me, and only speak to me to humiliate or mock me.

Our culture is stricken. The thorn is in its flesh and there’s no way to take it out without dying. But we can live with the thorn and leave it in our body, not like a medal, but like a scar, a witness, a bad memory, like a warning against future thorns. There will be other thorns, in other forms, in other colors. But this one, this thorn, is now part of our great wound, meaning our life.”

When she emerged from childhood, her beauty had erupted like the sun revolting against a thousand-year dictatorship of the night.

“What do you want with Moussé Paul?” “I’d like to see him. I’m family. He’s my brother.” “Sa Waay, Moussé Paul doesn’t have a brother.” “I’m telling you he does! Can’t you see that we resemble each other like the two half-moons of one ass?” “Maybe.” “That’s more like it!” “Not so quick. Not all ass cheeks look alike. A butt crack isn’t a mirror.”

‘It is finished’ means ‘in the end I understood that not only is being understood rare in literature, but also that you should do everything to not be completely understood when you’re a writer. Now I can write freed from the fear of not being understood, since I no longer want to be.’ That’s what it meant.”