The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel

by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Of a writer and their work, we can at least know this: together, they make their way through the most perfect labyrinth imaginable, the path long and circular, and their destination the same as their starting point: solitude.

Elimane sank into the depths of his Night. The ease of his farewell to the sun fascinates me. The willing embrace of his shadow fascinates me. The mystery of his destination haunts me. I don’t know why he stopped speaking when he had so much left to say. But mainly, it pains me that I can’t do the same. Encountering someone who’s gone silent, truly silent, invariably prompts reflection about the meaning—the necessity—of your own words, as you suddenly wonder whether it’s all just worthless babbling, linguistic sludge.

chance is always merely a fate unknown to us.

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.

life, I added, is nothing more than a series of “maybes,” a slip of a word and yet it can carry so much. I hope it holds my weight but tough luck if it gives way, in which case I’ll get to see what lives or rots below.

The seeming coldness of her demeanor clashed with the fieriness of her works, the memory of which—sumptuous and pelean pages, pages of flint and diamonds—cast doubt in my mind, briefly, that this impassive woman was the one who had written them.

Hers was a beauty entangled with suffering; an immodest body, tried and tested; a body without harshness but one that wasn’t frightened by the harshness of the world. It sufficed to see it, truly, to understand it. I watched Siga D. and I knew the truth: this wasn’t a human being I had before me, but a spider, the Spider-Mother, whose vast composition was interwoven with millions of threads of silk but also of steel and maybe blood, and I was merely a fly mired in that web, a fascinated and fat, green-hued fly, caught in Siga D., in the lattice and density of her lives.

“I bet you’re a writer. Or an aspiring writer. Don’t act so surprised. I’ve learned to recognize your kind at first glance. They look at things like they all contain some profound secret. They see a woman’s vagina and contemplate it like that’s where the key to their mystery is hidden. They aestheticize. But a pussy is just a pussy. There’s no need to drool out your poetry or your life philosophy while you feast your eyes on it. You can’t live in the moment and write it at the same time.”

Writers, and I’ve known many, have always been among the most mediocre lovers I’ve ever encountered. Do you know why? When they have sex, they’re already thinking about the scene the experience will turn into. Every caress is ruined by what their imagination is doing or will do with it, every thrust is weakened by a sentence. When I talk to them during sex, I can almost hear their ‘she murmured.’ They live in chapters. Quotation marks precede every word they say. Als het erop aan komt—that’s Dutch, it means ‘at the end of the day’—writers like you are stuck in their make-believe. You’re permanent narrators. It’s life that matters. The work only comes after. The two don’t mix. Ever.”

Great works impoverish us and must always impoverish us. They rid us of the superfluous. After reading them, we inevitably emerge emptied: enriched, but enriched through subtraction.

we were tormented, like all writers no doubt, by the idea of finding nothing and leaving nothing,

I’ve reached the terminal stage of immigration: I no longer simply believe in the possibility of return, I am convinced of its imminence and persuaded that I can regain the time spent far from my loved ones. That tragic hope is as life-sustaining as it is lethal: I pretend to believe that I’ll go home soon, that everything there will be unchanged and that I can make up for it.

Exiles are obsessed with geographical separation, with physical distance. Yet it’s time that forms the core of their solitude; and they cast blame at the miles when it’s the days killing them.

African writers are aware of all that. We’re human beings, not political heroes or ideologists. Every writer should be able to freely write what they want, wherever they are, whatever their origin or skin color. The only thing that should be demanded from writers, whether they’re African or Inuit, is talent. Everything else is tyranny. Bullshit.”

nothing makes a man sadder than his memories, even when they’re happy.”

Being a great writer is perhaps nothing more than the art of knowing how to conceal one’s plagiarisms and references

The dire aspiration of the essential book is to encompass infinity; its desire, to have the last word in the long discourse of which it is the most recent phrase. But there is no last word. Or if there is, it doesn’t belong to the book, since it doesn’t belong to Man.

We always find ourselves, in a story—but perhaps, more broadly, at every moment of our existence—between voices and places, between the present, past, and future. Our greatest truth is more than the simple sum of those voices, times, places: our greatest truth is what runs ceaselessly and tirelessly between them, in a dual movement of back-and-forth, recognition and loss, dizziness and assurance.

Each of us has to find our question. Why? To obtain an answer that will unveil the meaning of our lives? No: the meaning of life is only unveiled at the end. You don’t look for your question to find the meaning of your life. You look for it so you can confront the silence of a pure and uncompromising question. A question for which there can be no response. A question whose only goal is to remind the person asking it how profoundly enigmatic their life is. Every being must look for their question in order to brush against, if only briefly, the dense mystery at the core of their destiny—which will never be explained to them and yet occupy a fundamental place in their lives.

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 won’t be here to see the day when they leave for good and we turn back into what we were. Maybe even you two, as young as you are, will already be long dead, and that day still won’t have come. Maybe that day will never come and it’s impossible to go backward in time to turn back into what we were. After all, man can’t go against the current of history the way some fish go against the river current; he can only descend toward the great delta, the very tip of his destiny, before flinging himself into the great sea.

Words can’t go against the current of time to prevent their own birth

I’m fascinated by people’s final moments. Only then can we assess, have a worthwhile regret, make a sincere confession, only then can we take a truthful look at ourselves. The moment our lives slip away is when they belong to us.

Can you hold a child responsible for a past he’s never known? Is he the inevitable heir to the events that preceded him? Can he be blamed for the mistakes of his forebears? Blamed for being the living trace of who his ancestors were, the custodian of what they did?

Some profound part of what my brother once was had settled inside of Elimane like silt on the bottom of a lake, the lake of blood. Elimane, even if he contested it, even if he took different paths, would continue his father’s history. He could even hate him later, consider him to be the most despicable man there was: that still wouldn’t take away the part of Assane inside of him, a part that’s not only physical but also mythological—a part of the void from which every man emerges.

We forget that children have their own melancholy to carry, and for better or worse, they may feel it more intensely, for at that stage of life, nothing is felt halfway: the world comes rushing inside us with all its force and through every portal of our still-tender souls. It wreaks its havoc without regard for our age, before retreating just as violently. Then comes the time during which we learn to understand, to flee, to shut down, to pretend, to trick, to heal more quickly. Or to die. Still, time remains the perennial teacher. But it takes time to learn from time.

“He’s unhappier because he sees in his memory that there is beauty in the world. But he doesn’t know that what he remembers no longer exists because the world changes. Every day has its own beauty. But the main reason the blind man who has seen is unhappy is because his memory keeps him from imagining. He dedicates so much energy to not forgetting that he forgets that he can reinvent what he’s seen, and invent what he will never see again. And a man without imagination, blind or not, is always unhappy.

Fear of the past doesn’t carry anything but the weight of its own anxiety. And even remorse or repentance aren’t enough to alter the irrevocable nature of the past; quite the contrary: they are the very confirmation of its eternalness. You don’t only regret what was; you also regret, even more so, what will forever be.

He said that nothing was worse than a book that explained itself, that warned the reader, that gave hints on how it should be understood, or absolved for being what it was.

What pained him was that he wasn’t seen as a writer, but as a media phenomenon, as an exceptional Negro, as an ideological battlefield. In the press, hardly anyone talked about the text itself, his writing, his creation.”

I understood: just because you’re wounded doesn’t mean you have to write about it. It doesn’t even mean you have to consider writing about it. I won’t bother bringing up ability. Time heals? Wrong; it kills. It kills the illusion that our wounds are unique. They’re not. No wound is unique. Nothing human is unique. Everything becomes terribly banal over time. There’s the conundrum; but somewhere in there, literature has a chance to emerge.

By then I was really spooked, and I understood why my laughter had turned to crying a few minutes earlier: my body innately knew that it had no desire to laugh, and that its dominant feeling in that moment was an archaic fear, the sort you feel while waiting for an imminent and unavoidable catastrophe or for the horror to appear. It was the fear of a child convinced, despite their parents’ words of reassurance and their verifications, that the monster is under the bed and will inevitably come out; the fear of the investigator who knows that beneath the next shovelful lies the first corpse of an enormous mass grave.

I understood why my laughter had turned to crying a few minutes earlier: my body innately knew that it had no desire to laugh, and that its dominant feeling in that moment was an archaic fear, the sort you feel while waiting for an imminent and unavoidable catastrophe or for the horror to appear. It was the fear of a child convinced, despite their parents’ words of reassurance and their verifications, that the monster is under the bed and will inevitably come out; the fear of the investigator who knows that beneath the next shovelful lies the first corpse of an enormous mass grave.

Nothing is more terrifying than the interference of strange phenomena in your reality, while you’re in a rational state, that you then have to make sense of without the crutches of irreality and insanity, those easy resorts that not only spare us from looking at reality’s every face, even the most hideous, but have yet to accept the idea that reality has many faces.

I don’t care about reality. Compared to the truth, it’s always lacking.

nothing remains unchanged. Would we even want it to? Fidelity to a self that has ossified over time is not simply an illusion; it also strikes me as a blind spot laughed at by life: life, its unpredictable current, its uncertainties, its circumstances that, at times, destroy the values and principles we believed (claimed) to be immutable.

The child that once was will always look cruelly or with disappointment at what they’ve become as an adult, even if they’ve achieved their dream. That doesn’t mean that adulthood is by nature cursed or rigged. Simply, nothing ever lives up to a childhood ideal or dream experienced in all its guileless intensity. Becoming an adult is always a betrayal of our most tender years. But therein lies all the beauty of childhood: it exists to be betrayed, and that betrayal is the birth of nostalgia, the only sentiment that allows us, one day perhaps, at the other end of life, to rediscover the pureness of youth.

My every sense recognizes you, but recognition isn’t enough: you still need to prove it. I want to prove it to you again, even if you believed me.

The loud clock coughed out ten p.m. from its ravaged lungs.

The suffering was no longer content to ravage Chérif’s flesh: it wanted to escape him, as if from an oppressive prison. My friend’s body had become too cramped for those screams, whose only wish was to grow, spread, explode, and strike everything within reach.

Until recently, I wrote using loud, sonorous words, so they would cover the horrified clamor of my memory, and so I wouldn’t hear anything more.

My father said to me: “Don’t worry, he doesn’t know what he’s saying.” Boom went my little kid brain. If this man, who was crazy, but only because he so clearly saw the horror, didn’t know what he was saying, who on earth knew what he was saying?

Thus it ends for every diviner: nostalgic for the days ahead. Thus it ends for the seer: melancholic for the future.

It might be that every writer, in the end, only contains a single essential book, a work that demands to be written, between two voids.