Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637

The awe of literature faced in The most secret memory of men

Ludmilla Feres Faria
Psychoanalyst
Member of the Brazilian School of Psychoanalysis (EBP)
and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP)
O endereço de e-mail address está sendo protegido de spambots. Você precisa ativar o JavaScript enabled para vê-lo.

At 31, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is the first writer from Sub-Saharan Africa to receive the most important literary award of the French language, the Goncourt Prize, for his book The Most Secret Memory of Men.

Born in 1990, the son of a doctor from Diourbel, in central Senegal, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr proved to be an excellent student and avid reader from a young age. According to him, when continuing his studies he considered, among other careers, being a doctor, football player, soldier and teacher, until writing became necessary. Having attended the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, a period which he dedicated to investigating Léopold Sedar Senghor, the great voice of African literature and defender of blackness, he ended up abandoning his thesis to delve into writing fiction. He confided to TV 5 Monde, on the occasion of his award: “Fiction won! Literature is a point of view on the world. There is no difference between life and literature.”

The most secret memory of men, his fourth book, is inspired by the cursed fate of the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, the first black person to win the French Renaudot prize, in 1968, at the age of 28, for the novel Le devoir de violence, translated into English as Bound to violence. Six years later, at the height of his fame, Ouologuem was accused of plagiarism and, despite his defense arguments, ended up being abandoned by his French publisher, who withdrew his books from circulation. He then took refuge in his home country, where he lived as a hermit until he died in oblivion in 2017.

When asked about his choice, Sarr states the fascination that this writer, attacked by both the Africans and the French, aroused in him: “Why did he remain silent, when he still had so much to say?” He adds that “coming across someone so silent always calls into question the meaning – the necessity – of our own words, which we suddenly question whether they are not a dull chatter, dregs of language.” In terms of psychoanalysis, we also find that speech is a mode of jouissance, a jouissance of the blah-blah, and that the work of an analysis aims to wipe out this proliferation, thus reducing meaning to locate in each case the “it” around which the words gravitate: the real.

Sarr himself reiterates in one of his interviews the statement that “the act of writing is not an operation of transcribing reality as it can be presented to the common citizen; it is more about sublimating it, to make it a unique, insurmountable and idiosyncratic literary material.” That's why, for him, the choice of the topic is less important than the way it is approached. When taking this reasoning to the extreme, he advises: “Never again fall into the trap of wanting to say what a book that you think is great is about... the truth is that only a mediocre, bad or banal book talks about something”. For him, the only question that matters is, “What is writing?”

If the question that permeates The Most Secret Memory of Men is that literature presents itself as an ideal to be achieved based on each person's style, Sarr does so in the tension between the confinement of the word and the communicable, between politics and aesthetics and, also, questioning the notion of commitment surreptitiously attached to the African writer as a knot from which he finds it difficult to free himself.

In the book, he investigates the intimate story of two characters, the African writers, Diégane Latyr Faye, a contemporary in search of himself, and who resembles the author; and the mysterious T.C. Elimane, who had his hour of glory in 1938, after publishing his book The Labyrinth of the Inhuman, only to be accused of plagiarism and fall into rapid decline. The story takes place in Senegal and Buenos Aires, but also in Amsterdam and Paris, places where Diégane is looking for T.C. Elimane and the reasons why he disappeared.

Sarr's great merit is to make this search a sublime, labyrinthine work, permeated with layers, in which the narrator crosses paths not only with fictional characters, such as young African writers, but also invokes literary figures as Ernesto Sabato and Jorge Luís Borges to investigate literature itself, although he states through the narrator that “seeking literature is always chasing an illusion”.

It is from this tension between the new and what is inherited, experienced by Diégane Faye, that Sarr can ask about the originality of the contemporary creator, always led to question his predecessors, but also always consenting to make them exist in his work , consciously or not. For him, literature is always, in some way, trace, memory, quote, mirror. Hence his statement that, to be a great writer, one must have the “genius of collage”.

His book is also a testimony to the way in which he manages to position himself in the face of the effects, in writing and literature, of the complex relationship between Africa and Europe, “It is an asymmetrical relationship insofar as there is the idea that those that are dominated do not deserve to be read or known.” In the interview entitled “The passion of the possible”, published in the Brazilian magazine Quatro Cinco Um, he uses the example of the French language to discuss how he “dealt with” this tragic legacy of colonization. He warns us that this “thorn in the flesh of the colonized” cannot be suppressed, but neither does it need to continue to exercise the same violence: “The French language could become one among the others [...] we must learn to live with it".

This statement leads us to the idea of trauma, so dear to psychoanalysis since its beginnings – trauma as what leaves a trace and consequently imposes a mark on the subjective history of each parlêtre. It is the impact of this indelible mark, of the encounter between word and body, that makes it impossible to unify subjects into the same class: “all colonized”. This is precisely what Christianity, for example, seeks, as Miller warns us in Extimidad. The commandment to “love your neighbor” is a way of nullifying this singular trait, this inassimilable jouissance, and establishing the common, the conformity. There lies the origin of racism, this hatred that is directed precisely towards the most unique in each one, this jouissance that founds alterity. According to Miller (2010, p. 201), “true intolerance is intolerance to the jouissance of the Other”.

The path that this brilliant writer chooses is not that of racism; he will be neither the savior among his compatriots nor the colonized exemplar in the white world. To deal with the inassimilable remains of what echoes within him, he chooses a third way: giving himself entirely to literature. As one of his characters states, “I will write as someone who betrays his country, that is, as someone who chooses as his territory not his native country, but the fatal country, the homeland to which our profound life has always destined us, the inner homeland, that of warm memories and icy darkness, the homeland of the first dreams, the homeland of fears and shame that distills down the sides of the soul [...] the only homeland that I would consider habitable. [...] what country is this? You know it: it is the homeland of books, it is obvious [...] I will be a citizen of this kingdom, the kingdom of the library”.

The Most Secret Memory of Men also tells the story of families, of twins and their love for the same woman, of madness, of blindness, of social upheavals. Sensually free young people parade through its pages in search of love, but also wars; those who never left the place and those who are always ready to leave. Along the way, the author is led to question the extent to which writing can be compared to social suffering. And he himself admits that this is the balance, which permeates every novel; this faith that literature can do everything, but at the same time it cannot do much; or, in his words: “literature does not exist to provide answers”.

He warns those who seek ease in writing, “Writing always requires something else, something else”. It is necessary to twist words, make them an instrument at the service of literature, or it will remain in the domain of the incommunicable and the unspeakable. For the protagonist of this novel, literature emerged in the form of a woman of ravishing beauty, who put him on his knees, begging, “Spend one night with me, one single, miserable night. She disappeared without a word. I darted after her [...] I'm going to catch you, I'm going to sit you on my knees, I'm going to force you to look me in the eyes, I'm going to be a writer!”

From the first pages of The Most Secret Memory of Men, Sarr highlights how writing imposed itself on him as an inevitable necessity, “A labyrinth in which work and writer walk together, on a long and circular route, whose destination is confused with its origin: solitude". We can translate what he calls solitude into the One-all-alone: writing becomes, for Sarr, the response to this trait that is rebellious to meaning, which iterates, more and more. And faced with it, he states, every person haunted by literature hesitates: “to write, not to write”. The most secret memory of men can also be read as Sarr's way of responding to this awe.

References

Eichenberg, F. A Paixão do Possível. Quatro Cinco Um, nov. 2023. Available at: https://www.quatrocincoum.com.br/br/resenhas/literatura-negra/a-paixao-do-possivel#:~: text=A%20paix%C3%A3o%20do%20poss%C3%ADvel%20%C3%A9,como%20um%20sentido%20do%20poss%C3%ADvel.  Access on Feb. 26, 2024.

MILLER, J.-A. Extimidad: Los cursos psicoanalíticos de Jacques-Alain Miller. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2010.

Sarr, M. M. A mais recôndita memória dos homens. São Paulo: Fósforo, 2023.

English version by Ana Helena Souza.