Africa, Europe and the third continent

21.02.2317.10.21 from Kai Nonnenmacher

This article is written in German. Automatic translations:

Et quel livre! Le chef-d'œuvre d'un young nègre d'Afrique! You're in France! En naquit une de ces querelles littéraires dont ce pays seul a le secret et le goût. Le Labyrinthe de l'inhumain compta autant de soutiens que de détracteurs. Mais alors que la rumeur promettait à l'auteur et à son livre de prestigieux prix, a tenébreuse affaire littéraire brisa leur envol. L'œuvre fut vouée aux gemonies ; Quant au young author, il disparut de la scène littéraire. ¹
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secret mémoire des hommes

And what a book! A masterpiece by a young Black African! Nothing like it had ever been seen in France before! This led to one of those literary debates whose mystery and flavor can only be found in that country. The Labyrinth of the Inhuman It had as many supporters as critics. But while rumors promised the author and his book prestigious prizes, a turbulent literary affair brought both of their meteoric rises to an abrupt end. The work fell into oblivion, and the young author disappeared from the literary scene.

the novel La plus secret mémoire des hommes In 2021, he made the shortlists for several important literary prizes: the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Médicis, the Prix Renaudot, and the Prix Femina. The Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (MMS), born in 1990, presents another building block of his political literature with his fifth book, alongside themes from previous works such as migration to Sicily (Silence du chœur), Homosexuality in Senegal (De purs hommes), Jihadism in the Sahel (Terre ceinteNow, literature itself comes into focus. When asked by Frédérique Roussel whether one should stay in Africa or go to Europe, MMS called literature the third continent, explaining that this was his attempt, because: "I believe there is no more brutal way to tackle problems than trying to overcome them through writing." ² The publishing cooperation of Philippe Rey Founded in Paris and Senegal by the publishing house Jimsaan, established by the writers Boubacar Boris Diop and Felwine Sarr, this is also a statement against the literary prize lists that otherwise focus on the large publishing houses of France.

Even the motto from Roberto Bolaño's novel about the literary scene The Wild Detectives, which chooses MMS (and from which the title of his own novel is taken), makes a great claim to a work that outlasts authors, readers and planet:

For a time, criticism accompanies the work before it vanishes and the readers become its companions. The journey can be very long or very short. Then the readers die one by one, and the work continues its solitary journey, although new reviews and new readers continually join it. Then criticism dies once more, the readers die, and on this road, gradually covered with bones, the work continues its journey into solitude. To approach it, to swim in its wake, means certain death, and yet tirelessly other reviews and other readers approach, all of them swallowed up by time and speed. In the end, the work travels in absolute solitude through the infinite expanse. And one day it dies, as all things die, as the sun fades, the earth, the solar system, and the galaxies, and yet more. the most hidden parts of human memoryWhat begins as a comedy ends as a tragedy.] ³
Roberto Bolaño, The Wild Detectives

Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano aim to reinvent literature in Bolaño's work. Their Mexican conception of "visceral realism" expresses the hope for democratization in Central and South America during the 70s. MMS dedicates the novel to the Malian Yambo Ouologuem, who won the Prix Renaudot in 1968. Le Devoir de violence received, and MMS' protagonist TC Elimane experiences something similar (albeit still in the colonial era) with Le Labyrinthe de l'inhumain (1938), both disappear, wounded, from the literary scene, and the book is withdrawn from the market. The rediscovery of these books by the young generation of African authors accompanies their own awakening. As with Bolaño, research, particularly by the writer-protagonist Diégane Latyr Faye, follows, focusing on witnesses and archives. Frédérique Roussel described the novel as "a fascinating and unsettling investigation through a mosaic of testimonies, stories, and writings, but also as a coming-of-age novel." ⁴

The situation in this internat military perdu en brousse limitait mes recherches. Je les arrêtai and me résignai à cette vérité simple et cruelle: Elimane avail été effacé de la mémoire littéraire, mais aussi, semblait-il, de toutes les mémoires humanes, y compris celles de ses compatriotes (mais il est bien connu que ce sont les compatriotes qui vous oublient toujours les premiers). Le Labyrinthe de l'inhumain Appartenait à l'autre histoire de la littérature (which est peut-être la vraie histoire de la littérature): celle des livres perdus dans un couloir du temps, pas même maudits, mais simplement oubliés, et dont les cadavres, les ossements, les solitudes jonchent le Sol de prisons without geôliers, balisent d'infinies et silencieuses pistes gelées.
MMS, La plus secret mémoire des hommes

My situation in this military boarding school in the bush limited my research. I broke off my investigations and came to terms with this simple and cruel truth: Elimane had not only been erased from literary memory, but also from the memory of all people, including his countrymen (but as is well known, it is always the countrymen who forget you first). The Labyrinth of the Inhuman It belongs to the other history of literature (which is perhaps the true history of literature): that of books lost in a corridor of time, not even cursed, but simply forgotten, and whose corpses, bones, and solitaries litter the floor of prisons without jailers, leaving endless and silent frozen traces.

Here the novel becomes freer and more episodic, but also animistic, mythical and surreal, for example when the return to a rural-traditional Africa is imagined. ⁵ The novel then shifts its focus away from this continent and examines the consequences of the First World War, for example, Elimane's father as a French soldier, later an emigrant in South America. The novel ends in 2018 with student demonstrations in Senegal, where yet another author withdraws from literary life, this time in Africa itself. La plus secret mémoire des hommes "It is a world book that takes us to Paris, Dakar, Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, where we traverse the apocalypses of the 20th century as we encounter Borges, Sábato and Gombrowicz," praised Youness Bousenna. ⁶ MMS makes the detective-like and simultaneously the palimpsest-like aspects of his meta-novel explicit, and he chooses Borges's work for this purpose. Pierre Ménard, author of the Quixote, the story, which was written in 1939, one year after Le Labyrinthe de l'inhumain appeared:

J'ai alors ouvert mon ordinateur et commencé à saisir Le Labyrinthe de l'inhumain. I'm on the slopes, like a dog, a detective, and a blind. The filature de scribe se déroula au cœur moléculaire de la phrase d'Elimane. Je n'ai pas recopié ce texts. Je l'ai écrit ; j'en suis l'auteur, comme le Pierre Ménard de Borges fut l'auteur you Quixote. Quatre hours plus tard j'avais terminé. I sent the file by mail to Musimbwa with the words: “for the route”. Il répondit aussitôt: « T'es timbre, mec, mais merci. »
MMS, La plus secret mémoire des hommes

Then I opened my computer and started typing The Labyrinth of the InhumanI followed the words like a bloodhound, a detective, a jealous person. My literary investigation took place in the molecular heart of Elimane's sentence. I did not copy this text. I wrote to himI am the author, just as Borges' Pierre Ménard is the author of Quijote Four hours later I was finished. I emailed the file to Musimbwa with the words: "for on the go." He replied immediately: "You're crazy, man, but thank you."

Structurally, MMS follows the labyrinthine nature of Elimane, as Camille Laurens shows: “Like the book that is the object of the search, it presents itself as a vast labyrinth, but a labyrinth of the human—genealogical, political, aesthetic—in which the author, without taking us by the hand, never loses us. In this Borgesian construction, which has something of a police investigation about it, stories and testimonies are interwoven and intertwined so that the narrator and the reader together can identify Elimane’s mind a little better, through conjectures that are soon refuted and through floating interpretations. The women who loved him, the friends who knew him, he and his close friends, his writings themselves paint an ambiguous, fragmentary portrait of him, composed of successive ‘biographers.’” ⁷

MMS's labyrinth consists of various text types: narrative, work diary, press clippings, interviews, quotations. Pierre Benetti, however, wonders whether the sheer abundance of MMS's book isn't rather clumsy, because all the episodes, characters, paces, and stylistic shifts seem endless: "This can be described as clumsiness; but it can also signify a unique, novelistic energy that isn't afraid of anything, even if it confuses or leaves us speechless." ⁸

MMS is looking for the next step after Yambo Ouologuem (1968) and T.C. Elimane (1938), not just to put colonialism on trial again, but to emphasize the ambiguity between Africa and the West. It is also a challenge, he said in an interview with LibérationTo take up this legacy as a writer. To consider history in order to invent something different, beyond conventional categories. ⁹ Incidentally, it is exclusively women who reconstruct Elimane's life through their stories. The erotic dimension of the novel has received relatively little attention so far, but in conversation with Frédéric Roussel ¹⁰ Mohamed Mbougar Sarr confirms:

La vie érotique n'est jamais purement gratuite. This is not a world closed or part. This is a porte d'entrée existential comme une other. J'ai appris de mon ami et mentor l'écrivain togolais Sami Tchak, que la sexualité est toujours un point de sens. C'est pour this raison qu'autant le narrateur qu'Elimane ont une vie érotique qui dit quelque chose d'eux. Pour Diégane en effet, this is a type of oscillation between the cérébralité and a desir qui est là, mais qui n'arrive pas toujours à s'exprimer clairement.
Libération

Erotic life is never mere pleasure. It is not a closed or separate world. It is an existential gateway like any other. From my friend and mentor, the Togolese writer Sami Tchak, I learned that sexuality always carries meaning. For this reason, both the narrator and Elimane have erotic lives that reveal something about them. For Diégane, it is indeed a kind of oscillation between cerebrality and a desire that, while present, is not always able to express itself clearly.

Addendum

5 November 2021

The book received the Prix Goncourt on November 3, 2021. Euphoric sentences like the following sound remarkably similar to the excerpt from Mbougar Sarr's book itself quoted above ("Eh quel livre!"): "These more than 450 pages are on their way to the pantheon of literature, as they have already been nominated for the Médicis, the Femina, and the Renaudot!" ¹¹ – A list in Nouvel Observateur Of the 10 things you should know about the author, his consistent, reflective attitude towards the public is documented:2. ComposedWhere the journalist expects a very young writer overjoyed to be recognized, he encounters a wise old man of 31 with a discreet smile and carefully chosen words: 'You have to take things as they come, with joy, but with clarity. What we call success is very relative. I am inspired by the Stoics: only do what depends on us. And I can only trade with my writing.' ¹²

But even though Didier Decoin was quoted in the media as saying, "We've opened the windows, I have nothing against Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but it's good to look elsewhere. And then, in 2021, to dare to write a book whose subject is literature, what audacity!" ¹³ However, Arnaud Gonzague's warning to us readers still applies: in the case of... La plus secret mémoire des hommes, the first Prix Goncourt for a sub-Saharan author, not to speak too hastily of an “African novel”, as it so clearly inscribes itself into the labyrinthine modernity of the literature of Borges, Bolaño and Gombrowicz. ¹⁴ Let us understand this as a plea for the “Third Continent”, which, in the sense of Mbougar Sarr, transcends the contrast with Europe. vs. points beyond Africa.

Reference / Citation suggestion

Nonnenmacher, Kai. "Africa, Europe and the Third Continent." Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature. 2021. Accessed on May 9, 2026 at 20:27. https://rentree.de/2021/10/17/africa-europa-und-der-dritte-continent/.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Kai Nonnenmacher

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg | Contact

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Notes

Italicized in the book.>>>
“Je pense qu'il n'y a pas de façon plus brutale de s'attaquer aux problèmes que d'essayer de les dépasser par l'écriture.” MMS in Frédérique Roussel, “Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and “le three continent””, Libération, August 27, 2021.>>>
Bold: KN The last sentence, which is so important in Bolaño's book, is missing from MMS, however.>>>
Frédérique Roussel, “Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and “le three continent””, Libération, August 27, 2021.>>>
“Ce return to a African rurale, impregnée de forces surnaturelles, prize entre le désir d'assimilation au modèle colonial et la résistance du mode de vie traditionnel, se déroule comme une vision, troublante de vérité.” Isabelle Rüf, “Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, l'écriture face au réel”, Time, October 16, 2021.>>>
Youness Bousenna, “Une quête labyrinthique et magique autour d'un livre mystérieux, où affluent les signs du destin.” Télérama, August 18, 2021.>>>
"A l'instar du livre object de la quête, il se presente comme un vaste labyrinthe, mais un labyrinthe de l'humain - généalogique, politique, esthétique - où l'auteur, sans nous tenir par la main, nous perd pourtant jamais. Dans this construction borgésienne qui a quelque chose d'une enquête police, récits et témoignages se tissent et s'enchevêtrent, laissant the narrateur et le lecteur cerner ensemble un peu mieux, au fil de conjectures bientôt démenties et d'interpretations flottantes, le fantôme d'Elimane qui l'ont aimé, les friends qui l'ont connu, lui et ses proches, ses écrits euxmêmes dressent de lui un portrait ambigu, parcellaire, composé de « biographèmes » successifs.” Camille Laurens, “L'Or du monde”, Le monde du livre, August 27, 2021, 10 >>>
“Autant dire que Mohamed Mbougar Sarr semble souvent avoir voulu tout (trop ?) mettre dans son livre. La plus secret mémoire des hommes déborde, excède, insiste, traîne, accélère puis ralentit, multiplie les arrivées de personnages hauts en couleur (le portrait de la petite bande d'écrivains Afro-Parisiens est réjouissante, plus que celui du colonel Nazi esthète), tout en répétant les mêmes structures narratives enchâssées (le narrateur nous raconte ce qu'un personnage lui a rapporté de ce qu'un autre encore lui avait raconté, etc.), nous mène dans des lieux et des époques pour les abandonner aussitôt, fait dans l'emphase et soudain dans la sobriété. Cela peut s'appeler maladresse ; but it also signifies a Romanesque singulière energy, which has nothing to do with the eyes, quitte à nous dérouter or à nous laisser pantois. “Pierre Benetti, “En remontant le cours des œuvres”, Waiting for Nadeau, August 25, 2021.>>>
See MMS at the end of the interview in Frédéric Roussel, “Mohamed Mbougar Sarr et “le troisième continent””, Libération, August 27, 2021.>>>
MMS in Frédéric Roussel, “Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and “le troisième continent””, Libération, August 27, 2021.>>>
“Ces plus de 450 pages entrent au panthéon de la littérature, après avoir déjà été retenues notamment dans les lists du Médicis, du Femina ou encore du Renaudot !” Éric Chaverou, “Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, prix Goncourt 2021 pour La plus secret mémoire des hommes" Radio France CultureNovember 3, 2021.>>>
"2. Sang-froid. Là où the journaliste s'attend à rencontrer un tout jeune écrivain, surexcité d'avoir été reconnu, il tombe sur un vieux sage de 31 ans, sourire discret, phrasé choisi: « Il faut accueillir les choses comme elles viennent, avec joie mais lucidity. Ce qu'on appeale le succès is très relative. Je m'inspire des stoïciens: n'agir que sur ce qui dépend de nous. Et moi, je ne peux agir que sur l'écriture. »” Arnaud Gonzague, “10 choices à savoir sur Mohamed Mbougar Sarr”, Nouvel ObservateurNovember 3, 2021.>>>
"On a ouvert les fenêtres, je n'ai rien contre Saint-Germain-des-Prés, mais c'est bon d'aller voir ailleurs. Et puis, oser, en 2021, écrire un livre dont le sujet est la littérature, quelle audace !" Marianne Payot, “Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Goncourt 2021 : in the coulisses d'une après-midi chargée”, The ExpressNovember 4, 2021.>>>
"6. Labyrinths. Qu'on n'attende pas avec « la Plus Secret Mémoire des hommes » un « Roman African » : Mbougar Sarr s'inscrit plutôt dans la lignée des grands bâtisseurs de labyrinthes narratifs, like Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño or Witold Gombrowicz. L'intrigue repose ainsi sur une succession de récits enchâssés […].” Arnaud Gonzague, “10 choices à savoir sur Mohamed Mbougar Sarr”, Nouvel ObservateurNovember 3, 2021.>>>

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Pierre Adrian's "Le rêve inachevé de Jack Kerouac" (2026) reconstructs and reshapes Jack Kerouac's failed Brittany trip (1965) into a dual model of movement encompassing literary pilgrimage and self-discovery: Starting from Kerouac's genealogical obsession – the return to a Breton origin that proves unattainable – Adrian constructs an associatively structured, intertextually dense travel narrative that imagines Brest as a melancholic space of resonance between American Beat aesthetics and Breton culture; the "unfinished" Satori serves as a leitmotif of a poetics of failure, in which the missed enlightenment becomes productive. The essay demonstrates that Adrian's text is less a documentary reconstruction than a continuation of Kerouac's "Satori à Paris": While Kerouac's spontaneous prose records an immediate, disoriented experience, Adrian's writing appears as a reflective, centripetal approach that semantically charges the historical failure and transforms it into an elegiac narrative. Thus, the structural parallel between genealogical quest and existential uprooting is explored, and Brest is read as a topos of a "waiting possibility." The interpretation pursues the thesis that identity here is not genealogically but literarily constructed ("terre sans aïeux"). A certain tendency toward mythologizing, however, remains discernible: The interpretation affirms Adrian's reading, which, admittedly, accentuates the ruptures and ironies in Kerouac's work in favor of a coherent symbolic representation of failure. Overall, the interpretation of Adrian's transformation of a biographical failure into a literary myth shows and makes plausible that Adrian is less explaining Kerouac than productively continuing his unfinished nature.
Mesopotamia between archaic mythology, imperial present and postcolonial guilt: Olivier Guez
Olivier Guez's "Mesopotamia" (Grasset, 2024, German translation "Die Welt in ihren Händen," Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026) reconstructs, in the form of historiographical fiction, the life of the British archaeologist and colonial official Gertrude Bell as a nexus of two intertwined narratives: the emancipation story of an extraordinary woman and the violent genesis of modern Iraq in the context of British imperialism after the First World War. The novel traces Bell's path from the scientific exploration of Mesopotamia to her pivotal role in the political reorganization of the region, weaving historical figures such as T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and Faisal I into a dense web of diplomacy, mythology, and power politics. Central to this is the poetic construction of Mesopotamia as a palimpsest in which archaic civilizations (Sumer, Babylon) and modern colonial interests overlap. This deep layering functions simultaneously as an ideological matrix of imperial legitimacy and as an ironic refraction of its hubris. The interpretation highlights that Guez's actual argument lies in the structural analogy between archaeology and colonial rule: both operate as forms of epistemic appropriation that translate knowledge into power and thus produce political orders whose fragility becomes evident in the postcolonial epilogue—from the fall of the monarchy to the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. The cyclical temporal structure and the mythical overcoding are interpreted as narrative strategies that make the British project appear as merely an episode in a longue durée of imperial repetitions; in doing so, the tendency to read the Franco-British rivalry primarily as a mirror structure is emphasized. Overall, the review shows how Guez stages Bell as a tragic figure caught between knowledge and complicity, thereby formulating a fundamental critique of the illusion of imperial power.
Song in Chaos: Apocalypse, Nomadism and Resistance in the work of Mathieu Belezi
Mathieu Belezi's "Cantique du chaos" depicts a post-apocalyptic world that has emerged from a biblically exaggerated flood event, and whose political and existential order is characterized by violence, emptiness, and uprooting: At its center is the aging desperado Théo Gracques, who, after a failed attempt to retreat as a hermit, flees with Chloé and her children across devastated Europe and America, while his present is incessantly intertwined with the lyrically condensed memories of his lost love Léonore and the death of their child; after further losses and increasing physical decline, his journey comes to a standstill at the Orinoco, where he dies and leaves his last poem to a young woman who keeps it in remembrance. The essay interprets this narrative arc as a triply structured poetics—between road novel, epic, and lyric cycle—in which being on the move is simultaneously spatial movement, the work of remembering, and the dying process. It precisely elucidates how Belezi, through the interweaving of a mythical opening hymn, prosaic chapters of escape, and poetic diary entries, establishes a "poetics of the end": writing here appears not as a representation of the world, but as the final autonomous act in a world without alternatives. The hybrid form is interpreted as a response to the depicted catastrophe—the baroque abundance of language against the emptiness of the devastated world, the lyrical transcendence of time against the linearity of decay, the female characters as bearers of action and tradition against the exhausted male narrator. By closely linking these formal and thematic lines, the review shows the novel not only as a dystopian narrative, but as a reflection on the conditions of literature itself: The “cantique” becomes the last, precariously continuing form of meaning-making in the face of total disintegration.
All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle
Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, "Le Procès Pelicot," which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies, and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

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