1.

On cold mornings in September, Venice is still. We’re past the peak of the tourist summer, a period bookended by the film festival whose showings I was sad to have missed, and so, on this morning, as I sat by the water, the crowds that had pockmarked the city for the last few months were absent. By the pier, I could see a few cruise ships anchored at port, and people I imagined were its occupants waddling nearby. I was waiting for April, a friend with whom I had travelled to Venice. The two of us were in Venice for the Biennale, or, as we had gleefully announced to the immigration officer in Amsterdam, “in Italy to look at art.” As ever, I had packed a book to read on my trip — Mohammed Mbougar Sarr’s 2021 novel The Most Secret Memory of Men — and so, waiting for her, I took it out of my bag and began to read, the wash of the sea in front of me, and gulls floating lazily above me.

Perhaps this story begins months earlier. Over the past year, I have made several mistakes. The gravest was that, when, at the start of the year, I decided to read a series of books that were as much about the stories they were telling as about the literary process, Sarr’s was the last one on the list. I had four books. R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface was the first, a complete waste of my time, since it failed to sustain the energy of its first pages and grew increasingly cringey to read. Then, after abandoning it, I pivoted. Next came Laurent Binet’s Hhhh, which I had first read in the early months of the pandemic and which played excellently with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between fact and imagination, then Percival Everett’s Erasure, a hilarious book whose movie adaptation, American Fiction, had undersold the excellence of Everett’s prose. And now I had The Most Secret Memory of Men before me.

Then again, perhaps this was no mistake. Had I shifted the order and read Sarr’s book first, I would not have enjoyed either Binet’s or Everett’s (Yellowface was beyond rescuing so it didn’t matter when I would have read it). Things happen the way they are meant to happen. And reading is so often an accidental process. One doesn’t choose the books they love, or indeed the person they are when they encounter these books. I still remember the books that have shaken me. The first time I read Soyinka’s Ake. The first time I read Yvonne Owuor’s Dust. The afternoon I read, in one crazed sitting, McEwan’s Atonement. My first Ferrante (The Lost Daughter). The Neapolitan Series. Tram 83. Franzen’s The Corrections. The God of Small Things. Or, being ten years old and obsessing about Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy. 

The Most Secret Memory of Men begins with a paean to writing. “Of a writer and their work,” Sarr writes, “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.”

2. 

I obsess often, about lost writers. There are versions of myself that exist to undertake literary excavation, desperate to make sure their literature isn’t forgotten. There I am, writing about a generation of writers in 1960s Kampala whose careers disappeared into the ether. There I go, hunting through bookstores for books in the Heinemann African Writers Series backlist. John Munonye was a writer, and Charity Waciuma was a writer, and Peter K. Palangyo was a writer. Cameron Duodu, whose only novel was published by Andre Deutsch in 1967, and who is one of only three living participants of the famous conference in Makerere in 1962 writes an essay about John Nagenda where he remembers meeting the Ugandan novelist for the first time in Kampala that year. This conference was also the first time he met the members of the “Drum Boys” — Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, and Bloke Modisane. The Drum Boys were a group of black writers who wrote for Drum Magazine in South Africa, providing fiction and nonfiction about the black South African experience in the townships in the 1950s and 1960s. He hoped also to meet the most famous Drum Boy of all, Can Themba, but Themba was a banned man in South Africa — it was illegal to publish or reference his work, was exiled from his home, and was dead by 1967. And so, naturally, I begin to obsess about the Drum Boys, and about Themba, and I’m soon scouring the online catalogues of second bookstores to see where I can find a copy of his book.

3. 

In Venice, April and I were there to look at art. She arrived at the beach, I put down Sarr’s book, we walked to a seafront cafe to have coffee, and then walked into the Biennale. In Arsenale we were assaulted by an ocean of art. Before the Industrial revolution, this had been the site of the largest industrial complex in Europe, but now, centuries after the fall of Venice as a naval powerhouse, its abandoned shipyards and warehouses housed mountains of art. We walked through them, spending hours inside the vast halls. I made note of installations I wanted to look at later, to think through deliberately, but there never was any time to go through it all, and so I never did. Days in Venice, and all deliberate plans were gone. Instead we wandered through the city, at first, stumbling into pavilions we knew nothing about. In the Panama Pavillion we wandered through the jungle of the Darién Gap, and in the Azerbaijan Pavilion, we crested a sea of pink. Everything was pink. I don’t know what the Caspian Sea looks like, or what Azerbaijan looks like, but now I see pink everywhere whenever I think of Azerbaijan. I fell in love with a series of paintings called “Girls Prefer Oilmen.” Inspired by 20th Century American cultural icons, these paintings played on the idea that “Men Prefer Blondes.” I spent several minutes in front of one. In it, two people danced: a man and a blonde woman. I understood that the music was slow, and soft. All around them are other people, mostly couples, but there was no colour in them, no detail to their faces. I thought of Meja Mwangi’s “nameless faceless ones.” In the background there was an oil rig, and in front of it the two of them danced, the oilman and the blonde.

4. 

The first time I became aware that what I was reading was a great book was while we sat at a cafe in Arsenale. In the novel, Sarr’s protagonist, Diégane Latyr Faye who is a Senegalese novelist living in Paris, discovers a lost novel by a writer called T. C. Elimane. He has known about this novel since he was in high school, but he had given up on ever finding a copy of it until Marème Siga D., a Senegalese writer in her sixties between whose breasts Diégane wished to bury his face, gives him the book. He reads the book, goes into a frenzy, then shares the book with his compatriots. He and his friends, all of them African writers, spend hours arguing about this book, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. Diégane tries to explain to his housemate, a Polish translator called Stanislas, what the book is about. He says something vague and grandiose about evil, power, and the history of humanity. Stanislas was silent for a minute, then said, “I’m going to give you some advice: never attempt to say what a great book is about. Or, if you do, the only possible response is “nothing”[…] The truth, Diégane is that only a mediocre or bad or ordinary book is about something. A great book has no subject and isn’t about anything, it only tries to say or discover something, but that only is already everything, and that something is also already everything.”

5. 

Venice was a city of foreigners. We were everywhere. We were easy to recognize: the cameras, the languages we spoke, our accents, and by how often our phones were open on Google Maps. Some of the tourists got onto the city’s gondolas — a must-do on several bucket list guides — and I looked haughtily at them. I didn’t think taking a means of transport that was primarily for tourists was a good way of discovering a city. Joseph Brodsky, in his book on Venice agreed, dismissing the gondola, and so instead I took the water buses, sometimes having to rely on directions from Venetians who spoke little to no English, that is, until April and I discovered that the ticket machines had an English option. Looking at the city as we moved in the water on the buses was tranquil, and we saw it the way Venetians did, even though most Venetians had moved away from the islands, which had become a global mascot for overtourism.  

6.

The Most Secret Memory of Men is a book about nothing. 

7.

A few weeks before I’d started reading Sarr’s book — while I was still basking from the glow of Everett’s — I hosted a few people for dinner at my house.  We ate, played pool, someone opened a bottle of wine, then we sat down to talk about the protests that had rocked Kenya through June and July. One of my friends expressed his sadness that the protests had ended because, after hundreds of people were either killed, kidnapped, or injured by security agents, most of the protesting youth had been cowered away from returning to the streets. This is what had happened to me, I said, and I did not want to die as a protestor. 

“But that would be the best way to die,” another guest said. “Dying for what you believe in. I’d want that for myself.”

I disagreed. I said that I was a writer before anything else, and any sort of death that ended with me remembered as a “brave protestor” rather than a writer would be a betrayal of myself. 

She looked at me. She was, like me, a writer, but felt that when it came to revolutions, she believed so strongly in them that this was the way she’d want to be remembered. 

When I was writing about Ugandan literary history, I came across Robert Serumaga. Serumaga was one of the most prominent playwrights in 1960s and 1970s Kampala, but by the end of the seventies he had abandoned his plays and started a militant group to fight against Idi Amin. In 1979 he fought in the army that threw Amin from power, became minister, was removed from government, and allegedly started arming up again. He died in Nairobi in 1980, allegedly poisoned by his opponents. Was the manner of his death a betrayal of myself? Was Christopher Okigbo’s? I studied Okigbo’s poetry in college — neither my classmates nor I enjoyed Labyrinths as much as our professor did. Okigbo picked up arms during the Biafran War and fought for the Biafran Army, where he died in battle. Had he too betrayed himself? Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is a book that asks this central question: Should the poet have lived as a writer as a revolutionary?

At my house the conversation continued. Other people chimed in. One of them, a Sudanese writer who’d grown up in Khartoum, talked about the youth revolution that had occurred in her country before it was grabbed by her generals. The night went on.

8.

Venice, as a city, is a site for visual pleasure. I especially loved the stonework of its buildings: the facades, the statues, the arches. I’ve always been a fan of Gothic architecture and it was wonderful to see how long it has survived in Venice and other parts of Italy. I stayed in a hotel near The Church of San Zaccaria, and it was a joy to see it every morning as I walked to the Biennale/the water bus. Inside the church there are a series of paintings and frescoes on the walls and ceilings, and one morning I sat in the church during mass, looking up at them, the sounds of the mass vibrant around me.

9.

I only ever read one bit of the book to April. It is the section right after Diégane and his friend Musimbwa have finished reading The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, and are having an intense, passionate discussion about it. They discuss the impossible position their predecessors, older African writers, faced of having to be “African but not too African” and the box that put their writing into, criticise them for accepting to be locked in this way, but then ask each other “who were we to direct such tough, uncompromising, and categorical criticisms against the men and women without whom we wouldn’t have existed?”

Later, the two of them introduce the book to the other members of their cohort. Musimbwa reads all of it to them in three hours, and after he’s finished, “the astonishment lasted for a long minute, then the debates started with a roar. We debated with rage and with outrage. We told untruths. We uncrossed our hearts.”

Their discussion continued deep into the night, and Diégane wonders if there is something irresponsible and selfish about their talking like this about a book while “conflicts were raging, the planet was suffocating, the nobodies with nothing were starving to death, orphans were contemplating their parents’ corpses […] there was a whole ocean of shit outside, and we, African writers whose continent was swimming in it, were discussing The Labyrinth of Inhumanity instead of doing a single damn thing to rescue it.”

But Musimbwa, when Diégane tells him about his shame at this, “But if writers don’t talk about literature, by which I mean if they don’t talk about it with every fiber of their being, as practitioners, as lovers, as raving lunatics, as if they’re haunted and possessed, if those writers for whom literature is the be-all and end-all, even if the be-all and end-all sometimes disguises itself as an anecdote or as futility, don’t, then who will? It might be an unbearable, obnoxious, and elitist motion, but we have to accept it. This is our life: we attempt to create literature, yes, but we also talk about it, because talking about it keeps it alive, and as long as it’s alive, our lives, even if they’re pointless, even if they’re tragically comical and insignificant, won’t be completely wasted. We have to behave as if literature were the most important thing on earth; it just might happen, rarely, but even so, that someday it will be and someone will have to bear witness. We’re those witnesses, Faye.”

10.

At the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, I saw work by old European masters which I’d never seen before: Picasso, Dali, Max Ernst and Joan Miró. I stood transfixed in front of Dali’s Birth of Liquid Desires and Miro’s Peinture. The latter, in particular, called to me. In it, I could see someone — a hero of some kind — about to embark on a journey. I saw too, the dangers our hero would face, and in the red, the fact that in these dangers he would die. I was filled with fear as I stood in front of the painting. I wanted to hold the hero in my arms, and tell him not to go on his journey, even though I understood that his was an inevitable death.

11.

T. C. Elimane is based on Yambo Ouologuem. The Labyrinth of Inhumanity is Ouloguem’s Bound to Violence. I don’t know how much of my admiration of Sarr’s book is in the book-in-itself, the noumenon, and how much is because of how quick I am to fall in love with the work of excavating lost literary figures.  Ouologuem’s career ended on the back of accusations of plagiarism, and he went back to Mali, where he never published another book, became a marabout, apparently refused to speak French, and tried to prevent his children from going to school. Such was the bitterness of the affair, that his was a complete break with the very idea of literature.

Depending on where one stands, Ouologuem either plagiarised other people’s work or tried to create a collage — démarquages — like Picasso had done with his visual work. In Sarr’s rewriting, Elimane is angry at people who misread what he was doing. To Elimane, the gravest sin a person can make is to read literature wrongly, and those who had either reduced what he did to an act of plagiarism, or reduced him to an “African writer”, no matter how gifted they thought him, were guilty of this sin. I don’t know how much of Ouologuem is Elimane, and how much is Sarr.  

I wonder how Oulogouem would be viewed in France now if his book had been published in the present-day, or if he had put the sentences he had borrowed from other writers in quotation marks. 

12.

In Rome, while on a bus near the Piazza Venezia, the giant winged horses of the Vittoriano resplendent in the afternoon sky, April and I talked about her artistic career. When younger she’d do commissions for her relatives and friends, particularly an uncle and aunt who were continuously willing to pay her for work. Then, while in her thirties, she decided to become a full-time artist. The shift from a full-time job to an unstable career was difficult, but then she got representation from a gallery, and her work began to sell. At first, each painting had sold for relatively cheap — just under $2000 dollars — but then the prices had accelerated and now, most of her work was much too expensive for her family and friends to buy. “This is what I want,” she said, “for my work to pay enough for me to have a nice life,” but she was unhappy at how she had become inaccessible to the people she cared about. And she wanted to be a successful artist, but the more success she garnered the harder it got for people like her uncle and aunt to buy her work.

13.

Part of the allure of The Most Secret Memory of Men is that, very early on, Sarr promises its reader that what they are reading is going to be a great book. He also, through Diégane, pokes fun at prizes like Prix Goncourt, and criticises the ways in which these prizes reduce writers to their identities. So, perhaps it was inevitable that he’d win the Goncourt, and that he would be described as the the first Sub-Saharan winner of the prize, a term which achieved the double swoop of being born of a racist idea, and of being the sort of lazy reduction that Elimane had described as an act of incorrect reading. Sarr, in an interview, took this in good humour, saying, “Does it mean that they have a better sense of humour, more self-derision, than believed? Or is it a way to silence me, or to endorse me with the prize?[…] But I really hope that it’s because it’s above all a good book.”

It is easy to speak about this book purely at the level of what it is about, rather than what it is. Which would be a sin for this novel is one written by a writer with an astonishing understanding of his craftwork. Several friends of mine and I have taken to talking about the book in sections — the Argentina section, the Ellenstein section, the Musimbwa section, etc — with the idea that each section is a completely different book, existing in different genres. My favourite section, the Musimbwa section, can be thought of as a thriller, and the first time I read it I was filled with deep fright at what I understood was going to happen.

However, the most impressive part of the text happens early on. Diégane travels to Amsterdam to hear from Marème Siga D. how the lost book came into her life. He, Diégane, then tells us the story Siga D tells her, which is the story her father, Ousseynou Koumakh, tells her. In Ousseynou Koumakh’s story, another character — Mossane — becomes the protagonist, and we are drawn so deeply into the world of Mossane that it is a shock when Sarr writes about the singing of Ajax Amsterdam’s fans outside Siga D’s apartment. It is an astounding display of the sort of novelistic control every writer seeks to have over their work. 

14.

It was in the airport in Amsterdam that I fell wholly into the book. I had hours to burn before my flight, and I sat on an uncomfortable lounge chair and read. Time, as the cliche goes, disappeared without my knowledge. I felt myself floating above the book and watching myself sink into it. I hate it when people describe physical experiences as being spiritual, but my reading of the book was ethereal. I remember nothing else of that day but the annoyance of boarding the plane, the annoyance of meal times, and the severe sorrow I felt that none of the people around me were reading this book. In the months since, months in which I’ve reread this book in four different countries, I think of other sorrows I’ve had; the fact that my friend Ndegwa had told me about his experience of reading this book at the start of 2024 and I did nothing more than buy the book and store it on my bookshelf for months; the fact that an uncle had told me about it shortly after it won the Goncourt and I had done nothing more than store its information in my head; the fact that a French translator I met at a literary festival told me that she didn’t think this was Sarr’s best book, that he had better. This last one was the most frightening.

I wonder which of his books she thinks is his best. Is it Brotherhood? Is it his first novel De Purs Hommes (“Of Pure Men”), which is yet to be translated? Or is it The Silence of the Choir, which was translated into English this year? In the latter, we see glimpses of the classical European literature that Sarr is interested in (just like Latin American literature appears in The Most Secret Memory of Men, particularly Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives). Perhaps this is one of the problems of literature: go back long enough, and most of our literary guides become European writers. In Venice, April told me how excited she was to see the work of European masters which she’d never seen in person before. Looking at them in person was very different from looking at them online. She could study the paintings in ways that didn’t occur to her when viewed from afar, see how the painters played with light, notice techniques that were harder to parse when viewed through a screen, see the patterns she could infuse into her own work as an African painter. This was how art worked. It was a constant pattern of borrowings and reworkings and lessons, into which one poured their creative self. We all needed each other. I too was a borrower, a Kenyan writer who had come to an Italian city where I read a book by a Senegalese writer which spoke to European literature, was inspired by the life of a Malian writer, and in its structure and heft had a book by Bolaño, a Chilean writer, as its progenitor.