Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s prize-winning novel transforms the troubled legacy of a writer who stopped writing into a galvanizing tale about all that remains to be written.
In 1968, the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem won France’s prestigious Prix Renaudot for a bloody satire about a fictional African country called “Bound to Violence.
There’s an element of poetic justice in an homage to Ouologuem winning such approbation from the very establishment that discarded him. Sarr witheringly scrutinizes the cultural Françafrique—a word for France’s geopolitical influence over its former colonies—that relegates African fiction to the status of veiled memoir, ethnographic study, or folkloric entertainment.
What initiates the central narrative is another failed tryst, this time with an older woman: Marème Siga D., doyenne of Senegal’s expatriate writers, whose scandalous frankness has given her the reputation of an “evil Pythia.” As their foreplay fizzles, Siga D. chides Diégane for confusing life and literature—and sends him home with a copy of T. C. Elimane’s “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity.
.” Local writers and religious leaders accused him of selling out his culture. The more conspiracy-minded speculated that he had received the Goncourt as a reward for his pro-L.G.B.T.Q. stance, or was even himself a disguised homosexual. The fracas didn’t stop Senegal’s President from awarding the young author the National Order of the Lion. But it did shed light on why Sarr might have found such a model in Ouologuem’s courageous effrontery.
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