{"id":11187,"date":"2026-05-06T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11187"},"modified":"2026-05-05T20:35:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T00:35:33","slug":"the-most-secret-memory-of-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/06\/the-most-secret-memory-of-men\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Secret Memory of Men."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1968, a Malian novelist named Yambo Ouologuem saw his first novel, Le devoir de violence<\/em>, published to great acclaim, including winning the Prix Renaudot, before accusations that he\u2019d plagiarized text from two other novels stained Ouologuem\u2019s reputation and led to his withdrawal from public life. He eventually returned to Mali, publishing two books under a pseudonym and some poetry, before leaving writing entirely, dying in 2017 with his book still out of print in France. (A new edition appeared in 2018, and a new English translation came out in 2023.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr took Ouologuem\u2019s story and spun it into a novel of his own, The Most Secret Memory of Men<\/a><\/em>, in which Di\u00e9gane, a young Senegalese writer in Paris, learns of an obscure 1938 novel by T.C. Elimane, nicknamed \u201cThe Black Rimbaud\u201d before he, too, was mired in a scandal of plagiarism accusations. He refused to address the claims and disappeared from public life entirely, while the novel, scarcely seen for decades, created a cult-like following in all who read it, with some readers trying to locate Elimane as he slides silently across the globe in his seclusion. Much as the Entertainment film in Infinite Jest<\/a><\/em> drives everyone who sees it to madness, Elimane\u2019s book, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity<\/em>, possesses all who read it, driving Di\u00e9gane to learn more about the author, the book\u2019s publication, and the controversy that brought it and its author down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ouologuem became the first African author to win the Prix Renaudot, and his defenders have argued that the attacks on his authorship were motivated in large part by racism and nationalism. (In a lovely twist, Sarr won the Prix Goncourt for this book, making him the first African author to win the prize.) Sarr clouds the issue around Elimane\u2019s case; the fictional author\u2019s book did not borrow as much from any single source as Ouologuem appears to have done, but instead patched together lines and phrases from many books, maybe dozens, to create an entirely new work of art, like an album made entirely of samples that ends up sounding nothing like any of the original material. Elimane is, according to his acolytes, using colonialist literature as the building blocks for a post-colonialist novel that might have shaken the world had its white critics not had their way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n