The Secret Memory. How The Goncourt 2021, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Rewrites the Story of the “Black Rimbaud”

The Secret Memory. How the Goncourt 2021, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Rewrites the Story of the “Black Rimbaud”. In a mixture of “savage detective story” à la Bolaño, of diary, journalism, interviews and discussions on “plagiarism,” the revolutionary book of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr rewrites the history of Western relations to Africa, to its cultures and its storytelling, but also to different forms of marginality, since its main character, Elimane Madag, is also travelling to South America, being part of its most interesting intellectual circles – through, for instance, Sábato, Gombrowicz, Silvina and Victoria Ocampo. Through voices of Senegalese, Haitian, Argentinian writers and poets, through an apocryphal rewriting of the literary history of the twentieth century, through subverting the theory of plagiarism (since African myths are reinterpreted and melted in the Western culture, similar to African artefacts after the expedition Dakar-Djibouti), as well as through detective journalism (since many characters are interrogating the relation facts-fiction), the marginal and the minor are presented as an alternative, disruptive literary history of the twentieth and of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Keywords: marginality, minor, African myths, Western culture, plagiarism