The Wild Density of the Word: An Interview with Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
by Eliana Văgălău
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was born in 1990 in Senegal. After secondary studies at a prestigious military high school, the Pyrtanée militaire de Saint-Louis, he pur-sued his education in France at a preparatory school in Compiègne and then enrolled at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). His writing was met with praise starting with his first short story, La Calle (2014), which was awarded the Stéphane-Hessel Prize. He has since published four novels, each welcomed by critics and the public alike. His latest novel, The Most Secret Memory of Men (2021), was awarded France’s most coveted literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, among many other international accolades, leading to its translation into over forty languages.
On a muggy August afternoon in 2024, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mr. Sarr in Paris to discuss two general topics: his relationship to literature and to politics. Once the recorder was turned on, we did our best to forget its presence and evoke topics at the core of many of our conversations: the centrality of reading, the transgressive freedoms afforded by literature, the place and function of sexuality in novels, and the origins of storytelling. We also touched upon current political questions in France and Senegal, as well as the ways in which Mr. Sarr approaches them in literature and in the public sphere.
Eliana Văgălău: Could you tell us a little about your relationship with literature during childhood and youth? And especially your relationship with reading, because that relationship is always first and foremost with reading.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: My first relationship with literature was an auditory one. But I think that’s the case in all cultures: you start by listening. The pleasure of storytelling is first and foremost the pleasure of listening to stories, and the question of writing doesn’t come into play until much later, when we start to know how to read. But there’s always a rather wonderful age between three and six or seven, when our only relationship to stories is through the way they’re told to us. And for me, it’s all about tales, lots and lots of tales, and the belief that those tales were real things that truly happened. Obviously, over time you learn to distinguish between what is fiction and what is real, but there was a moment of confusion, and I think it’s in this moment of confusion that the poetic mind begins to take shape. And by the poetic mind, I simply mean the ability to see the world as a reservoir of stories, of characters who meet, talk, have adventures, that end well or badly. That’s when seeing the world as a narrative starts. More precisely: I talk a lot about storytelling and my grandmother, because it’s true that it comes from the women in my family, my grandmother, my mother, my aunts, but especially my maternal grandmother, because among the Serer people there are matrilineal branches, so it’s often the aunts on the maternal side or the grandmother on the maternal side who take care of a certain part of education. And when I think of my grandmother telling stories, there’s one thing that always strikes me. I say this with a lot of hindsight, of course, but at the time, there was one thing she often did: she always changed the settings of the tales, the story within the tale, or she reversed roles.
On a muggy August afternoon in 2024, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mr. Sarr in Paris to discuss two general topics: his relationship to literature and to politics.
She obviously didn’t tell the same tale, there were lots of them, but sometimes she came back to a tale, and when she returned to it, she changed things. At first, I thought it was involuntary, that she’d made a mistake. But when I would point it out to her, she always told me: “No, I am changing the story on purpose.” So she inverted stories, she changed plot lines, she brought out a plot that was more important, she reinvented the tale all the time. So she was playing with the tale—which is, after all, a fairly universal structure found in all cultures—and transforming it. I think at that point I integrated the idea that I managed to verbalize years later: in a narrative, the most important thing is form, what you have to say, anyone can say. What will make the difference is the form you choose to tell the thing—to recount is always about finding the right form. As our dear friend Hame- dine (Kane) says, “Artists create forms,” deal with forms, work with forms, and he’s absolutely right. An artist, and a writer is aware that what is told is told in a certain form and exists because it has a certain form; it passes through a certain voice that arranges things in a particular way. To put it more radically, I’d even go so far as to say that a tale is nothing more than the moment when it’s told. It’s not so much the content, but the moment when it’s told; there’s a storyteller, an audience, this device and the interactions that take place between the storyteller and the audience, and the form that instantiates the story at that moment. That’s what storytelling is: the creation of a space of illusions into which many other illusions are placed—the plot, the characters, animals who become men, men who speak with animals, who speak with gods, etc. In my first experience with literature, these elements were put in place through orality, which I only understand now, twenty years later. Then I learned to read, and I read just about anything: things for my own age, like comics, storybooks, and anything else I could get my hands on, newspapers—my father brought a lot of them, so we had a whole national press at home—and I was reading and doing crossword puzzles. I was getting used to words, reading and starting to write them, and trying to decipher them. So, it’s a bit like the magic of a child discovering a new world within the same world, because suddenly you see writing everywhere. A little later, around age seven or eight, my cousins at home, who were already in high school, brought home the books they read. I didn’t understand everything in these texts, so I used a dictionary, because there were a lot of them at home—I spent a lot of hours that I now consider irreplaceable. It was really the moment when wonder comes through practice, through technique, through the exercise of memory. It all happens around that time, in the space of three or four years. I was lucky enough to be passionate about it, even if I did a lot of other things. Soccer, that was on my mind, but at the same time I liked to read everything that was happening and listen to TV shows, which were very specialized at the time and which I didn’t understand. Maybe that’s where the snobbery of the French language comes in. You start speaking French: you hear words and expressions on TV in very technical shows, you don’t understand them at all, but you retain them, you keep them in your mind because they strike you, because they intrigue you. You’re constantly using them in the wrong way and against the grain, but you’ve got them, they’re there. Sometimes, in the beginning, it’s just to show off, to get a compliment, but that’s part of the learning process. Then comes the time when I really started picking up my own books and asking my dad to buy me some. Even though I read a lot today, I feel like I read twice as much back then. It was a very intense time of reading, both from what came from school, but also from what I came across, from libraries, and sometimes quite by chance, because someone gave you some recommendation, or because you opened a book and saw mention of another book. There was a whole range of things, which one does over a lifetime, which I had already encountered by then. So yes, that’s why for a very long time, I didn’t yet know what I would be doing in life, but whatever I would do, I knew I would always be connected to reading. Not writing but reading.
To put it more radically, I’d even go so far as to say that a tale is nothing more than the moment when it’s told. It’s not so much the content, but the moment when it’s told; there’s a storyteller, an audience, this device and the interactions that take place between the storyteller and the audience, and the form that instantiates the story at that moment.
EV: Today, especially after The Most Secret Memory of Men, you are often associated with Latin American writers like Borges, Marquez, and Bolaño. The title and epigraph of the novel are direct nods to the latter, while the labyrinthic literary quest prolongs the conversation with both Savage Detectives and 2666. Is there something territorial or geographical about your inspirations? Or does literature remain a true land of freedom without borders? Are you a Senegalese writer?
MMS: Obviously, yes, I am. But now that you’ve said that, it strikes me as an incomplete description. If you have discovered something in Senegalese literature that doesn’t exist anywhere else, i.e. something that only Senegalese literature can say about human experience, then clinging to nationality would make sense. Unfortunately, or fortunately, when you read Senegalese literature and call yourself a Senegalese novelist by nationality, by birth, by the place where your poetic spirit was formed, and then read other things, you discover that sometimes what you read—in Mariama Bâ, or Aminata Sow Fall, or Malick Fall—is found in another context, another time, another geography, in writers who come from elsewhere—Asia, Latin America—you say to yourself that the question of nationality has no real value other than to situate historically, geographically, through education and cultural elements.
But that’s not what literature is all about. The essence of literature is a vast space in which all cultures, ori- gins, and identities move and inter- sect, but none of them can claim to express something absolutely unique about the human experience because it belongs to that particular nationality or geography. I don’t see how that’s possible, and it’s not even a theoretical debate. That’s why I’m very happy to be associated with authors who are far removed from me, even if, of course, we run into the same problem when some people tell you, for example, that Garcia Marquez is universal because he has inspired a Congolese or Senegalese writer . . .
EV: That’s not a good enough reason to make universalist claims.
MMS: Yes, that’s not a good enough reason. It’s not because someone is going to influence someone far away that he’s universal. It’s because he’s expressed something in which that far-away person finds himself and a strong connection. Above all, García Márquez or Bolaño didn’t write thinking, “I want to be universal.”
EV: It’s a question that will always come up: wanting to integrate fiction into this other fiction that is the nation, to confine it, and we know a lot of writers who have described this problem. And I like to talk about it precisely to celebrate literature, because it really is a space that eschews these limitations, right from the start, without even asking about them.
MMS: Absolutely. And that’s why, for me, it’s a very serious thing to have a library at home, not for the pleasure of having a library, but to have books at home and to see what the arrangement of these books creates. Because it’s the most concrete example of the fact that literature is always a way of summoning the whole world. Of course, you can have a library that’s very oriented, where you only find a certain number of authors, but I tell myself that even in this type of configuration, there are authors who, a priori, have nothing to do with each other, yet who are in the same place for a given reason. Either because the reader’s own tastes can make associations between authors, or because there’s a conversation going on between writers or between works that we’re unaware of. What the books are saying to each other sometimes escapes us, but it happens all the same by the simple fact of being side by side.
When I go to people’s homes, or even my own, and look around a bit, it’s an object of infinite reverie to realize that people as different as an American and a Korean, a Senegalese and a Chilean, are at a given moment placed on the same plane, not in the sense of value, but the same geometric plane, and that a conversation begins at that moment. I find that it immediately diffuses any idea of nationalizing literature, of locking it into a box, of legitimizing it through a territory.
EV: I like this image of the library. I also think that this conversation necessarily takes place through the affinities that the reader creates. This brings us back to a subject I know you are fond of: the centrality of the reader.
And, speaking of readers, a question I really want to ask you about The Most Secret Memory of Men regards sexuality. The presence of sex scenes has been criticized by some of your readers, who considered them superfluous. What is the place of sexuality in literature? For you, does it have a place? Do we need it? Or do you need it as material for your stories?
MMS: It might not have any place, but I feel that something would be missing without it. I find that there’s something irrepressible in sexuality, because, whether in real life, in our sexuality, or in fiction, sex scenes are always revealing. What we’re looking for in sexuality is always a way out of ourselves at any given moment that it happens, or doesn’t happen; in any case, it remains the horizon. In writing, for me, it has the same function, in that these are always moments when writing has to get away from what it has set up until then. For me, it’s really quite a powerful emancipation in terms of style. I always try, in sex scenes, in sexuality as it’s represented, to let go a little more of the style so that it can access something else, or so that the character can access areas that weren’t present before—including more comical, lighter ones— sex scenes can also increase drama. But let’s just say that, at that point, there are secrets. There are secrets in every book, and sexuality in my novels is one of the places where I try to hide them. It’s very paradox- ical, because I say that you have to reveal something, but let’s say that these are places where something important in the novel is hidden,
I find that there’s something irrepressible in sexuality, because, whether in real life, in our sexuality, or in fiction, sex scenes are always revealing.
and sometimes you have to read them in a certain way to see them appear. And this is the case in The Most Secret Memory of Men. In fact, the only explicit sex scene in The Most Secret Memory of Men is when Diégane makes love to Aïda. And since people have been commenting on this book, no one has mentioned this scene. Sometimes people tell me it’s beautiful, but they never really say why they think it’s beautiful. Even when I read it, I don’t necessarily understand why suddenly, at that moment, Diégane focuses on that little drop of sweat. But, clearly, it’s little elements like that that pick up on something from the book as a whole, pick up on something about the character, pick up on something from the relationship and the secret core of the book. There are always several, but one of the secret cores for me is always sexuality. And even though it’s a long book, and I often write quite long books, paradoxically, I’m always looking for places of concentration. That is, to find scenes that are not key in the sense that they explain the whole novel, but that contain a detail that can contain the whole novel. And for me, it’s much more obvious that this should appear in sexuality, whatever register sexuality takes, rather than in a dialogue or the description of a landscape. Before, I used to focus a lot on land- scapes and descriptions. But now, more and more, it’s based on many things—one of those things is sexuality. It’s quite classic as a revealer but also operates as a darkroom and a lightroom. It’s the place where images are being developed, but in a form of darkness, that of sexuality—images of what we don’t understand, of what we don’t understand about ourselves, of what we don’t necessarily understand about the other, and yet in the most intimate contact imaginable. So, I think it’s always a shame to reduce sex scenes to their moral significance or to what people say about their necessity. Was it necessary? Maybe some- times it isn’t, but for me, no sex scene is gratuitous. And in The Most Secret Memory of Men, now that I think about it, it’s quite clear, whether it’s that scene I was talking about, or even the scene with the crucifix.
But when we talk about sexuality, which also means a way of relating, understanding, and asserting oneself, then it becomes something else.
EV: The scene with the crucifix is fabulous. It’s extremely powerful in the shift it produces, in all the mystical thought, and precisely in the development of the character: we see a whole other side of Diégane in that conversation.
MMS: I think that what produces misunderstandings about sex scenes is that we don’t know how to read them as anything other than sex scenes. You talked about sexuality, and that’s something other than sex. Obviously, if we limit ourselves to sex, it may seem banal, a little prim- itive, if you like. But when we talk about sexuality, which also means a way of relating, understanding, and asserting oneself, then it becomes something else. And that’s precisely what I think we should try to do: write scenes that have more to do with sexuality than pure sex. For example, I’ve been thinking about this fabulous sex scene in Iochka (by Cristian Fulaș), which is magnificent because, first of all, it’s beautifully written. Everything Iochka is, and everything we don’t know about him, is present in that moment. It’s a place of both familiarity and absolute strangeness. And that’s why it’s so beautiful. And then you know it’s not just sex. It becomes sexuality because it becomes a moment where you can interpret and understand not just a character, but a whole universe.
EV: Yes, and it’s also a hotbed of politics. We mustn’t forget that. It’s always an expression of being in the world. A lot happens when it’s done well.
MMS: Yes, but it must be written first. In any case, it has to be well done and there has to be literature in it.
EV: I had one last question about what’s ahead for you in literature: are you setting yourself any particular narrative challenges? Are there any narrative aspects you want to tackle? Do you work like that at all, or do you start with a question or a story? What drives the machine?
MMS: So far, they’ve always been questions about images, usually taken from reality. The first three novels were really like that: first there was an image and then a question about that image. And then the story of the novel was just the attempt to answer that question or to turn around that question, and it ends up being a story. But I’ve never been able to conceive of a story first. There always has to be a question that I work from first, and it’s the attempt to formulate this question that ends up giving rise to characters, ends up giving rise to very different lines, but which in the end all revolve around this one question. After The Most Secret Memory of Men, I’ve had the impression for some time now that I’m more and more preoccupied by a certain history, by certain stories I should say, which are very old. And for the first time, I don’t have the support or backing of an image, but rather of a word. So that changes the very basis of the form, which is no longer visual, but uttered. This has transformed what I’m trying to do now. The Most Secret Memory of Men immediately induces multiple voices. Not because it’s a choral novel per se—because I’m really trying to differentiate. It’s necessarily choral because several people are speaking, carrying the narrative. But the difficulty I feel more and more, as I write now, is that these people are different in time, but at the same time saying the same thing. I need to find a structure that can take this into account. In The Most Secret Mem- ory of Men, this already happens a little. In other words, the narratives are carried by voices that are not immediately identifiable, and you can get lost among them wondering who’s speaking. In the end, it may be a very silly question, but it’s one that structures our relationship with the novel today. We have to identify who’s talking. Where does the narration come from? And then, we need to be able to distinguish this voice from other voices. But the way the question or the word I’m talking about comes to me, the utterance, gives me the impression that it’s impossible to say who’s talking. And how do you render this in writing, what structure do you adopt so that something is said, that someone says it, but that this someone can be both someone in particular and someone else? It’s difficult. In short, it’s not very clear, but overall, I’ve gone from the image to the utterance, and the question of the utterance must give a structure that’s both unified and multiple and fragmented. I’d like to come back to what I was saying about my grandmother earlier. When she changed characters or plots, it was always through her voice that things happened, and today I have the impression that that’s a lesson in the structure of a novel, and a lesson in making several voices fit together into a single voice. Perhaps it’s the question of the source, not so much the horizon.
EV: That’s something I was already thinking in relation to your four novels: in the first three, the question is very clear and unique, whereas, regarding The Most Secret Memory of Men, some read it as a novel about literature, others as a novel about plagiarism; in other words, the interpretations multiply. I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed that it starts from a change of source, that you shift from image to word, but it makes perfect sense. Perhaps the source and the horizon are in dialogue, one can’t be divorced from the other.
MMS: It’s true, and it’s also true that in my case, that’s exactly what’s happening: the source is at the same time the horizon. It’s the circular word, it’s the question of prophecy, it’s the question of what is really said at a particular moment, but which reverberates through time. Then I have to write it down. All in all, it’s a question of how to ensure that a word can be written down and not simply transcribed—how to convey in writing the power of a word that crosses so many temporal distances and structures so many lives. I’ve been thinking about the difference between the spoken word and the written word. We say that the spoken word flies away and the written word remains. Well, I’m not so sure about that today. Yes, in some cases. But overall, many people in the world are confronted with a word, which sometimes goes back a long way, and that makes psychoanalysts happy, because there’s something that’s been said. But, the question of the word is there, and it carries a wild density, and it takes a structure that’s both very fine and very complex to put it into writing without simplifying it, without making a kind of translation, transcription, or recording of it. That’s not what it’s about. It’s more a question of it unfolding in time, in several other sentences. In any case, I’m becoming increasingly aware of how difficult it is to write from the spoken word.
EV: To move on to a very different topic: I’ve already heard our friends tease you about the possibility of accepting a position as minister, president, and so on, and your answer has always been a categorical no. Yet, you intervene, obviously through your writing. Your novels are eminently political without hiding it. Then, you intervene on political topics on social media; often those interventions are much appreciated for their precision and lucidity, be they about France or Senegal. Do you feel obliged to intervene? How do you position yourself in relation to these debates, and is literature your politics, or is it a politics that is already sufficient in itself?
MMS: They’re two very different ways of expressing politics: in one case, you intervene in your own name, in your personal analysis and intimate perception of a given situation. That’s simpler because you’re absolutely responsible for it—you can answer for it. What’s interesting and, at the same time, totally disconcerting about political intervention in and through literature is that precisely because it’s fictional, it’s impossible to make theses out of it because each thesis is often contradicted or relativized by a situation, by another character, by another point of view—that’s why it’s interesting. I consider fiction to be more of a reflection on politics, which is still a way of doing politics. Public interventions are really position statements. I’d make that slight distinction between the two, but overall, it’s still political writing. It also reflects a certain passion for politics in the simple sense that politics is the relationship that people have with each other (horizontally) and with each other via a leadership they have elected. In my public interventions, often on social media or in newspapers, I try not to intervene on everything. I try to intervene first and foremost on things that touch me or concern me in some way. That is, I try to express myself only on things I know about. There’s a big difference between writing and intervening like that, and the novel. In the novel, I can sometimes write about situations that I don’t know precisely, because I don’t place the weight of the novel on the factual knowledge of things, but rather on something more linked to deep human experiences and the way they’re interpreted humanly, psychologically, and philosophically. All of that depends on the precise context. On the other hand, when it comes to political situations, I think you have to intervene on things you know about—that’s what I try to do. Generally speaking, I intervene on Senegal and on political situations in France.
EV: Precisely. Because Senegal is your native country and France is the country in which you live, so their realities have a direct impact on you. This year, Senegal has gone through a major change, with the election of Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a particularly charged election given the turmoil that preceded it. According to your observations, and given that we’re talking just a few months later, what has really changed, and what hopes or hesitations has this change brought with it?
MMS: Yes, Bassirou Diomaye Faye has been elected, and he replaces a regime whose end was rather sad because it was quite authoritarian, increasingly violent and more and more undermined by cases of corruption, but also cases that were murkier, linked to potential disappearances, even murders. There have been unexplained disappearances of people, policemen for example, who were identified as being opposed to government action and who disappeared in rather mysterious circumstances. We have also seen, during demonstrations, unidentified people shooting at demonstrators. Unidentified people receiving weapons from the Senegalese police and shooting at demonstrators and the Senegalese police claimed not to know who they were, even though it was filmed. The Ministry of the Interior tried to manipulate the foot- age by editing it, but there was a lot of footage available, so you could see the whole sequence. These things really clouded the end of the previous regime. This one arrives with a lot of hope, and that could be dangerous—people might be tempted to deify or messianize them, as if in the end they weren’t just men who, with the best intentions in the world, are limited by their human nature. They are limited by the real possibilities that exist in government, they are limited by the complexity of a situation, by time too, and they are going to have to negotiate. The problem is that they have raised so much hope, they have promised so many things, they have made so many people dream, that inevitably the start of their governance seems a little disappointing, because many were expecting miracles. Personally, I’m not expecting miracles, which is why for me we’re in the normal beginning of a reign of power; we’ll see in a year or two. But for the time being, I find it rather amusing that this party, PASTEF, which puts rupture and the radicality of their rupture at the forefront, should arrive and show itself to be more diplomatic.
Personally, I’m not expecting miracles, which is why for me we’re in the normal beginning of a reign of power; we’ll see in a year or two. But for the time being, I find it rather amusing that this party, PASTEF, which puts rupture and the radicality of their rupture at the forefront, should arrive and show itself to be more diplomatic.
Suddenly, they’re more nuanced, they’re discussing, they’re negotiating, whereas their time in opposition was completely different. So, there’s already been a change in practice, which I find normal. We’ll see in a few years’ time, but there are some things I like about this new government right off the bat, namely that President Faye seems much more measured than Prime Minister Sonko, who was supposed to be President. Had it not been for the cabal that fol- lowed him, he would have been president, and it was he who gave the order—which was quite an interesting gesture—that Bassirou Diomaye Faye become president. And then the man who was in the shadows, who was second in command, became the first, stepping into the spotlight. And we discover that he’s a much more measured man, who seems less carried away, more composed—he’s quite well-liked. Sonko is also still extremely popular, but people are also starting to like Bassirou Diomaye Faye for his personality, which is very different. And I really liked two things in his first stances, one concerning Senegal’s internal affairs, because he reaffirmed his desire to make people pay taxes. This is a real problem in Senegal, where many of the wealthy, the very wealthy, don’t pay taxes. And the tax system is chaotic. Given that he’s a tax inspector, and Ousmane Sonko is also a tax inspector by training, they promised to work on this, and he reaffirmed this despite protests from people who are quite wealthy, but they said that everyone would pay taxes and that it’s really a priority for him. The other interesting thing, for external affairs, is that at a time when the West African sub-region, ECOWAS, is riven by many fractures, three countries have left SADC to form the ESA. And at a time when we were thinking that there would be a fracture, that the two blocs would no longer be talking to each other, Bassirou Diomaye Faye is trying to assert himself as a diplomatic leader, to try and get these countries to talk to each other. I find this absolutely crucial today. A Togolese novelist by the name of Théo Ananissoh said something very true: that in fact, yes, we may not have the same history, but we have the same geography. And geography is a constraint. When you’re in the same space, you have to collaborate, you have to manage the movement of products, goods, and people between your territories, and when each country has a share of its economic survival dependent on a neighboring country, there can’t be any fractures. Obviously, ECOWAS can be criticized as an institution, but we simply must think in terms of a political unity that may work as an institution but exists through history, geography, and social needs. Bassirou Diomaye Faye is trying to ensure that the two blocs talk to each other and that there is no rupture. That said, there are huge disappointments linked, for example, to women. Very few women are promoted, and obviously it’s not a question of competence. It’s just that it’s a party that has seemed to me, from the outset, rather conservative in terms of mores. I don’t see any justification for it when women were extremely important in the struggle that brought PASTEF to power. That’s really the big miss for me at the start of this mandate. It’s really a kind of forgetfulness or con- tempt for women in leadership. I don’t expect there to be, immediately in any case, a radical break in terms of governance, institutions, and administration. But I do hope, and this is what I’m observing at the moment, that there will continue to be a more transparent way of governing. The end of the reign of the previous regime was really opaque. And now, I’m just hoping for a little more transparency. That would be a big step.
EV: Finally in France, because France also happens to be going through a very particular period that has involved the dissolution of the National Assembly after the European elections, then early elections, and now negotiations for key posts. But what seems to have attracted the most attention is the rise in support for the Rassemblement National, which has been the focal point of the last two months, i.e. support for the far right. In your opinion, is there an explanation for this phenomenon, and is there any way of preventing this continued rise? Are there any possible solutions to divert attention away from these politics, which are both hidden and visible at the same time?
MMS: Preparations have been underway for several years now—for fifteen, twenty years—in the political sphere, in the media, in the intel- lectual sphere, in the social sphere, and in social life. French society has been preparing for the arrival of the RN to power. By this I don’t mean that all French society has been preparing for and accepting the ideas of the Rassemblement National, but it accepts the idea that they’re there— they’ve been introduced little by little. In certain media, Vincent Bolloré’s in particular, they’re ultra-present, and that’s all we hear. Nor should we forget that in the last twenty years, the RN has not been in power—it is not yet in power—and yet these ideas have advanced in the political sphere. Why? Because the people who were the political leaders gradually resorted to the imagination, vocabulary, and proposals of the far right. When I arrived in France, as I recalled in a recent article, those in power were the UMP—Nicolas Sarkozy with a small group of people. But they spoke in a way that a leader of the RN today would not reject.
So having people who are supposed to be of the “Republican Right”, who use a certain language, who implement certain policies, and who are therefore heard by a huge number of people, inevitably gives the impression that these ideas are now acceptable. Worse than that, when the left was in power under François Hollande, there were two or three laws passed that were truly left-wing, but apart from those, there was a whole set of proposals that were directly in line with the ideas of the extreme right. Under François Hollande, unfortunately, we had the Paris attacks in 2015—first Charlie Hebdo, then those at the Bataclan, and those that followed, in Nice, for example. And from that moment on, I felt a shift: the question of revoking nationality started to come up. It was the left that introduced that idea, an idea that’s typically been a far-right idea for a very long time. So, it’s not necessarily the RN that has imposed these ideas, it has tried to do so, to do it better, to have its own media where they present these ideas. It’s not just the RN, though they are the ones who visibly subscribe to these theses. Alongside them, a great deal of responsibility falls on the entire political class, on both the right and the left, who seem only to be able to speak to the French population through words or themes identified as far-right. This has led to trivialization, to what we call de-demonization, and to the feel- ing that there’s no longer any shame at all in saying that all France’s problems stem from foreigners, from the fact that there are too many foreigners in France. When you’re binational, for example, you’re still suspect, you’re less deserving of certain positions than people who are purely French. When it’s said, for example, that people from immigrant backgrounds don’t want to integrate, and that the term “people from immigrant backgrounds” doesn’t include people from European countries—white Franco-Spanish, Franco-Italian, Franco-Polish, etc.—then it’s clear that the French don’t want to integrate. They themselves don’t feel concerned when you say, “Peo- ple from immigrant backgrounds”, because you know right away that that refers to people from African immigrant backgrounds—black, Arab, Muslim. A whole profile of the threat has developed over the last few years, that the RN has pushed, but that the media have also pushed, and what’s worrying is that there has been no audible response, neither politically nor intellectually. I’m not saying there haven’t been responses, there have been, but it’s hard to hear them—we have the impression that the massive listening center of society is in places where the intellectual critics of these ideas can’t be heard. When Bourdieu said, in his day, that it was almost impossible for an intellectual, and particularly one classified on the left, to express himself in certain spaces—on TV in particular—today we see that it’s completely impossible. In any case, in places where people spend a lot of time listening—for example, on 24-hour news channels—it’s impossible to have a say, because the set-up makes it so, because the editorialists make it so, because the interruptions make it so, because buzz prevents any in-depth criticism. You have to criticize quickly and be in a kind of clash or search for the absolute punch line, which is the very opposite of reflection and any kind of in-depth criticism.
You have to criticize quickly and be in a kind of clash or search for the absolute punch line,
which is the very opposite of reflection and any kind of in-depth criticism.
The Rassemblement National and its ideas benefit from all this cowardice, these compromises, and the impossibility of listening to another opinion. The idea, for instance, that they are no longer the same as before, today even reversing the accusation of anti-Semitism, which is, after all, the very foundation of their party. To say that it’s the far left that’s anti-Semitic—a spectacular reversal has taken place. How do we stop it now? How do we stop these ideas? I wouldn’t have a clue. I have the impression it’s already too late. That’s not to say that it’s inevitable; there’s a large part of France that resists these ideas. Fortunately, I think, they are still slightly in the majority.
EV: Yes, we saw it in those election results that contradicted every poll, produced moreover by the same media and the same centers you were talking about.
MMS: Fortunately, that leaves a little hope, but there’s a lot of work to be done regarding history, because overall, the RN only uses immigra- tion as a lever, and the only way to think about it is to try and understand what immigration is and who French immigrants are. This would force everyone to look at how France is constituted, what its memories are, and people would be surprised to see the plural memories of this country, how numerous and fragmented they are, and how they contradict absolutely everything that can be said about the national narrative, about the native Frenchman.
EV: Remember, for example, that the Eiffel Tower, that great Parisian symbol, was built with Haitian money.
MMS: But, you see, it’s facts like these that 95% of the French population ignores. Haitian money, okay, fine. But how, why?
EV: And the slow progress made, to date, in getting the histories of the former colonies into schools, which is still very . . .
MMS: That’s a real struggle, I don’t know if it’s changed a bit, but to aspire to real change, it has to be massive, or in any case reach a large critical mass, so a whole new generation, or several successive generations are confronted with it. Even fifteen years ago, if you revealed something or showed something that was quite commonplace else- where, in France it was considered to be indigénisme.
EV: I think there’s been a real willingness to blindness, in other words, it’s not naive ignorance. That’s why, for example, there are more studies on people like Fanon, on French anti-colonialism in the United States and elsewhere: there’s an external point of view, there’s no emotional charge. And in France, there’s this question of having to really look into one’s own backyard, to go and talk to one’s grandfather, who in reality was a general in the colonies etc., and so I think it’s much more difficult because it involves emotion. Often it’s easier not to start this process—maybe it’s better not to know, because it’s more important to continue to love him, the grandfather.
MMS: You know, I discovered this because Gauz was talking about it at one point: Roland Barthes’s grandfather worked in the colonies as a cocoa farmer and committed some minor horrors. It was striking to see how Barthes himself was never interested in this aspect of his story— he chose to remain willfully ignorant.
…Gauz was talking about it at one point: Roland Barthes’s grandfather worked in the colonies as a cocoa farmer and committed some minor horrors. It was striking to see how Barthes himself was never interested in this aspect of his story— he chose to remain willfully ignorant.
This is a country where people don’t want to take an interest in their own past; the past doesn’t pose a problem and when it does, it’s because the fault is big, and you can’t pretend. The only past that poses a problem in France is collaboration, Vichy, Pétainism, because we can’t hide it. It’s not a question of individual stories, it’s collective. That’s where one starts to feel guilty and clear- headed, but we are unable to say “We’re guilty” or “Our ancestors were guilty.” That’s a real problem. It’s astonishing. A country that never stops talking about its glorious past, but can’t embrace all of that past. The ability to choose one’s past, is that of a country that has dominated others; the vanquished can’t choose their past. When you’ve conquered, when you’ve enslaved, you can choose. That’s the privilege of amnesia.