PURE MEN, Prix Goncourt-winning Senegalese author MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR's récit of homophobia's viciousness

PURE MEN
MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR (tr. Lara Vergnaud)
Other Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A young professor grapples with homophobia in Muslim Senegal in this searching, heart-wrenching novel from the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Most Secret Memory of Men.

A viral video makes the rounds in Dakar, showing an incensed crowd that gathers to dig up a grave and drag the corpse from holy ground. When Ndéné, a French literature teacher, watches it, he’s surprisingly affected. Who was this man, and what could he have done to deserve such a fate? The answer soon becomes clear: he was a “góor-jigéen,” one of the so-called “men-women,” the shameful label given to homosexuals, cross-dressers, or any man who lives outside the accepted norm.

Haunted by the video, Ndéné sets out to learn more. With the help of a friend who works in night life, he explores a hidden side of Dakar, away from the rigid Islam of his family and university. Although he feels a certain disgust for homosexuality, he’s moved by the suffering and resilience of the people he meets. But the further he goes, the more he doubts his own identity, threatening to become an object of suspicion and scorn himself.

A powerful, nuanced portrait of queerness in a conservative society, Pure Men asks the fundamental question of how to find the courage to be true to yourself, whatever the cost.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A récit from a Francophone Senegalese author, winner of multiple impressive prizes including 2021's Prix Goncourt for The Most Secret Memory of Men (published by Other Press in 2023), the first sub-Saharan native speaker of French to be so honored.

This powerful story of one academically expert yet culturally naïve man Ndéné coming to terms with the raw potency of religious belief to inspire behaviors its own tenets specifically condemn...murder, desecration of human remains...in a Muslim-majority country by no means anywhere close to a Stonewall moment. In all of his professorial duties and in his life with his lover Rama, Ndéné has not thought much about queerness and Senegalese Islamic homophobia. His hather is a major figure in the Islamic world of Dakar, and Senegal as a whole.

Then Ndéné encounters a viral video of the desecration of a grave because its occupant is rumored...not known bur rumored...to have been a góor-jigéen or man-woman (equivalent to US English faggot) that rocks his entire world. This is done by homophobes screaming at a corpse things that any adult queer has heard many times whether loudly or quietly directed at them. It's a jolt to professorial Ndéné, accustomed to explicating poetry and French culture to his students. He elects to pursue more information about the video, about queerness, and about Senegalese Islam's homophobia. An academic's natural role is to perform research, after all.

Rama and her friend who works for Human Rights Watch in Dakar bring innocent Ndéné into a buried lifeway lived at risk of torture and murder by Dakar's homosexual population. It is fateful. It cannot possibly go unnoticed because of who his father is in the Muslim world; and because the viral video is not condemned by his father, Ndéné investigating the acts depicted and the topic they're embedded in attaches suspicion to himself and damages his father among the devout. Rama, herself bisexual, is added to the trail of calumny.
In exploring the intense, hypocritcal taboos and burning hatred experienced by Senegal's queers, Ndéné begins to ask himself questions about Authority, conformity, prejudice in a country known to be repressive overall. He does himself no favors wher he decides to introduce his students to the work of Verlaine, that monadnock of queer letters the world around. Why would he do this, seeming to me to make the decision on a whim?

The lack of my fifth star above can now be explained. Is Ndéné having a bi awakening? Is he simply so repulsed by his father's religion's hypocrisy and the cultural cruelty, viciousness really, on display in that viral video that he simply wants to lash out at the cultural fog?

Dunno. Does Author Sarr know? It was not obvious to me if he did, and made this choice of direction steered by that knowledge. It's a vague and unsatisfying thing as a result. I can see from Translator Vergnaud's high-quality work that the vagueness was intentional. No author who can create this much investment in a story narrated by a man entirely in his own head, from his own PoV, and in under 200pp reach a truly life-altering conclusion that's internally consistent and resolves the story's plot is going to simply forget to mention if the main character's suddenly gone queer.

But then why do this? What the hell, back down and live to fight another battle (metaphorically speaking, not literally)? It's simply not in the text, or I am too obtuse to see it.

Astonishingly forceful and stylistically assured, the read os one I'll recommend to anyone willing to live in a high degree of narrative uncertainty.

Good practice for our modern life.