Exploring 'De Purs Hommes' by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: A Journey into Senegalese History
BY MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR
REVIEW
It all began with a real story that everyone has heard about: the exhumation of a male body in Dakar.
The main character-narrator decides to investigate and this investigation turns into a history lesson.
This novel is the first (in my opinion) to address not only homosexuality but homophobia within the Muslim community in Senegal.
A very brave book, courageous because to explore this subject head on with graphic descriptions while being a man, Black , African and Muslim is an exploit to me;
I know it shouldn't be but it is.
The novel proves that African societies have always been able to integrate all minorities but that colonization destroyed all structures of social intelligence and imported its homophobia.
In today's Africa, homosexuality has become a taboo whereas at one time it was tolerated, absorbed, as a social, cultural, traditional element of African ingenuity.
The Igbo and Yoruba tribes did not have a gender binary and did not assign gender to babies at birth, but waited until later in life.
The Dagaaba tribe assigned gender not based on anatomy, but rather on energy.
This tragic legacy of colonization inevitably decides what is normal and who is normal, and anyone "deemed" abnormal is, ipso facto, exterminated physically or morally.
In this book, for example, Verlaine's poems are brutally suppressed, and when the narrator is suspected of having sympathy for homosexuals, he is disowned byhis father.
This novel is a depiction of Senegalese society and the role that Islam plays in the fierce rejection of all diversity.
With his poetic writing, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr signs a moving novel about the only burning question that matters to most of us : how to find the courage to be fully oneself, but above all, at what price?
"I made my choice. Everyone here is ready to kill to be an apostle of Good. I am ready to die to be the only possible figure of Evil".