The Most Secret Memory of Men questions what it means to be an African writer today. It asks: what does it mean to write outside the centre? We find in the book the group of friends that Diégane keeps. His friends are the literary world of Paris’s African diaspora, ‘the Ghetto’ as he affectionately calls them. With one of his friends, Musimbwa, they, ‘discussed at length the occasionally comfortable often humiliating, ambiguities of our status as African writers (or writers of African origin) in the French literary milieu.’ In many ways they all struggle with who they are writing for, what topics to write about, how they will be received by Western media and the influence living in France has had on them in comparison to if they were living in the countries where they were from. Where they are from automatically marks them as being in the periphery of the literary world, and they are constantly trying to get to the centre. One of Diégane’s friends writes to him and says,

I think that’s the fate that awaits us if we keep chasing Europe, keep chasing the vast Western literary canon: we’ll all be Elimane’s, in our own way. Maybe we already are, in which case let’s stop before we’re destroyed. It’s time to get out of there.

When Diégane does go back to Senegal, during his search for Elimane, the country falls into turmoil due to the death by suicide of Fatima Diop, an activist. An old friend of Diégane living in Dakar who is intimately involved in the youth movement angry at how the government is running the country says to him,

All I’m saying is that if, at the very least, your goal isn’t to shake people down to their core, you’re better off not writing. Don’t write another book like Anatomy of the Void. The only person that book was speaking to was you.

We learn much about T. C. Elimane and his masterpiece, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, and how gorgeously written it was; but we only get a few sentences of what Elimane wrote stated in the novel. We cannot quite decide for ourselves if Elimane was as good as the narrator claims. In addition, we only get to see Elimane through the different versions of him which exist in people’s perspectives, but we never quite get to see how Elimane perceives himself. In addition, in Elimane, Diégane sees a literary lineage to which he can belong as he seeks to write his own masterpiece. This keeps the mystery of Elimane and the novel he wrote alive throughout the novel. It shows an ethos one of the characters speaks about in the novel,

The truth, Diégane, is that only a mediocre or bad or ordinary book is about something. A great book has no subject and isn’t about anything, it only tries to say or discover something, but that only is already everything, and that something is also already everything.

Sarr’s novel takes literature very seriously. It asks us to think about what African literature is and continues the conversation of the first African Writers Conference of 1962 held in Makerere University College, Uganda. It deftly shows the legacy of colonialism, and the choice of language in writing and questions the idea of what an African writer can write. Ultimately, it asks us to think of literature as the highest art form⎈