Making complexity happen to rebuild the body: ‘Silence du chœur’ by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, a poetics of crossing symbolic borders

Abstract

Silence du chœur is Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s second novel. In this breathtaking novel of more than 560 pages, which describes the arrival of seventy-two sub-Saharan men in a village in Italy, the author sets out to dismantle the effective borders and deconstruct the symbolic boundaries that people erect between themselves for fear of losing or questioning themselves. The novel thus insists on the need to rebuild a social body by bringing out the complexity of the characters and situations, just as the need to refaire «corps avec le lieu» (Sarr, 2022, p. 119) by reviving the profound truth of the myth. To achieve this, the author deploys a whole poetic system to cross symbolic boundaries, whether it is a question of going beyond the boundaries of the words themselves, or literally displacing the reader, leading him to experience the passing of time (the main enemy of the ragazzi), or polyphony (the first step towards critical examination). The boundaries between art and life are also blurred, as in theatre, a genre towards which the whole story tends, perhaps the only one able to guarantee the possibility of «rebuilding a body» after the chaos.