At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

At Night All Blood is Black

by David Diop

(translated by Anna Moschovakis)

David Diop’s 2018 novel Frère d’âme achieved great acclaim in the French-speaking world. It has now been published by Pushkin Press with the title At Night All Blood is Black, in an English translation by Anna Moschovakis, earning itself a place on the longlist of International Booker Prize.  

At Night All Blood is Black is an addition to the body of novels dealing with the tragedy of the First World War. Considering that there are well-established classics set in the trenches of the Great War, any novelist wishing to convey the horror of the carnage is immediately faced with the challenge of how to bring something new to the subject.  What is original about At Night All Night is Black is that it is written from the perspective of a Senegalese soldier in the French army.  It is a (probably) lesser-known fact about the Great War that a total of around 200,000 so-called Senegalese Tirailleurs fought for France, 135,000 of whom in Europe, with 30,000 killed in action.

Alfa Ndiaye, the narrator, is one of those soldiers, derogatorily referred to as “Chocolats” by their European leaders.  The novel opens harrowingly, with Ndiaye remembering the last hours of agony spent with Mademba, his “more than brother”, eviscerated during an attack on an enemy trench. Mademba begs Alfa to end his agony by slitting his throat. Alfa feels that it would be wrong to do this, but later questions whether his moral compunctions were justified.  This traumatic experience turns Alfa into a revenge-intent beast, who attacks enemy soldiers with his machete, cutting off their hand as a trophy.   Through his increasingly wild yet daring actions, Alfa disturbingly accepts and perpetuates the very racist image of the “fear-inducing savage” which his colonial masters promote.  In fact, his initial forays into the enemy lines are celebrated, but there comes a point when both his Senegalese comrades and the French start getting wary of Alfa.  And this is hardly surprising because, although he does not admit it, Alfa is descending into madness, sucked into a vortex of grief and guilt, masked by a newly-found lust for brutality, violence and sex.

The thoughts of the increasingly deranged soldier are conveyed in a stream-of-consciousness style.   The deliberate repetition gives the novel the feel of a prose-poem, whilst also hinting at the Alfa’s obsessiveness.  After the opening, visceral descriptions of life in the trenches, Alfa reminisces about the life he led back in Senegal – these nostalgic segments of the book have a strange beauty, imbued with a sense of the mythical and folkloric.

Given the subject-matter, and its intense and graphic (although never gratuitous) violence, this novel is hardly what one consider “entertaining”, and some readers will probably prefer to stay away from it.  However, it tells an important story in an original way, and, given its short length, does not outstay its welcome.     

Kindle Edition, 192 pages

Published November 5th 2020 by Pushkin Press

(first published August 16th 2018 as Frère d'âme)

Senegalese Soldiers in World War 1