At Night All Blood Is Black

When talking about WWI, most people think of the trenches and all the lives lost in the years of the conflict. What people may not always remember is that the big colonial empires are still out there and the men in those trenches were not just the youngsters of Europe.

Alfa Ndiaye is from a small village in Senegal and does not speak a word of French but still decided to join the war - because then he can come back and be an important man in a nearby town. He does not join alone - his best friend, Mademba Diop, is there with him - until the day when Mademba dies. Alfa is haunted by that death - he found his friend still alive friend and refused to kill him, to spare him the suffering from dying in pain. The reason for refusal was show more humanity - he cannot kill a friend but as soon as Mademba is dead, Alfa's brain flips over and he realizes that his ideas of humanity had been flawed. So he decides to pay for it, redeeming his humanity - by killing people from the other side and taking their hands.

Alfa narrates the story and as the novel progresses, he is less and less believable, we can see his mind unraveling from grief and guilt. While he narrates the story in the trenches, he also gives us the backstory - the small Senegalese village, the easy life before the war. People start to be afraid of him, even if he does not understand why (or is not ready to admit it). His mind finds correlations where they do not exist while it keeps getting less rational, all the way to the end of the novel where his mind simply breaks (even if some people may read these last chapters differently). The madness of war is finally fully reflected in the madness of a man.

The story is beautifully written. Diop uses a lot of repetitions of expressions and parts of sentences which creates a story-telling cadence that can lull you in (until something horrible happens). There are a lot of metaphors and myths in all of it and I am pretty sure I missed a lot of them (for example 7 shows up a lot (7 hands, 7 traitors, 7 enamel pots in the party when the boys were 16; it cannot be a coincidence but I am not sure what 7 means in this culture). But even when you do not know what they mean, they add to the tapestry of the short novel - as do all the myths and stories that are told in full.

The novel's journey is almost entirely in a man's mind - he may be reporting real events sometimes but trying to separate reality from imaginary may not be so easy, especially as the novel progresses. Guilt and shame and grief rob Alfa of everything that the war did not take from him. And we are right there to see how he unravels.

I am not surprised that the novel won the Man Booker International Prize and Anna Moschovakis translation probably helped with that. It is a bit hard to get into the novel at first, the repetition is almost bothersome - until it just start working and you cannot imagine the novel without it. It is a disturbing novel - but then a novel about a war will always be disturbing. It is the lack of hope at the end which almost gets you - all the way to the end I hoped that Alfa's journey is not one way. And yet, I knew that there is no path back.

Strongly recommended - although with a warning about its darkness and language. show less

But I, Alfa Ndiaye, I understand the true meaning of the captain's words. No one knows what I think. I am free to think whatever I want. And what I think is that people don't want me to think. The unthinkable is what is hidden behind the captain's words. The captain's France needs for us to play the savage when it suits them. They need for us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes. I know, I understand, it's no more complicated than that.

Alfa is a twenty-year-old Senegalese soldier fighting for the French colonizers in the trenches of World War I. The book opens with Alfa lying beside his dying brother-in-arms, Mademba. The two had been inseparable throughout childhood and on the battlefield, now Mademba is begging show more Alfa to "finish him off" rather than let him die in pain and indignity. Alfa refuses to kill his best friend, setting off a downward spiral of doubt, guilt, recrimination, vengeance, and madness. Told entirely from Alfa's point of view, the book is brutal and dark, portraying not only the horrors of war but of colonial racism.

Once I began reading, I could not put the book down, and finished it in a single sitting. I then went back and reread the ending twice more. There is so much to unpack in this small volume. It's also beautifully written, even descriptions of horrible acts read lyrically. It's easy to understand why it won the International Booker Prize in 2021. Although it will not be a book for everyone, if you are interested, I recommend it highly.

Yes, I understood, God's truth, that on the battlefield they wanted only fleeting madness. Madmen of rage, madmen of pain, furious madmen, but temporary ones. No continuous madmen. As soon as the fighting ends we're to file away our rage, our pain, and our fury. Pain is tolerated, we can bring our pain home on the condition that we keep it to ourselves. But rage and fury cannot be brought back to the trench. show less

Alfa Ndiaye is a young Chocolat from Senegal, one of the approximately 450,000 young men from North and West Africa who were conscripted to fight for the French Army on the front lines against Germany during World War I. At least 30,000 of them died in battle, and very few of the 2.3 million Africans who were mobilized during the war gained anything from their participation, as they remained poorly treated subjects of the European colonial powers and would not gain their independence and freedom for nearly half a century.

As the novel begins, Alfa is traumatized by the protracted death of Mademba Diop, his childhood friend and fellow soldier, who suffered for days next to his brother-in-arms after he was ambushed by a German soldier show more while trying to prove his bravery to him. Alfa takes it upon himself to avenge Mademba’s death, by ambushing one German soldier after another and bringing grisly “trophies” back with him to the trenches where his infantrymen are stationed. They initially brand him a hero for his single minded bravery and successful missions, but they ultimately began to fear and shun him as he becomes more determined and more mentally unstable. His commanding officer takes Alfa off of the front lines and has him admitted to a military psychiatric hospital. However, instead of finding peace and internal stability Alfa descends slowly into madness, as he slowly unravels and is transformed into an unreliable and very disturbed narrator, up to the book’s unexpected ending.

‘At Night All Blood Is Black’ is a superbly written and translated analysis of the horrors and effects of warfare on one sensitive young man, who is tasked to mercilessly kill enemy soldiers by hand yet maintain his humanity, and a glimpse of a largely unknown piece of history of the essential roles that millions of Africans played in World War I, which is fully deserving of being named the winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize. show less

Absolutely amazing portrayal of a man's descent into madness.

Alfa makes fun of his "more-than-brother" Mademba's tribal totem, questioning his bravery. In response, Mademba may have been a little too eager in that nights battle (the setting in WWI), and is gravel injured. Three times, Mademba begs Alfa to kill him and put an end to his suffering, but Alfa is unable to do so. Now he is living with overwhelming guilt, becoming more violent and less tethered to reality.

David Diop writes extremely well, with a style that verges on poetic. He does a masterful job of creating the atmosphere of WWI trench warfare -- from boredom to terror. He tells the story of Black Senegalese soldiers fighting for colonial France, and the underlaying racism show more that is present.

A difficult book to read because of the violence, but well worth it. show less

I have by now a pretty sizeable collection of war lit, shelves and shelves of it, so was eager to add this book. David Diop's short novel, AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK, won the Booker Prize in 2021 when the English translation (from French) was published. It is very possibly one of the strangest war books I've ever read. The protagonist-narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, is a "Chocolat" soldier, part of a Senegalese unit fighting with the French in the trench warfare of the First World War. His commander, Captain Armand, is a "Toubab," or White soldier. Alfa knows no French, his language is Wolof, which I learned is one of the more common languages of West Africa. Alfa enlisted to fight along with his closest friend, a small man, Mademba Diop, who show more dies early in battle, leaving Alfa consumed with guilt, and he begins his own private war against the "blue-eyed" enemy, creeping into no-man's land alone to trap, torture and eviscerate German soldiers, then cutting off their hands to bring back to his trench as trophies. After several of these night sorties, Alfa becomes a pariah among his own men, and is seen as a "demm," a "devourer of souls." There is a backstory here too, about Alfa and Mademba's friendship in their small village and some erotic scenes of Alfa losing his virginity with the chief's daughter just before he leaves to go to war. The story is told in a repetitive, incantatory fashion, giving it the air of a folktale, and indeed there are some actual folk tales included in Alfa's story, and an ending of supernatural overtones that will leave you wondering, What just happened here?

A very, very strange tale indeed. War and witchcraft? Maybe. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA show less

The story is about a Senegalese soldier named Alfa Ndiaye who is fighting for France. After Mademba, his "more-than-brother," is mortally wounded and Alfa can't kill him out of mercy, he goes into a ritualistic madness. Every night, Alfa sneaks into enemy lines, kills a German soldier, and comes back with their hand. At first, his friends praised him for being "brave," but as he collected more and more hands, they started to see him as a "soul-eater" or sorcerer.

The book looks at "temporary madness" as a way to stay alive and how the line between a hero and a monster is often drawn by who is doing the killing. Diop shows how French leaders used stereotypes of "African savagery" to scare their enemies, colonizing not only their bodies show more but also their minds. The unbearable guilt of watching Mademba die slowly and painfully is what drives Alfa's journey. The writing seems to put you in a trance and is almost like an oral history or a dark poem. Anna Moschovakis's English translation is great because it captures the rhythm of Alfa's thoughts, which are imagined in Wolof even though they are written in French.
The last few chapters seem to be very unclear and symbolic. This was a hard book to read at times, but it was worth it. show less

The International Booker Prize-winning book by David Diop and translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, is no heart-warming tale suitable for holiday reading. It's a hard, harsh read. The writing is lovely, the way the novel is structured is beautifully done and the story itself is grim.

Alfa is a soldier in the trenches fighting for France in the First World War. He and his best friend came from Senegal to fight with les Chocolats, African soldiers from Frances colonies. And when the worst happens, Alfa is compelled to seek revenge on the other side. His fellow soldiers at first applaud his exploits, but are soon terrified of him.

The story moves back and forth between Alfa's childhood and young adulthood, and his experiences in show more France, and the reader gets an ever more vivid look at what trench warfare did to the hearts and minds of the men who fought. This novel is brilliant, superbly written and absolutely devastating to read. show less