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At Night All Blood Is Black
"Astonishingly good." —Lily Meyer, NPR
"So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020
One of the Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year
Named a most anticipated book by Literary Hub | Electric Literature| The Millions | Refinery29
Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land.
Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.
"So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020
One of the Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year
Named a most anticipated book by Literary Hub | Electric Literature| The Millions | Refinery29
Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land.
Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.
145 pages, Paperback
First published August 16, 2018
About the author
David Diop
12 books322 followersDavid Diop a grandi au Sénégal. Il est actuellement maître de conférences à l’université de Pau.
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David Diop grew up in Senegal. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Pau.
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David Diop grew up in Senegal. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Pau.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,430 reviews
June 2, 2021
Winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize
David Diop's atmospherically visceral, harrowing and powerful award winning novella is superbly translated by Anna Moschovakis, and is deservedly on the 2021 longlist of the International Booker Prize. It throws a much needed spotlight on the European powers in WW1 and their exploitation of people from the colonies drafted to fight and die for them, but almost always missing in accounts of the Great War. The French utilise their racist stereotypes of the African soldiers as barbaric, subhuman, and primitive savages to be incited to defeat their German enemies. Narrated by a Senegalese soldier, Alfa Ndiaye, with his close friend 'almost brother', Mandemba Diop, both leave their home for the first time to serve as the 'Chocolat' soldiers in the European trenches.
When Diop is fatally wounded in no man's land, Alfa cannot bring himself to put an end to his agony and suffering, a decision that is to send him spiralling into a brutal and violent madness, fuelled by overwhelming grief, regret and guilt, with repercussions that have him seeking revenge, to replicate Diop's death as he targets and kills German soldiers. At first, Alfa is lauded by the French soldiers as he returns with his collection of hands, but not for long, as they become afraid and rumours begin to dog him, referring to him as a sorcerer. He sees a psychiatrist, and we learn of his past, his family, and his relationship with Diop. Underlying the narrative are numerous biblical allusions, and unpalatable and unsettling sexual metaphors are used in the battlefields.
The author poses fundamental questions about war, graphically laying bare the nightmare of horrors that is war, how it brutalises and destroys the soldiers used as fodder in the war, as illustrated by the ending, a destruction that extends to the colonisers battling to win the war as it kills any sense of humanity within the national psyche. I am not sure I will ever be able to forget this novel, it feels as if it has seared itself in my memory, an incredible, if unbearable, and revelatory read that documents the fight and sacrifices made in WW1 by soldiers from the colonies, exploited by the ruthless and racist French. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC.
David Diop's atmospherically visceral, harrowing and powerful award winning novella is superbly translated by Anna Moschovakis, and is deservedly on the 2021 longlist of the International Booker Prize. It throws a much needed spotlight on the European powers in WW1 and their exploitation of people from the colonies drafted to fight and die for them, but almost always missing in accounts of the Great War. The French utilise their racist stereotypes of the African soldiers as barbaric, subhuman, and primitive savages to be incited to defeat their German enemies. Narrated by a Senegalese soldier, Alfa Ndiaye, with his close friend 'almost brother', Mandemba Diop, both leave their home for the first time to serve as the 'Chocolat' soldiers in the European trenches.
When Diop is fatally wounded in no man's land, Alfa cannot bring himself to put an end to his agony and suffering, a decision that is to send him spiralling into a brutal and violent madness, fuelled by overwhelming grief, regret and guilt, with repercussions that have him seeking revenge, to replicate Diop's death as he targets and kills German soldiers. At first, Alfa is lauded by the French soldiers as he returns with his collection of hands, but not for long, as they become afraid and rumours begin to dog him, referring to him as a sorcerer. He sees a psychiatrist, and we learn of his past, his family, and his relationship with Diop. Underlying the narrative are numerous biblical allusions, and unpalatable and unsettling sexual metaphors are used in the battlefields.
The author poses fundamental questions about war, graphically laying bare the nightmare of horrors that is war, how it brutalises and destroys the soldiers used as fodder in the war, as illustrated by the ending, a destruction that extends to the colonisers battling to win the war as it kills any sense of humanity within the national psyche. I am not sure I will ever be able to forget this novel, it feels as if it has seared itself in my memory, an incredible, if unbearable, and revelatory read that documents the fight and sacrifices made in WW1 by soldiers from the colonies, exploited by the ruthless and racist French. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC.
June 2, 2021
3.5*
Now Winner of the International Booker Prize 2021
As the name suggests, this novel is not about rainbows and unicorns, it is bloody and brutal. My return to literary fiction couldn’t have been steeper but I do not regret my choice.
After reading almost the whole Republic of Consciousness longlist, I got tired of bleakness and difficult prose so I decided to take a break. As such, my plan to read the whole Booker International shortlist was abandoned. However, I decided to try the titles that attract me the most. At Night All Blood Is Black captured my attention because it deals with a part of history I know nothing about. Also, it is very short and I got it from Netgalley from one of my favourite publishers so I felt responsible to review it.
The novel is set in the trenches of WW1 and had as main character, Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese black man, part of a „Chocolate” army fighting for the French. Unable to mercy kill his badly wounded friend he descend into madness and starts to murder his enemies in gruesome ways. After the deed he takes one of their severed hands as trophy. The French use the racist stereotypes of the African soldiers as being savage and sorcerers to scare the German enemies so at first, Alfa’s revenge killings are praised as part of the act. After the hands start to pile, the rest of the French army begin to feel frightened. It shows how war can dehumanize people and how they were butchered in the trenches with almost no chance to survive.
The prose is terrifying, violent, graphic, repetitive which makes it even more atmospheric but also poetic. I preferred the 2nd part more, where we learn some background information about the two characters before the war. It is an intense novel and it should be read in on go, not like I did, 10 pages now and then. One of the most unsettling parts of this novel was the repetitive use of sexual metaphors to describe the trenches. I am not sure what the goal was but the effect was quite disgusting. I might not have understood the ending either.
Some interesting thoughts about translations: “To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
Now Winner of the International Booker Prize 2021
As the name suggests, this novel is not about rainbows and unicorns, it is bloody and brutal. My return to literary fiction couldn’t have been steeper but I do not regret my choice.
After reading almost the whole Republic of Consciousness longlist, I got tired of bleakness and difficult prose so I decided to take a break. As such, my plan to read the whole Booker International shortlist was abandoned. However, I decided to try the titles that attract me the most. At Night All Blood Is Black captured my attention because it deals with a part of history I know nothing about. Also, it is very short and I got it from Netgalley from one of my favourite publishers so I felt responsible to review it.
The novel is set in the trenches of WW1 and had as main character, Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese black man, part of a „Chocolate” army fighting for the French. Unable to mercy kill his badly wounded friend he descend into madness and starts to murder his enemies in gruesome ways. After the deed he takes one of their severed hands as trophy. The French use the racist stereotypes of the African soldiers as being savage and sorcerers to scare the German enemies so at first, Alfa’s revenge killings are praised as part of the act. After the hands start to pile, the rest of the French army begin to feel frightened. It shows how war can dehumanize people and how they were butchered in the trenches with almost no chance to survive.
The prose is terrifying, violent, graphic, repetitive which makes it even more atmospheric but also poetic. I preferred the 2nd part more, where we learn some background information about the two characters before the war. It is an intense novel and it should be read in on go, not like I did, 10 pages now and then. One of the most unsettling parts of this novel was the repetitive use of sexual metaphors to describe the trenches. I am not sure what the goal was but the effect was quite disgusting. I might not have understood the ending either.
Some interesting thoughts about translations: “To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
June 3, 2021
English: At Night All Blood is Black
Now Winner of the International Booker Prize 2021
Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2018
This book is so intense, reading it is a physical experience: The slaughter on the battlefields of WW I, desperation, guilt, madness, sex - the first person narrator takes the reader down a very graphic rabbit hole and it's not easy to stomach. Our 20-year-old protagonist Alfa Ndiaye and his best friend want to leave their small Senegalese village in order to see the world and, facing limited options, they decide to join the French army and fight for the colonial power in WW I. When his childhood friend dies in a slow and particularly gruesome way while Alfa watches as he feels like he cannot finish the act of the enemy, he goes mad over his guilt: Alfa starts to seek out and wound German soldiers in the same painful way as his friend was wounded by one of their compatriots, watches them suffer and then kills them, taking with him one of their hands. Now the other French soldiers start to fear the black man who is covered in blood and brings severed hands to their camp, and Alfa, confronted with the madness of industrialized warfare, lonely, grieving and disturbed, spirals out of control.
At the core, French-Senegalese author David Diop is telling a story of racism and war: France sent 180,000 black soldiers from their colonies into WW I, perpetrating racist stereotypes, arming them with machetes and sending them on the battlefield screaming - and the Germans behind the enemy lines did buy into the narrative and feared the "savages" who brought "barbarity" to Europe. Alfa sees through the racist dynamic and suffers under the inhumane orders he is expected to follow without questioning: He knows that it is crazy to follow the commands, because the chance to survive is so small. His pain becomes unbearable when he realizes that his best friend died to defend a racist regime in the complete madness of the battlefields of WW I - which raises the question: Isn't it a normal reaction to lose one's mind when witnessing the pointless and seemingly endless brutality, caught in the slaughterhouse that Alfa's world has become? This protagonist suffers from severe PTSD, which of course wasn't an acknowledged condition in WW I.
In several flashbacks, we learn about Alfa's backstory, his family, his childhood, and how he ended up in the war, until this novella culminates in a terrible finale. The narration mirrors oral traditions and works with mantra-like repetitions that are remiscient of a religious litany or a folk song. The way Diop conveys Alfa's thoughts and feelings is unbelievably effective - I rarely read a book that distressed me as much as this one. But make no mistake: The explicit scenes aren't gratuitous, they are always there to make a point - even the placement of the wounds is always symbolic. A key concept of the text is that of "being double", as Alfa himself puts it, so look out for the analogies and comparisons in the text that hold important messages.
The French title of the book is "Frère d'âme", soul brother, a homophone to "Frère d'armes", brother in arms - this does not only point to Alfa's relationship with his dead friend, but also to the way black soldiers are dehumanized, because they are not perceived as people with souls, but as living weapons. Alfa questions existing rules, realizes the nature of socially accepted cruelty and then concludes: "I became a savage through thinking." This is powerful stuff, deservedly celebrated in France, a country which currently outclasses the rest of Europe when it comes to edgy novels with distinct voices.
Now Winner of the International Booker Prize 2021
Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2018
This book is so intense, reading it is a physical experience: The slaughter on the battlefields of WW I, desperation, guilt, madness, sex - the first person narrator takes the reader down a very graphic rabbit hole and it's not easy to stomach. Our 20-year-old protagonist Alfa Ndiaye and his best friend want to leave their small Senegalese village in order to see the world and, facing limited options, they decide to join the French army and fight for the colonial power in WW I. When his childhood friend dies in a slow and particularly gruesome way while Alfa watches as he feels like he cannot finish the act of the enemy, he goes mad over his guilt: Alfa starts to seek out and wound German soldiers in the same painful way as his friend was wounded by one of their compatriots, watches them suffer and then kills them, taking with him one of their hands. Now the other French soldiers start to fear the black man who is covered in blood and brings severed hands to their camp, and Alfa, confronted with the madness of industrialized warfare, lonely, grieving and disturbed, spirals out of control.
At the core, French-Senegalese author David Diop is telling a story of racism and war: France sent 180,000 black soldiers from their colonies into WW I, perpetrating racist stereotypes, arming them with machetes and sending them on the battlefield screaming - and the Germans behind the enemy lines did buy into the narrative and feared the "savages" who brought "barbarity" to Europe. Alfa sees through the racist dynamic and suffers under the inhumane orders he is expected to follow without questioning: He knows that it is crazy to follow the commands, because the chance to survive is so small. His pain becomes unbearable when he realizes that his best friend died to defend a racist regime in the complete madness of the battlefields of WW I - which raises the question: Isn't it a normal reaction to lose one's mind when witnessing the pointless and seemingly endless brutality, caught in the slaughterhouse that Alfa's world has become? This protagonist suffers from severe PTSD, which of course wasn't an acknowledged condition in WW I.
In several flashbacks, we learn about Alfa's backstory, his family, his childhood, and how he ended up in the war, until this novella culminates in a terrible finale. The narration mirrors oral traditions and works with mantra-like repetitions that are remiscient of a religious litany or a folk song. The way Diop conveys Alfa's thoughts and feelings is unbelievably effective - I rarely read a book that distressed me as much as this one. But make no mistake: The explicit scenes aren't gratuitous, they are always there to make a point - even the placement of the wounds is always symbolic. A key concept of the text is that of "being double", as Alfa himself puts it, so look out for the analogies and comparisons in the text that hold important messages.
The French title of the book is "Frère d'âme", soul brother, a homophone to "Frère d'armes", brother in arms - this does not only point to Alfa's relationship with his dead friend, but also to the way black soldiers are dehumanized, because they are not perceived as people with souls, but as living weapons. Alfa questions existing rules, realizes the nature of socially accepted cruelty and then concludes: "I became a savage through thinking." This is powerful stuff, deservedly celebrated in France, a country which currently outclasses the rest of Europe when it comes to edgy novels with distinct voices.
June 2, 2021
Winner of The International Booker Prize 2021.
I'm tempted to write one of those useless three word reviews that you find at the back covers (instead of good old summaries) of most paperbacks these days.
"Brutal. Riveting. Honest."
Or how about -
"Disturbing. Dark. Brilliant."
But honestly it's not brilliant. Unless you consider comparisons of war trenches with women's genitals brilliant, in which case, I'm afraid I don't share this particular fetish.
However there's still a lot to be said for it.
First of all, the book should come with Trigger Warnings: graphic depiction of violence, unhealthy masochism, trauma.
At its core this book confronts the nature of dualities, it hovers on the chasm between life and death while questioning the validity of both. As we witness an already deranged protagonist's quick descent into what could only be complete insanity, we are left reeling at the vicissitudes of truths and falsehoods within the story. Despite the monotonous narration and gory-ness, our gaze and attention are constantly drawn to the text through the use of poignant, repetitive phrases like "God's truth" and "I swear".
And of course, no review of this book is complete without praising its sharp commentary on colonialism and wars. Diop does a terrific job of illustrating the debilitating effects of wartime atrocities on ordinary men.
But in the end, I think this book was too gruesome and hyper-masculine for me.
I'm tempted to write one of those useless three word reviews that you find at the back covers (instead of good old summaries) of most paperbacks these days.
"Brutal. Riveting. Honest."
Or how about -
"Disturbing. Dark. Brilliant."
But honestly it's not brilliant. Unless you consider comparisons of war trenches with women's genitals brilliant, in which case, I'm afraid I don't share this particular fetish.
However there's still a lot to be said for it.
First of all, the book should come with Trigger Warnings: graphic depiction of violence, unhealthy masochism, trauma.
At its core this book confronts the nature of dualities, it hovers on the chasm between life and death while questioning the validity of both. As we witness an already deranged protagonist's quick descent into what could only be complete insanity, we are left reeling at the vicissitudes of truths and falsehoods within the story. Despite the monotonous narration and gory-ness, our gaze and attention are constantly drawn to the text through the use of poignant, repetitive phrases like "God's truth" and "I swear".
And of course, no review of this book is complete without praising its sharp commentary on colonialism and wars. Diop does a terrific job of illustrating the debilitating effects of wartime atrocities on ordinary men.
But in the end, I think this book was too gruesome and hyper-masculine for me.
June 23, 2020
"I can think what I want. But I won't tell-the depths to which the war drove me...the weight of shame...the day Mademba Diop died".
Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop lived in a small Senegalese village. At age 20, they decided to join the French army's fight against Germany in WWI. With rifle in one hand, machete in the other, told to scream like "savages", they left the trenches to intimidate, scare and shock the enemy. "I found the...soldiers foolish-soldiers, black or white, when commanded to leave the shelter of their trench...with a savage cry...the captain has told them they are great warriors, so they love to get killed while singing...".
The day Mademba was mortally wounded, "I couldn't cut the barbed wire of his suffering...I let duty make my choice". Mademba cried, "...if you are my brother, Alfa...I'm begging you...slit my throat...I would no longer listen to the voice of duty, the voice that commands...but it was too late".
"I am not concerned with my trenchmates...what I want is to fight face-to-face...I always returned after battle with an enemy rifle and the hand that went with it...". Trophies...I was lauded...until the fourth rifle and hand...now shunned, feared by my war brothers...I became untouchable, a soldier sorcerer.
Through back stories, the bond between Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop is conveyed to the reader. Motherless Alfa was embraced by the Diop family, fragile Mademba became physically fit under Alfa's tutelage. Now Alfa's guilt and regret are unbearable. "I didn't really listen to Mademba, my childhood friend, my more-than-brother,...I thought only of...the blue-eyed enemy...I listened to the voice of revenge". Alfa is coming undone. Plans hurriedly are made to remove him from the trenches.
"At Night All Blood is Black" by David Diop was "selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens (2018). It is an intense, riveting historical novel of a young man's decent into madness. Alfa was forced to make a moral decision, a no win choice. Regret, horror, and the expendability of soldiers, especially those from the colonies, are this tome's hot button topics and make for a graphically compelling read. This tome was unputdownable despite its darkness and Alfa's battle with his demons during WWI.
Thank you Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop lived in a small Senegalese village. At age 20, they decided to join the French army's fight against Germany in WWI. With rifle in one hand, machete in the other, told to scream like "savages", they left the trenches to intimidate, scare and shock the enemy. "I found the...soldiers foolish-soldiers, black or white, when commanded to leave the shelter of their trench...with a savage cry...the captain has told them they are great warriors, so they love to get killed while singing...".
The day Mademba was mortally wounded, "I couldn't cut the barbed wire of his suffering...I let duty make my choice". Mademba cried, "...if you are my brother, Alfa...I'm begging you...slit my throat...I would no longer listen to the voice of duty, the voice that commands...but it was too late".
"I am not concerned with my trenchmates...what I want is to fight face-to-face...I always returned after battle with an enemy rifle and the hand that went with it...". Trophies...I was lauded...until the fourth rifle and hand...now shunned, feared by my war brothers...I became untouchable, a soldier sorcerer.
Through back stories, the bond between Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop is conveyed to the reader. Motherless Alfa was embraced by the Diop family, fragile Mademba became physically fit under Alfa's tutelage. Now Alfa's guilt and regret are unbearable. "I didn't really listen to Mademba, my childhood friend, my more-than-brother,...I thought only of...the blue-eyed enemy...I listened to the voice of revenge". Alfa is coming undone. Plans hurriedly are made to remove him from the trenches.
"At Night All Blood is Black" by David Diop was "selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens (2018). It is an intense, riveting historical novel of a young man's decent into madness. Alfa was forced to make a moral decision, a no win choice. Regret, horror, and the expendability of soldiers, especially those from the colonies, are this tome's hot button topics and make for a graphically compelling read. This tome was unputdownable despite its darkness and Alfa's battle with his demons during WWI.
Thank you Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
February 21, 2021
Over two million West Africans fought for France in WWI, and yet the image I have of that war is entirely white. I can't remember a single line of Wilfred Owen, or a single scene of All Quiet on the Western Front that mentions any other kind of person in the trenches.
Diop's novel corrects that view. It brings to life a world where white officers encourage their "chocolat" soldiers to strike fear in the enemy by behaving with excess savagery on the battlefield. The officers think of these men, after all, as savages. But when one of the men goes too far in his savagery, he's sent to a field hospital to recover from what his officers categorize as a mental breakdown. It's a striking and harrowing counterpoint to Pat Barker's novel Regeneration, where men are sent home from the battle and considered mentally ill for refusing to fight hard enough.
The narrative voice is lyrical, mythical, nearly incantory, and yet the story the narrator tells is one of relentless violence--not just violence of trench warfare, graphically portrayed, but also the violence of colonialism.
Diop's novel corrects that view. It brings to life a world where white officers encourage their "chocolat" soldiers to strike fear in the enemy by behaving with excess savagery on the battlefield. The officers think of these men, after all, as savages. But when one of the men goes too far in his savagery, he's sent to a field hospital to recover from what his officers categorize as a mental breakdown. It's a striking and harrowing counterpoint to Pat Barker's novel Regeneration, where men are sent home from the battle and considered mentally ill for refusing to fight hard enough.
The narrative voice is lyrical, mythical, nearly incantory, and yet the story the narrator tells is one of relentless violence--not just violence of trench warfare, graphically portrayed, but also the violence of colonialism.
June 2, 2021
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2021! 🎉
Full of incantations, invoking god and understanding, while detailing a gruesome rampage to avenge the loss of more than a brother in arms through a blood splattered kind of shell shock
Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.
Possession, Senegalese folktales, war trauma, colonialism: this was a breathless read that I practically inhaled in one sitting. Compelling, dark and with a twist that keeps you on your feet till the very end. Mademba Diop is a soldier from Senegal who dies in the trenches of France. His more than brother in arms (however much I loved the poetic nature of the English title At Night All Blood is Black, actually the Dutch translation that roughly equates to "More Than A Brother" is much closer to the French original title) Alfa Ndiaye is the narrator of the book. He tells of the hell of the First World War trenches and the revenge he tries to exact upon the Germans on the other side, cutting of their hands in raids that move from being seen brave to terrifying, shocking and almost black magic like.
Slowly Ndiaye shows his relationship with Mademba, his memories of Senegal and what he left behind, and he starts some kind of process of healing which turns almost Stephen King like in the end of the book. David Diop manages to give Alfa a singular, almost biblical voice, full of incantations and fixed phrases that serve to keep some of the horrors of the battlefield away from the reader. Scenes of punishing deserters, intestines spilling around in the mud, cold and damp seeping in everywhere because fire could draw in artillery fire. Its haunting stuff in such a short book.
The writing is almost claustrophobic and drags you into the trenches while examining colonial exploitation, nomads being supplanted and human life only having meaning in folktales instead of the real world. A well earned winner!
Dutch quote:
De commandant houdt van de oorlog zoals iemand van een wispelturige vrouw houdt.
Full of incantations, invoking god and understanding, while detailing a gruesome rampage to avenge the loss of more than a brother in arms through a blood splattered kind of shell shock
Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.
Possession, Senegalese folktales, war trauma, colonialism: this was a breathless read that I practically inhaled in one sitting. Compelling, dark and with a twist that keeps you on your feet till the very end. Mademba Diop is a soldier from Senegal who dies in the trenches of France. His more than brother in arms (however much I loved the poetic nature of the English title At Night All Blood is Black, actually the Dutch translation that roughly equates to "More Than A Brother" is much closer to the French original title) Alfa Ndiaye is the narrator of the book. He tells of the hell of the First World War trenches and the revenge he tries to exact upon the Germans on the other side, cutting of their hands in raids that move from being seen brave to terrifying, shocking and almost black magic like.
Slowly Ndiaye shows his relationship with Mademba, his memories of Senegal and what he left behind, and he starts some kind of process of healing which turns almost Stephen King like in the end of the book. David Diop manages to give Alfa a singular, almost biblical voice, full of incantations and fixed phrases that serve to keep some of the horrors of the battlefield away from the reader. Scenes of punishing deserters, intestines spilling around in the mud, cold and damp seeping in everywhere because fire could draw in artillery fire. Its haunting stuff in such a short book.
The writing is almost claustrophobic and drags you into the trenches while examining colonial exploitation, nomads being supplanted and human life only having meaning in folktales instead of the real world. A well earned winner!
Dutch quote:
De commandant houdt van de oorlog zoals iemand van een wispelturige vrouw houdt.
February 24, 2020
«Είμαι η νύχτα και η μέρα.
Είμαι η φωτιά και το ξύλο που το κατακαίει.
Είμαι ο αθώος και ο ένοχος.
Είμαι η αρχή και το τέλος.
Είμαι ο δημιουργός και ο καταστροφέας.
Είμαι δισυπόστατος.
Ο μεταφραστής φαίνεται να διστάζει, φοβισμένος από τα αυστηρά βλέμματα που εκτοξεύονται με ανησυχία και θυμό προς το μέρος του. Καθαρίζει τον λαιμό του και απαντά στις επίσημες στολές με χαμηλή φωνή που σχεδόν δεν ακούγεται:
«Εκείνος είπε ότι ήταν ταυτόχρονα ο θάνατος και η ζωή».
Είναι ο πόλεμος, ο πτωματοφάγος πόλεμος,
ο μισητός,που καταβροχθίζει ψυχές και σώματα
για να αποκτήσει δύναμη, υπόσταση,λογική, νόηση, συναίσθηση.
Του χρειάζονται απαραιτήτως για να μπορέσει
να εξηγήσει την αρχή της αλήθειας
που δεν έχει τέλος, για να μπορέσει να αφηγηθεί
την ιστορία του, να δείξει τις πληγές που τον έθρεψαν, να θυσιάσει το αίμα που πότισε την κυριαρχία του
πάνω στη γη, την γη του κανενός.
Τα σοκολατί και τα λευκά χυμμένα αίματα του πολεμικού πολιτισμού , τα σκούρα και τα άσπρα κορμιά, τα γαλανά μάτια και τα σκοτεινά βλέμματα, ξεκοιλιάζουν τα εχθρικά χαρακώματα της αθωότητας και της δυστυχίας, παίρνουν στην ζεστή αγκαλιά τους τα πεπρωμένα των μνημείων και των ηρώων, με τα παράσημα ανδρείας που γυαλίζουν σαν κόκκινα φεγγάρια και στις δυο όψεις τους, έγκλημα και θηριωδία.
Οι νεκροί, που σε σκούρες στολές στρατιωτικών δηλώνουν υπακοή στη σφυρίχτρα του λοχαγού
που δεν μπορεί να προδώσει την πλάνη του νεκρικού καθήκοντος, τα τρόπαια των εχθρών βλέπουν τα γραμμένα της μοίρα τους και ξέρουν πως ο θεός δεν μπορεί να ξεμπλέξει τα νήματα πολλών πεπρωμένων συγχρόνως.
Άλλωστε ο αληθινός θεός φθάνει πάντα καθυστερημένος διαπιστώνει τις ζημιές στην γη του κανενός που τίποτε δεν είναι απλό
και
ο λυμφατικός δαίμονας που ξεβράζεσαι απο τα έγκατα της άγονης γης, ο φρικιαστικός πρίγκιπας με τα σημάδια απο τις κραυγές της τραγωδίας ξεπηδάει ανάμεσα σε χαρακτήρες που δεν αναγνωρίζει και ομολογεί πως τα χαμόγελα της τρέλας, της ύπαρξης, της ηδονής και των ό��κων ειναι μεταδοτικά.
Το διαμαντάκι αυτό, τούτο το μυθιστόρημα, αρχικά μοιάζει σαν άλλο ένα πολεμικό χρονικό του Α’ΠΠ που κόβουμε τις εχθρικές σάρκες, σακατεύουμε, αποκεφαλίζουμε, ξεκοιλιάζουμε και με τα αχνιστά εντόσθια των στρατιωτών τρέφεται αυτή η γη,
αυτή που δεν ειναι κανενός.
Όμως, απο κάποιο συγκλονιστικό σημείο της εξέλιξης και μετά ζούμε με όλες τις αισθήσεις μας και την νόηση μας την ιστορία ζωής του Άλφα Ντιάγε, του άγριου νέγρου, του Σενεγαλέζου τυφεκιοφόρου, που μεταμορφώνεται σε ζουλού, κανίβαλο, βασανιστή και μαύρο εφιάλτη για τους εχθρούς με τα γαλανά μάτια,
μα κυρίως για την ψυχή του που χανεται για πάντα ανάμεσα σε ζωή και θάνατο.
Ανάμεσα σε πόλεμο και ειρήνη.
Ανάμεσα στα λάφυρα των κομμένων χέριων που συλλέγει και τον επιθανάτιο ρόγχο των ανθρώπων που αγάπησε, των ανθρώπων που είτε ζωντανοί είτε νεκροί αποτελούν το δικό του χαράκωμα.
Εκεί που κρύβεται το μεγάλο αθώο παιδί της Αφρικής για να μην το βρει ο ευρωπαϊκός πολιτισμός και το καταδικάσει σε αιώνια σκλαβιά λόγω της άγριας και βίαιης αφρικανικής «μαύρης ντροπής».
Ο Ντιαγέ μέσω του πολέμου χάνει και την τελευταία σταγόνα ενσυναίσθησης και ανθρωπιάς που του είχε απομείνει. Εκεί εξαγριώνεται απο τον πόνο και την φρίκη. Ξεδιπλώνει τις μνήμες της θλιβερής ζωής του παράλληλα με την μεταμόρφωση σε διατεταγμένη υπηρεσία θανάτου.
Γίνεται άγγελος φονιάς, γίνεται δισυπόστατος,
γίνεται κενό, άηχο, βαθύ, σκοτεινό, δαιδαλώδες και αβυσσσαλέο.
Γινεται γνώστης με τον πιο σκληρό τρόπο, πως ναι, είναι αλήθεια, ότι «τη νύχτα, όλα τα αίματα είναι μαύρα».
🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤
📚📚📚
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς
Είμαι η φωτιά και το ξύλο που το κατακαίει.
Είμαι ο αθώος και ο ένοχος.
Είμαι η αρχή και το τέλος.
Είμαι ο δημιουργός και ο καταστροφέας.
Είμαι δισυπόστατος.
Ο μεταφραστής φαίνεται να διστάζει, φοβισμένος από τα αυστηρά βλέμματα που εκτοξεύονται με ανησυχία και θυμό προς το μέρος του. Καθαρίζει τον λαιμό του και απαντά στις επίσημες στολές με χαμηλή φωνή που σχεδόν δεν ακούγεται:
«Εκείνος είπε ότι ήταν ταυτόχρονα ο θάνατος και η ζωή».
Είναι ο πόλεμος, ο πτωματοφάγος πόλεμος,
ο μισητός,που καταβροχθίζει ψυχές και σώματα
για να αποκτήσει δύναμη, υπόσταση,λογική, νόηση, συναίσθηση.
Του χρειάζονται απαραιτήτως για να μπορέσει
να εξηγήσει την αρχή της αλήθειας
που δεν έχει τέλος, για να μπορέσει να αφηγηθεί
την ιστορία του, να δείξει τις πληγές που τον έθρεψαν, να θυσιάσει το αίμα που πότισε την κυριαρχία του
πάνω στη γη, την γη του κανενός.
Τα σοκολατί και τα λευκά χυμμένα αίματα του πολεμικού πολιτισμού , τα σκούρα και τα άσπρα κορμιά, τα γαλανά μάτια και τα σκοτεινά βλέμματα, ξεκοιλιάζουν τα εχθρικά χαρακώματα της αθωότητας και της δυστυχίας, παίρνουν στην ζεστή αγκαλιά τους τα πεπρωμένα των μνημείων και των ηρώων, με τα παράσημα ανδρείας που γυαλίζουν σαν κόκκινα φεγγάρια και στις δυο όψεις τους, έγκλημα και θηριωδία.
Οι νεκροί, που σε σκούρες στολές στρατιωτικών δηλώνουν υπακοή στη σφυρίχτρα του λοχαγού
που δεν μπορεί να προδώσει την πλάνη του νεκρικού καθήκοντος, τα τρόπαια των εχθρών βλέπουν τα γραμμένα της μοίρα τους και ξέρουν πως ο θεός δεν μπορεί να ξεμπλέξει τα νήματα πολλών πεπρωμένων συγχρόνως.
Άλλωστε ο αληθινός θεός φθάνει πάντα καθυστερημένος διαπιστώνει τις ζημιές στην γη του κανενός που τίποτε δεν είναι απλό
και
ο λυμφατικός δαίμονας που ξεβράζεσαι απο τα έγκατα της άγονης γης, ο φρικιαστικός πρίγκιπας με τα σημάδια απο τις κραυγές της τραγωδίας ξεπηδάει ανάμεσα σε χαρακτήρες που δεν αναγνωρίζει και ομολογεί πως τα χαμόγελα της τρέλας, της ύπαρξης, της ηδονής και των ό��κων ειναι μεταδοτικά.
Το διαμαντάκι αυτό, τούτο το μυθιστόρημα, αρχικά μοιάζει σαν άλλο ένα πολεμικό χρονικό του Α’ΠΠ που κόβουμε τις εχθρικές σάρκες, σακατεύουμε, αποκεφαλίζουμε, ξεκοιλιάζουμε και με τα αχνιστά εντόσθια των στρατιωτών τρέφεται αυτή η γη,
αυτή που δεν ειναι κανενός.
Όμως, απο κάποιο συγκλονιστικό σημείο της εξέλιξης και μετά ζούμε με όλες τις αισθήσεις μας και την νόηση μας την ιστορία ζωής του Άλφα Ντιάγε, του άγριου νέγρου, του Σενεγαλέζου τυφεκιοφόρου, που μεταμορφώνεται σε ζουλού, κανίβαλο, βασανιστή και μαύρο εφιάλτη για τους εχθρούς με τα γαλανά μάτια,
μα κυρίως για την ψυχή του που χανεται για πάντα ανάμεσα σε ζωή και θάνατο.
Ανάμεσα σε πόλεμο και ειρήνη.
Ανάμεσα στα λάφυρα των κομμένων χέριων που συλλέγει και τον επιθανάτιο ρόγχο των ανθρώπων που αγάπησε, των ανθρώπων που είτε ζωντανοί είτε νεκροί αποτελούν το δικό του χαράκωμα.
Εκεί που κρύβεται το μεγάλο αθώο παιδί της Αφρικής για να μην το βρει ο ευρωπαϊκός πολιτισμός και το καταδικάσει σε αιώνια σκλαβιά λόγω της άγριας και βίαιης αφρικανικής «μαύρης ντροπής».
Ο Ντιαγέ μέσω του πολέμου χάνει και την τελευταία σταγόνα ενσυναίσθησης και ανθρωπιάς που του είχε απομείνει. Εκεί εξαγριώνεται απο τον πόνο και την φρίκη. Ξεδιπλώνει τις μνήμες της θλιβερής ζωής του παράλληλα με την μεταμόρφωση σε διατεταγμένη υπηρεσία θανάτου.
Γίνεται άγγελος φονιάς, γίνεται δισυπόστατος,
γίνεται κενό, άηχο, βαθύ, σκοτεινό, δαιδαλώδες και αβυσσσαλέο.
Γινεται γνώστης με τον πιο σκληρό τρόπο, πως ναι, είναι αλήθεια, ότι «τη νύχτα, όλα τα αίματα είναι μαύρα».
🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤
📚📚📚
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς
June 4, 2021
Military officers often describe how it's necessary to mentally and physically break recruits down so they can be rebuilt into soldiers. The idea is that creating a steely sensibility which follows the absolute authority of commanding officers is necessary for the brutality of war. Arguably, it's a process that entirely strips individuals of their humanity to transform them into killing machines. This is what the character of Alfa has turned into at the start of David Diop's “At Night All Blood is Black”. When his “more-than-brother” friend Mademba is killed during combat while they are fighting in WWI, Alfa goes on a rampage assassinating German soldiers and cutting off their hands to keep as trophies. This Senegalese soldier fights for the French army and at first they find his deadly tenacity admirable and then fear he's actually a madman or demonically possessed. Within the context of war, questions of humanity or inhumanity become dangerously confused. This intensely brilliant novel portrays the conflicts this soldier has over this issue as he literally battles through his grief and rage. In deftly pared-down prose the author powerfully describes the chaotic savagery of war and how it spiritually crushes this beautifully unique and traumatized individual.
Read my full review of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop on LonesomeReader
I'm thrilled Diop's novel has won the International Booker Prize and you can see my live reaction has I'm watching the ceremony here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqdsOdnTA3U
Read my full review of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop on LonesomeReader
I'm thrilled Diop's novel has won the International Booker Prize and you can see my live reaction has I'm watching the ceremony here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqdsOdnTA3U
June 4, 2021
Winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize, one of two shortlisted books by Pushkin Press – who publish “the world’s best stories, to be read and read again.”.
It was good to see that after their rather odd shortlist and longlist choices the judges remembered what the words "long-form fiction" actually mean.
In 2014 I spent much of the Summer reading non-fiction books around World War I / The Great War – mainly concentrating on the factors that lead to its outbreak, but some covering something of the War as well. One thing that becomes clear if you study the War (but is perhaps a lot less clear from more standard accounts and most fiction on the topic) is the extent of non-white involvement particularly in the British and French armies.
One of the most interesting books I read was “Attrition” by William Phlipott, one of its key themes (from my 2014 review) is that “from very early on it was inevitable that given the current state of technology and the existential nature of the war, the land war would largely be an attritional battle of numbers – destroying or capturing the enemies key war resource (i.e. soldiers) to the extent that they could no longer sustain the battle”. One aspect of this was the advantage held by England and France in being able to raise troops from their Empires (for example the Sepoys in the British Army), the book stating that “The availability of imperial manpower resources allowed the Entente states to keep expanding their war efforts after Germany’s had reached its peak”. The book points out that a French General Charles Magnin had argued even pre-war, in an influential treatise, that a French imperial manpower reserve “The Force Noire” should be developed as a counterweight to Germany’s larger population and that as the war progressed the West African battalions became more and more crucial to the French war effort.
And this is a novel about those forces – the “Chocolat” soldiers – and two soldiers in particular: Alfa Ndiaye and his “closer than a brother” friend Mademba Diop. The novel begins with one of its many difficult to read scenes, with Mademba dying slowly in agony in no man’s land, his guts literally in his hands, with Alfa refusing, on what he later realises is mistaken principle, his friends pleas to end his agony by cutting his throat.
Another history book I read was the popular military historian Max Hastings “Catastrophe: Europe Goes To War 1914”. That book gave much less coverage to the West Africans that fought for the French other than in a rather gratuitous section on war brutality which mention a story of a column of escorted German PoW’s being “beset by Senegalese troops determined to cut off the German’s ears”, before following up with a reference to a French army Chaplin in a field hospital complaining about the lack of civilisation of the West Africans being treated (“while applauding the terror the colonial infantry inspired among the Germans”).
However gratuitous, this story acts as a very close analogy to the subsequent story of Alfa. On the way back to the trenches, carrying Mademba’s body something switches in his mind (what we might now categorise as PTSD) – the first sign he recognises himself is that he suddenly views the trenches in a highly sexualised way; but the more serious consequence is that he takes to hanging back after the retreat is sounded with the aim of hamstringing a German soldier with his machete, dragging him to no-mans land , slicing his belly and then cutting his throat after only a short period as soon as the soldier pleads for release – effectively recreating Mademba’s death with a different ending. Even more gruesomely he cuts the hand from his victim and takes it back with him to the trenches.
At first his savagery and the fear it must strike in the enemy makes him something of a hero, even among the white soldiers, but soon the stench of death he carries makes him a pariah even among his fellow Africans – at which point he is sent to a field hospital for recovery.
There – in what is the real beating heart (I am tempted to say bloody guts) of the novel - we learn more of his life in Africa, his mother and father, his relationship to Mademba and his first sexual experience just before his travel to Africa, and a tour de force ending - that I think will stay with me for a long time - reunites him with Mademba.
Overall this is a harrowing but compelling novel of brotherhood in war (something I think better captured by the French title), very naturally translated by Anna Moschovakis.
It was good to see that after their rather odd shortlist and longlist choices the judges remembered what the words "long-form fiction" actually mean.
In 2014 I spent much of the Summer reading non-fiction books around World War I / The Great War – mainly concentrating on the factors that lead to its outbreak, but some covering something of the War as well. One thing that becomes clear if you study the War (but is perhaps a lot less clear from more standard accounts and most fiction on the topic) is the extent of non-white involvement particularly in the British and French armies.
One of the most interesting books I read was “Attrition” by William Phlipott, one of its key themes (from my 2014 review) is that “from very early on it was inevitable that given the current state of technology and the existential nature of the war, the land war would largely be an attritional battle of numbers – destroying or capturing the enemies key war resource (i.e. soldiers) to the extent that they could no longer sustain the battle”. One aspect of this was the advantage held by England and France in being able to raise troops from their Empires (for example the Sepoys in the British Army), the book stating that “The availability of imperial manpower resources allowed the Entente states to keep expanding their war efforts after Germany’s had reached its peak”. The book points out that a French General Charles Magnin had argued even pre-war, in an influential treatise, that a French imperial manpower reserve “The Force Noire” should be developed as a counterweight to Germany’s larger population and that as the war progressed the West African battalions became more and more crucial to the French war effort.
And this is a novel about those forces – the “Chocolat” soldiers – and two soldiers in particular: Alfa Ndiaye and his “closer than a brother” friend Mademba Diop. The novel begins with one of its many difficult to read scenes, with Mademba dying slowly in agony in no man’s land, his guts literally in his hands, with Alfa refusing, on what he later realises is mistaken principle, his friends pleas to end his agony by cutting his throat.
Another history book I read was the popular military historian Max Hastings “Catastrophe: Europe Goes To War 1914”. That book gave much less coverage to the West Africans that fought for the French other than in a rather gratuitous section on war brutality which mention a story of a column of escorted German PoW’s being “beset by Senegalese troops determined to cut off the German’s ears”, before following up with a reference to a French army Chaplin in a field hospital complaining about the lack of civilisation of the West Africans being treated (“while applauding the terror the colonial infantry inspired among the Germans”).
However gratuitous, this story acts as a very close analogy to the subsequent story of Alfa. On the way back to the trenches, carrying Mademba’s body something switches in his mind (what we might now categorise as PTSD) – the first sign he recognises himself is that he suddenly views the trenches in a highly sexualised way; but the more serious consequence is that he takes to hanging back after the retreat is sounded with the aim of hamstringing a German soldier with his machete, dragging him to no-mans land , slicing his belly and then cutting his throat after only a short period as soon as the soldier pleads for release – effectively recreating Mademba’s death with a different ending. Even more gruesomely he cuts the hand from his victim and takes it back with him to the trenches.
At first his savagery and the fear it must strike in the enemy makes him something of a hero, even among the white soldiers, but soon the stench of death he carries makes him a pariah even among his fellow Africans – at which point he is sent to a field hospital for recovery.
There – in what is the real beating heart (I am tempted to say bloody guts) of the novel - we learn more of his life in Africa, his mother and father, his relationship to Mademba and his first sexual experience just before his travel to Africa, and a tour de force ending - that I think will stay with me for a long time - reunites him with Mademba.
Overall this is a harrowing but compelling novel of brotherhood in war (something I think better captured by the French title), very naturally translated by Anna Moschovakis.
July 2, 2022
At Night All Blood Is Black is a fairy short book consisting of just 145 pages, and within those 145 pages, the phrase 'God's truth' was written at least 120 times, if not more. Why, I hear you ask? Well that, I cannot answer, but I can certainly state that from a personal point of view, this was not an International Booker Prize Winner. God's truth, it drove me to the brink of madness with it's repetitiveness.
This wasn't a total mess, because the book actually began quite well, and I was intrigued with the plot and the descriptions of the horrors and atrocities of war, but this was short-lived, as things quickly went south.
The themes are ultimately dark and really quite disturbing. Make no mistake here, this is not a pleasant read. That isn't what made me wince, though. The final straw for me, was when our main guy compares a war trench to female genitalia (yes, he really did) and then almost in every chapter he distastefully speaks of how marvellous the sensation is when one is inside a wet and warm female.
I do understand what this book was trying to do, and it probably could have been something better, but it was horribly tainted by the monotonous and strange comments about the female sex. It simply wasn't for me.
This wasn't a total mess, because the book actually began quite well, and I was intrigued with the plot and the descriptions of the horrors and atrocities of war, but this was short-lived, as things quickly went south.
The themes are ultimately dark and really quite disturbing. Make no mistake here, this is not a pleasant read. That isn't what made me wince, though. The final straw for me, was when our main guy compares a war trench to female genitalia (yes, he really did) and then almost in every chapter he distastefully speaks of how marvellous the sensation is when one is inside a wet and warm female.
I do understand what this book was trying to do, and it probably could have been something better, but it was horribly tainted by the monotonous and strange comments about the female sex. It simply wasn't for me.
June 13, 2021
Το τη νύχτα, όλα τα αίματα είναι μαύρα είναι ένα ωμό, σκληρό αλλά ταυτόχρονα λυρικό και άκρως ποιητικό μυθιστόρημα που μέσα σε τόσο λίγες σελίδες ο συγγραφέας του αποτυπώνει με τρόπο μοναδικό την βιαιότητα του πολέμου, τη δύναμη της φιλίας, τη νομιμότητα ή μη ενός εγκλήματος, το ρατσισμό.
Ο Αλφά Ντιάγε και ο Μαντέμπα Ντιοπ είναι αδελφικοί φίλοι. Έχουν μεγαλώσει μαζί και έχουν επιλέξει ό ενας τον άλλο για οικογένεια του. Όταν ξεσπά ο πρώτος Παγκόσμιος πόλεμος, οι δύο φίλοι κατατάσσονται στο στρατό.
«Εσείς οι Σοκολατί της μαύρης Αφρικής είσαστε από τη φύση σας οι πιο γενναίοι από τους γενναίους. Η Γαλλία σας ευγνωμονεί και σας θαυμάζει»
«Όμως εγώ, ο Αλφά Ντιάγε, κατάλαβα καλά τα λόγια του λοχαγού. Κανείς δεν ξέρει τι σκέφτομαι, είμαι ελεύθερος να σκέφτομαι ό,τι θέλω. Αυτό που σκέφτομαι, είναι ότι θέλουν να μη σκέφτομαι. Το αδιανόητο κρύβεται πίσω από τις λέξεις του λοχαγού. Η Γαλλία του λοχαγού μας χρειάζεται για να κάνουμε τους άγριους όταν τη βολεύει. Χρειάζεται να είμαστε άγριοι γιατί οι εχθροί φοβούνται τις ματσέτες μας. Το ξέρω, το έχω καταλάβει, δεν πρόκειται για κάτι πιο περίπλοκο. Η Γαλλία του λοχαγού χρειάζεται τη θηριωδία μας και, καθώς είμαστε υπάκουοι, εγώ και οι άλλοι, κάνουμε τους άγριους. Κόβουμε της εχθρικές σάρκες, σακατεύουμε, αποκεφαλίζουμε, ξεκοιλιάζουμε. Η μόνη διαφορά ανάμεσα στους συμπολεμιστές μου τους Τουκουλέρ και τους Σερέρ, του Μπαμπαρά και τους Μαλινκές, τους Σουσού, του Αουσσά, τους Μοσίς, τους Μαρκά, τους Σονινκέ, τους Σενουφό, τους Μπομπό και τους λοιπούς Ουόλοφ, η μόνη διαφορά ανάμεσα σ’ εκείνους και σ’ εμένα, είναι ότι έγινα άγριος μετά από σκέψη».
Κατά τη διάρκεια μιας επίθεσης ο Ματέμπα θα τραυματιστεί πολύ σοβαρά μπροστά στον Αλφά. Απελπισμένος και μη μπορώντας ν’ αντέξει τον πόνο ζητά από τον φίλο του να δώσει τέλος στο μαρτύριο του και να του πάρει τη ζωή. Ο Αλφά αρνείται πεισματικά. Όταν τελικά ο Ματέμπα πεθαίνει, ο Αλφά γεμίζει με ενοχές. Οδηγείται στην τρέλα. Ξεκινάει μέσα του ένας άλλος πόλεμο. Πλημμυρίζει από τύψεις που δεν βοήθησε το φίλο του και τότε αλλάζει. Βγαίνει στο μέτωπο και δεν είναι ��ια ο ίδιος. Σκοτώνει όποιον βρει στο διάβα του και κρατάει ως λάφυρο το χέρι τους.
«Η άσπρη κοιλιά του είναι γυμνή, ανεβοκατεβαίνει σπασμωδικά.Ο εχθρός από απέναντι ξαφνικά λαχανιάζει και ουρλιάζει βουβά, επειδή έχω σφίξει πολύ το φίμωτρο που του κλείνει το στόμα. Ουρλιάζει βουβά, όταν του παίρνω όλα τα σωθικά από την κοιλιά για να τα βγάλω έξω στη βροχή, στον άνεμο, στο χιόνι, ή στο φως του φεγγαριού. Αν εκείνη τη στιγμή τα γαλάζια μάτια του δεν σβήσουν για πάντα, τότε ξαπλώνω πλάι του, γυρίζω το κεφάλι του προς το δικό μου και τον κοιτάζω για λίγο να πεθαίνει, μετά τον σφάζω, όπως πρέπει, με ανθρωπιά. Τη νύχτα, όλα τα αίματα είναι μαύρα».
«αρχικά οι φίλοι μου στο χάρακωμα ήταν χαρούμενοι που τους έφερνα εχθρικά χέρια στο χαράκωμα ώστε τα άγγιξαν κιόλας».
Σύντομα από εθνικός ήρωας θα μετατραπεί σε έναν επικίνδυνο άντρα.
«Ναι, το κατάλαβα, μα τον αληθινό Θεό, ότι στο πεδίο της μάχης, χρειάζονται μόνο την πρόσκαιρη τρέλα. Τρελούς από λύσσα, τρελούς από πόνο, τρελούς από οργή, αλλά προσωρινά. Όχι συνέχεια τρελούς. Όταν τελειώνει η επίθεση, πρέπει να παραμερίζεις τη λύσσα σου, τον πόνο σου και την οργή σου. Ο πόνος επιτρέπεται, μπορεί κανείς να τον έχει μαζί του, με τον όρο να τον κρατάει για τον εαυτό του. Αλλά η λύσσα και η οργή δεν πρέπει να έρχονται πίσω στο χαράκωμα. Πριν επιστρέψεις, πρέπει να βγάλεις από πάνω σου τη λύσσα και την οργή σου, πρέπει να απογυμνωθείς απ' αυτές, αλλιώς δεν παίζεις το παιχνίδι του πολέμου. Η τρ��λα, μετά το σφύριγμα του λοχαγού που σημαίνει την οπισθοχώρηση, είναι ταμπού.»
Σε μια συγκονιστική αφήγηση ο Αλφά προσπαθεί να εξιλεωθεί για το θάνατο του φίλου του και την βιαιότητα των πράξεων και να σώσει την ψυχή του από τη βιαιότητα του πολέμου. Θα θυμηθεί το παρελθόν, τη ζωή στην Αφρική, τον πρώτο του έρωτα, τη δύσκολη ζωή που είχε με την οικογένεια του. Θα αναμετρηθεί με τους εφιάλτες του και τις μνήμες του μέσα από τις οποίες καθώς και με τη βοήθεια του εξαιρετικού επίμετρου της Κυρίας Γαζή θα μάθουμε για τη μοίρα αυτών των ανθρώπων που στρατολογούνταν στην πρώτη γραμμή της μάχης και οι ιδανικοί για να σκοτώνουν. Με το βιβλίο αυτό ο Ντιοπ τιμά τη μνήμη όλων αυτών των Αφρικανών στρατιωτών που σκοτώθηκαν στη μάχη ενός πολέμου που δεν τον διάλεξαν αυτοί. Συγκλονιστικό.
«Είμαι ο ίσκιος που καταβροχθίζει τα βράχια, τα βουνά, τα δάση και τα ποτάμια, τη σάρκα των ζώων και τη σάρκα των ανθρώπων. Γδέρνω, αδειάζω τα κρανία και τα σώματα. Κόβω τα μπράτσα, τα πόδια και τις παλάμες. Τσακίζω τα κόκαλα και ρουφάω το μεδούλι τους. Είμαι όμως και το κόκκινο φεγγάρι που ανατέλλει πάνω από το ποτάμι, είμαι το βραδινό αεράκι που κάνει τα τρυφερά φύλλα της ακακίας να σαλεύουν. Είμαι η σφήκα και το λουλούδι. Είμαι και το ψάρι που σπαρταράει και η ακίνητη πιρόγα, και το δίχτυ και ο ψαράς. Είμαι ο φυλακισμένος και ο δεσμοφύλακας. Είμαι το δέντρο και ο σπόρος που το γέννησε. Είμαι ο πατέρας και ο γιός. Είμαι ο δολοφόνος και ο δικαστής. Είμαι η σπορά και η σοδειά. Είμαι η μητέρα και η κόρη. Είμαι η νύχτα και η μέρα. Είμαι η φωτιά και το ξύλο που το κατακαίει. Είμαι ο αθώος και ο ένοχος. Είμαι η αρχή και το τέλος. Είμαι ο δημιουργός και ο καταστροφέας. Είμαι δισυπόστατος. »
Ο Αλφά Ντιάγε και ο Μαντέμπα Ντιοπ είναι αδελφικοί φίλοι. Έχουν μεγαλώσει μαζί και έχουν επιλέξει ό ενας τον άλλο για οικογένεια του. Όταν ξεσπά ο πρώτος Παγκόσμιος πόλεμος, οι δύο φίλοι κατατάσσονται στο στρατό.
«Εσείς οι Σοκολατί της μαύρης Αφρικής είσαστε από τη φύση σας οι πιο γενναίοι από τους γενναίους. Η Γαλλία σας ευγνωμονεί και σας θαυμάζει»
«Όμως εγώ, ο Αλφά Ντιάγε, κατάλαβα καλά τα λόγια του λοχαγού. Κανείς δεν ξέρει τι σκέφτομαι, είμαι ελεύθερος να σκέφτομαι ό,τι θέλω. Αυτό που σκέφτομαι, είναι ότι θέλουν να μη σκέφτομαι. Το αδιανόητο κρύβεται πίσω από τις λέξεις του λοχαγού. Η Γαλλία του λοχαγού μας χρειάζεται για να κάνουμε τους άγριους όταν τη βολεύει. Χρειάζεται να είμαστε άγριοι γιατί οι εχθροί φοβούνται τις ματσέτες μας. Το ξέρω, το έχω καταλάβει, δεν πρόκειται για κάτι πιο περίπλοκο. Η Γαλλία του λοχαγού χρειάζεται τη θηριωδία μας και, καθώς είμαστε υπάκουοι, εγώ και οι άλλοι, κάνουμε τους άγριους. Κόβουμε της εχθρικές σάρκες, σακατεύουμε, αποκεφαλίζουμε, ξεκοιλιάζουμε. Η μόνη διαφορά ανάμεσα στους συμπολεμιστές μου τους Τουκουλέρ και τους Σερέρ, του Μπαμπαρά και τους Μαλινκές, τους Σουσού, του Αουσσά, τους Μοσίς, τους Μαρκά, τους Σονινκέ, τους Σενουφό, τους Μπομπό και τους λοιπούς Ουόλοφ, η μόνη διαφορά ανάμεσα σ’ εκείνους και σ’ εμένα, είναι ότι έγινα άγριος μετά από σκέψη».
Κατά τη διάρκεια μιας επίθεσης ο Ματέμπα θα τραυματιστεί πολύ σοβαρά μπροστά στον Αλφά. Απελπισμένος και μη μπορώντας ν’ αντέξει τον πόνο ζητά από τον φίλο του να δώσει τέλος στο μαρτύριο του και να του πάρει τη ζωή. Ο Αλφά αρνείται πεισματικά. Όταν τελικά ο Ματέμπα πεθαίνει, ο Αλφά γεμίζει με ενοχές. Οδηγείται στην τρέλα. Ξεκινάει μέσα του ένας άλλος πόλεμο. Πλημμυρίζει από τύψεις που δεν βοήθησε το φίλο του και τότε αλλάζει. Βγαίνει στο μέτωπο και δεν είναι ��ια ο ίδιος. Σκοτώνει όποιον βρει στο διάβα του και κρατάει ως λάφυρο το χέρι τους.
«Η άσπρη κοιλιά του είναι γυμνή, ανεβοκατεβαίνει σπασμωδικά.Ο εχθρός από απέναντι ξαφνικά λαχανιάζει και ουρλιάζει βουβά, επειδή έχω σφίξει πολύ το φίμωτρο που του κλείνει το στόμα. Ουρλιάζει βουβά, όταν του παίρνω όλα τα σωθικά από την κοιλιά για να τα βγάλω έξω στη βροχή, στον άνεμο, στο χιόνι, ή στο φως του φεγγαριού. Αν εκείνη τη στιγμή τα γαλάζια μάτια του δεν σβήσουν για πάντα, τότε ξαπλώνω πλάι του, γυρίζω το κεφάλι του προς το δικό μου και τον κοιτάζω για λίγο να πεθαίνει, μετά τον σφάζω, όπως πρέπει, με ανθρωπιά. Τη νύχτα, όλα τα αίματα είναι μαύρα».
«αρχικά οι φίλοι μου στο χάρακωμα ήταν χαρούμενοι που τους έφερνα εχθρικά χέρια στο χαράκωμα ώστε τα άγγιξαν κιόλας».
Σύντομα από εθνικός ήρωας θα μετατραπεί σε έναν επικίνδυνο άντρα.
«Ναι, το κατάλαβα, μα τον αληθινό Θεό, ότι στο πεδίο της μάχης, χρειάζονται μόνο την πρόσκαιρη τρέλα. Τρελούς από λύσσα, τρελούς από πόνο, τρελούς από οργή, αλλά προσωρινά. Όχι συνέχεια τρελούς. Όταν τελειώνει η επίθεση, πρέπει να παραμερίζεις τη λύσσα σου, τον πόνο σου και την οργή σου. Ο πόνος επιτρέπεται, μπορεί κανείς να τον έχει μαζί του, με τον όρο να τον κρατάει για τον εαυτό του. Αλλά η λύσσα και η οργή δεν πρέπει να έρχονται πίσω στο χαράκωμα. Πριν επιστρέψεις, πρέπει να βγάλεις από πάνω σου τη λύσσα και την οργή σου, πρέπει να απογυμνωθείς απ' αυτές, αλλιώς δεν παίζεις το παιχνίδι του πολέμου. Η τρ��λα, μετά το σφύριγμα του λοχαγού που σημαίνει την οπισθοχώρηση, είναι ταμπού.»
Σε μια συγκονιστική αφήγηση ο Αλφά προσπαθεί να εξιλεωθεί για το θάνατο του φίλου του και την βιαιότητα των πράξεων και να σώσει την ψυχή του από τη βιαιότητα του πολέμου. Θα θυμηθεί το παρελθόν, τη ζωή στην Αφρική, τον πρώτο του έρωτα, τη δύσκολη ζωή που είχε με την οικογένεια του. Θα αναμετρηθεί με τους εφιάλτες του και τις μνήμες του μέσα από τις οποίες καθώς και με τη βοήθεια του εξαιρετικού επίμετρου της Κυρίας Γαζή θα μάθουμε για τη μοίρα αυτών των ανθρώπων που στρατολογούνταν στην πρώτη γραμμή της μάχης και οι ιδανικοί για να σκοτώνουν. Με το βιβλίο αυτό ο Ντιοπ τιμά τη μνήμη όλων αυτών των Αφρικανών στρατιωτών που σκοτώθηκαν στη μάχη ενός πολέμου που δεν τον διάλεξαν αυτοί. Συγκλονιστικό.
«Είμαι ο ίσκιος που καταβροχθίζει τα βράχια, τα βουνά, τα δάση και τα ποτάμια, τη σάρκα των ζώων και τη σάρκα των ανθρώπων. Γδέρνω, αδειάζω τα κρανία και τα σώματα. Κόβω τα μπράτσα, τα πόδια και τις παλάμες. Τσακίζω τα κόκαλα και ρουφάω το μεδούλι τους. Είμαι όμως και το κόκκινο φεγγάρι που ανατέλλει πάνω από το ποτάμι, είμαι το βραδινό αεράκι που κάνει τα τρυφερά φύλλα της ακακίας να σαλεύουν. Είμαι η σφήκα και το λουλούδι. Είμαι και το ψάρι που σπαρταράει και η ακίνητη πιρόγα, και το δίχτυ και ο ψαράς. Είμαι ο φυλακισμένος και ο δεσμοφύλακας. Είμαι το δέντρο και ο σπόρος που το γέννησε. Είμαι ο πατέρας και ο γιός. Είμαι ο δολοφόνος και ο δικαστής. Είμαι η σπορά και η σοδειά. Είμαι η μητέρα και η κόρη. Είμαι η νύχτα και η μέρα. Είμαι η φωτιά και το ξύλο που το κατακαίει. Είμαι ο αθώος και ο ένοχος. Είμαι η αρχή και το τέλος. Είμαι ο δημιουργός και ο καταστροφέας. Είμαι δισυπόστατος. »
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April 22, 2021This was a book I expected to like. A story about a World War One African soldier in the trenches, I couldn't wait to read this. I think stories about people who are unacknowledged in history are important, over 10% of the French forces battling in World War One were from its colonies and yet given how the story of that war is told, I never thought the numbers were that high. The writer describes how racist tropes of the "African savage" were used to frighten the enemy among other violently racist things the African soldiers have to endure alongside their white counterparts.
That and the questioning of the madness of war were my favourite parts of the story. The protagonist seeks to avenge his friend killed in the war and does that by slicing the stomachs of enemy soldiers and cutting their hands off. Pretty gory stuff but it's a war story so I felt I should have expected that. The protagonist develops some kind of attachment to the severed hands and his colleagues become frightened of him.
"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.
I thought that quote to be brilliant. But the more the book progressed, the more I became disinterested, and was thankful that it's mercifully short because I don't think I could have managed this longer than it was.
Perhaps there is something in the tone of the book that was lost in translation but I just wasn't as captivated with the story as I was with the history. The metaphors, especially those comparisons with the female sex, felt ridiculous reading. But then again I hate genitals used as metaphor in whatever way, whether to express depth, strength or the lack of it, openness, mystery, whatever. It just never works and has been overdone.
I'm glad that this book has received the international attention and recognition it has, but couldn't help but feel underwhelmed by the story in the end
That and the questioning of the madness of war were my favourite parts of the story. The protagonist seeks to avenge his friend killed in the war and does that by slicing the stomachs of enemy soldiers and cutting their hands off. Pretty gory stuff but it's a war story so I felt I should have expected that. The protagonist develops some kind of attachment to the severed hands and his colleagues become frightened of him.
"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.
I thought that quote to be brilliant. But the more the book progressed, the more I became disinterested, and was thankful that it's mercifully short because I don't think I could have managed this longer than it was.
Perhaps there is something in the tone of the book that was lost in translation but I just wasn't as captivated with the story as I was with the history. The metaphors, especially those comparisons with the female sex, felt ridiculous reading. But then again I hate genitals used as metaphor in whatever way, whether to express depth, strength or the lack of it, openness, mystery, whatever. It just never works and has been overdone.
I'm glad that this book has received the international attention and recognition it has, but couldn't help but feel underwhelmed by the story in the end
January 12, 2022
Winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize and for me I can only imagine that this was chosen for its uniqueness and honesty at showing the horrors of war. As a reader of War books fiction and non fiction for many years, I do think this one was very graphic and disturbing and many readers might like to know this before reading.
A slim volume of a novel with only 144 pages that can be read in one sitting. I was drawn to this novel as it tells the harrowing story of two Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together the fight the enemy until Mademba is wounded and eventually dies. Alfa is alone in his grief and devastated by the death of Mademba and his finds himself hurtling towards madness.
This one started out quite strong and although fiction you do experience the savagery and suffering of war. It’s a dark and disturbing read that became a little too weird for me. I tired of the mantra like repetitions of words and phrases like “God’s Truth” which I have since read in reviews was used over 150 times in a 145 page novel.
Of course this is only my reaction to the novel and my opinion is in the minority on this one. It has won numerous prestigious awards so therefore don't dismiss it as it may be a 5 star read for other readers.
An ok read but certainly not a book for my favorites shelf.
A slim volume of a novel with only 144 pages that can be read in one sitting. I was drawn to this novel as it tells the harrowing story of two Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together the fight the enemy until Mademba is wounded and eventually dies. Alfa is alone in his grief and devastated by the death of Mademba and his finds himself hurtling towards madness.
This one started out quite strong and although fiction you do experience the savagery and suffering of war. It’s a dark and disturbing read that became a little too weird for me. I tired of the mantra like repetitions of words and phrases like “God’s Truth” which I have since read in reviews was used over 150 times in a 145 page novel.
Of course this is only my reaction to the novel and my opinion is in the minority on this one. It has won numerous prestigious awards so therefore don't dismiss it as it may be a 5 star read for other readers.
An ok read but certainly not a book for my favorites shelf.
June 2, 2021
Winner of the 2021 International Booker
His white belly is exposed, it rises and falls in jerks. The enemy from the other side gasps and screams, now in stark silence because of the gag I’ve cinched around his mouth. He screams in stark silence when I take all the insides of his belly and put them outside in the rain, in the wind, in the snow, or in the bright moonlight. If at this moment his blue eyes don’t dim forever, then I lie down next to him, I turn his face toward mine and I watch him die a little, then I slit his throat, cleanly, humanely. At night, all blood is black.
All Blood is Black is translated by Anna Moschovakis from the original Frère d'âme by David Diop. The original won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. And in translation, the Italian won the Strega European Prize, an Italian equivalent of the International Booker (previous winners as authors include Annie Ernaux, Jenny Erpenbeck and Marcos Giralt Torrente) and in Dutch Europese Literatuurprijs (shared with Ali Smith's Spring).
The novel is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye, a Wolof speaker from Senegal, one of the 'Tirailleurs Sénégalais' serving in the French army in the trenches of WW1. Alfa describes himself and his fellow recruits as "Chocolat soldiers" in contrast to the white "Toubab soldiers" (a Wolof term).
He serves alongside his childhood friend Mademba Diop. The two are close companions but friendly rivals and, in a key incident before the narrative begins, Alfa teases Mademba about the relative merit of their family lines, causing his friend to be particularly courageous and foolhardy in the charge that follows:
A Diop would not want it said of him that he is less courageous than a Ndiaye, and so the minute the sound of Captain Armand’s whistle commands him, he leaps up from his hole and screams like a savage. Same rivalry between the Keïtas and the Soumarés. Same thing between the Diallos and the Fayes, the Kanes and the Thiounes, the Dianés, the Kouroumas, the Bèyes, the Fakolis, the Salls, the Diengs, the Secks, the Kas, the Cissés, the Ndours, the Tourés, the Camaras, the Bas, the Falls, the Coulibalys, the Sonkhos, the Sys, the Cissokhos, the Dramés, the Traorés.
They will all die without thinking because Captain Armand has said to them, “You, the Chocolats of black Africa, are naturally the bravest of the brave. France admires you and is grateful. The papers talk only of your exploits!” So they love to sprint onto the battlefield to be beautifully massacred while screaming like madmen, regulation rifle in the left hand and savage machete in the right.
Mademba, as a result, is gutted by a white blue-eyed German soldier and suffers an extended, painful death in no man's land. Alfa stays with his friend but is unable or unwilling to meet his entreaties to end his suffering by delivering the coup de grâce.
The after-effects of this tip Alfa over a psychological edge and he becomes something of a demon or a sorceror - a "dëmm" - feared even by his fellows.
Each time there is a battle, he stays on in no man's land, abducts a blue-eyed enemy soldier, guts him as Mademba was gutted, then severs his hand as a trophy, with which he returns to the trenches.
The first half of novel has Alfa thoughts circling around these events, including some oddly sexual imagery (he compares the trenches to a woman's sex) which make more sense as the novel progresses.
In the second he is sent back behind the lines for rehabilitiation and psychological assessment, and we learn more of his and Mademba's former life, including the girl they both loved.
Alfa's father is a farmer and elder from the village of Gandiol near Saint- Louis in Senegal, and his mother from a family of Fulfulde-speaking Fula migratory shepherds, who disappeared (feared abducted and sold into slavery) when she went in search of her family, another trigger for Alfa's internal anger.
As his treatment progresses, Alfa's own self-identity starts to break-down, culminating in a disturbing incident involving his doctor's daughter. And when asked his name he responds:
I AM THE SHADOW THAT DEVOURS ROCKS, mountains, forests, and rivers, the flesh of beasts and of men. I slice skin, I empty skulls and bodies. I cut off arms, legs, and hands. I smash bones and I suck out their marrow. But I am also the red moon that rises over the river, I am the evening air that rustles the tender acacia trees. I am the wasp and the flower. I am as much the wriggling fish as the still canoe, as much the net as the fisherman. I am the prisoner and his guard. I am the tree and the seed that grew into it. I am father and son. I am assassin and judge. I am the sowing and the harvest. I am mother and daughter. I am night and day. I am fire and the wood it devours. I am innocent and guilty. I am the beginning and the end. I am the creator and the destroyer. I am double.
The novel's prose is visceral and powerful, for which credit is due to Anna Moschovakis. And, as the translator asked to convey the above speech, made in Wolof, to the French authorities reminds us:
To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.
A powerful, short, novel that raises questions about the violent echoes of both war and colonialism. A strong shortlist contender.
A review in Foreign Policy magazine that gives some interesting historical context including some fascinating propaganda photos: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/21/...
Another helpful review bringing out more aspects of the novel:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/b...
His white belly is exposed, it rises and falls in jerks. The enemy from the other side gasps and screams, now in stark silence because of the gag I’ve cinched around his mouth. He screams in stark silence when I take all the insides of his belly and put them outside in the rain, in the wind, in the snow, or in the bright moonlight. If at this moment his blue eyes don’t dim forever, then I lie down next to him, I turn his face toward mine and I watch him die a little, then I slit his throat, cleanly, humanely. At night, all blood is black.
All Blood is Black is translated by Anna Moschovakis from the original Frère d'âme by David Diop. The original won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. And in translation, the Italian won the Strega European Prize, an Italian equivalent of the International Booker (previous winners as authors include Annie Ernaux, Jenny Erpenbeck and Marcos Giralt Torrente) and in Dutch Europese Literatuurprijs (shared with Ali Smith's Spring).
The novel is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye, a Wolof speaker from Senegal, one of the 'Tirailleurs Sénégalais' serving in the French army in the trenches of WW1. Alfa describes himself and his fellow recruits as "Chocolat soldiers" in contrast to the white "Toubab soldiers" (a Wolof term).
He serves alongside his childhood friend Mademba Diop. The two are close companions but friendly rivals and, in a key incident before the narrative begins, Alfa teases Mademba about the relative merit of their family lines, causing his friend to be particularly courageous and foolhardy in the charge that follows:
A Diop would not want it said of him that he is less courageous than a Ndiaye, and so the minute the sound of Captain Armand’s whistle commands him, he leaps up from his hole and screams like a savage. Same rivalry between the Keïtas and the Soumarés. Same thing between the Diallos and the Fayes, the Kanes and the Thiounes, the Dianés, the Kouroumas, the Bèyes, the Fakolis, the Salls, the Diengs, the Secks, the Kas, the Cissés, the Ndours, the Tourés, the Camaras, the Bas, the Falls, the Coulibalys, the Sonkhos, the Sys, the Cissokhos, the Dramés, the Traorés.
They will all die without thinking because Captain Armand has said to them, “You, the Chocolats of black Africa, are naturally the bravest of the brave. France admires you and is grateful. The papers talk only of your exploits!” So they love to sprint onto the battlefield to be beautifully massacred while screaming like madmen, regulation rifle in the left hand and savage machete in the right.
Mademba, as a result, is gutted by a white blue-eyed German soldier and suffers an extended, painful death in no man's land. Alfa stays with his friend but is unable or unwilling to meet his entreaties to end his suffering by delivering the coup de grâce.
The after-effects of this tip Alfa over a psychological edge and he becomes something of a demon or a sorceror - a "dëmm" - feared even by his fellows.
Each time there is a battle, he stays on in no man's land, abducts a blue-eyed enemy soldier, guts him as Mademba was gutted, then severs his hand as a trophy, with which he returns to the trenches.
The first half of novel has Alfa thoughts circling around these events, including some oddly sexual imagery (he compares the trenches to a woman's sex) which make more sense as the novel progresses.
In the second he is sent back behind the lines for rehabilitiation and psychological assessment, and we learn more of his and Mademba's former life, including the girl they both loved.
Alfa's father is a farmer and elder from the village of Gandiol near Saint- Louis in Senegal, and his mother from a family of Fulfulde-speaking Fula migratory shepherds, who disappeared (feared abducted and sold into slavery) when she went in search of her family, another trigger for Alfa's internal anger.
As his treatment progresses, Alfa's own self-identity starts to break-down, culminating in a disturbing incident involving his doctor's daughter. And when asked his name he responds:
I AM THE SHADOW THAT DEVOURS ROCKS, mountains, forests, and rivers, the flesh of beasts and of men. I slice skin, I empty skulls and bodies. I cut off arms, legs, and hands. I smash bones and I suck out their marrow. But I am also the red moon that rises over the river, I am the evening air that rustles the tender acacia trees. I am the wasp and the flower. I am as much the wriggling fish as the still canoe, as much the net as the fisherman. I am the prisoner and his guard. I am the tree and the seed that grew into it. I am father and son. I am assassin and judge. I am the sowing and the harvest. I am mother and daughter. I am night and day. I am fire and the wood it devours. I am innocent and guilty. I am the beginning and the end. I am the creator and the destroyer. I am double.
The novel's prose is visceral and powerful, for which credit is due to Anna Moschovakis. And, as the translator asked to convey the above speech, made in Wolof, to the French authorities reminds us:
To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.
A powerful, short, novel that raises questions about the violent echoes of both war and colonialism. A strong shortlist contender.
A review in Foreign Policy magazine that gives some interesting historical context including some fascinating propaganda photos: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/21/...
Another helpful review bringing out more aspects of the novel:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/b...
February 25, 2024
This is a brutal book. And I mean brutal. It’s a book that makes you stare unblinking into the eyes of the graphic violence of war. As the reader, you will want to turn away, have some reprieve from this nightmare, but Diop will not let you look away. He grabs your head and forces you to keep on staring. It’s gruesome, but it’s brilliant. It’s also why this review is a bit short and took so long for me to get to – I was dreading being plummeted back into the nightmares this book holds.
“But before you, Mademba, I was incapable of being a man. I let you curse me, my friend, you, my more-than-brother, as soon as you were dead, I knew, I understood that I should not have abandoned you.”
Plagued with guilt after failing to mercy kill his “more-than-brother”, Mademba Diop, we follow Senegalese Chocolat soldier (aka a tirailleur sénégalais) Alfa Ndiaye as he fights in the trenches for the French army during World War II. During the first half, Ndiaye is plagued with guilt, leading him to do a string of killings that would be considered “barbaric” and “savage” as he continues to lose his grip with reality. The more he does this, the more isolated he becomes from his trench as he is seen as “barbaric” and “savage” (ironically the exact reason that the Chocolat soldiers were recruited). This part of the book is insanely repetitive and written in a way that made me really feel how this traumatic event (and the general trauma of war) was breaking Ndiaye. His paranoia makes him an incredibly unreliable narrator at this time, but there is still enough of him grounded in reality that makes one question the hypocrisy of war.
The second half has more to do with Ndiaye’s past as we are transported back to Senegal and get a better understanding of the climate under colonialization. Part of this section is focused on Ndiaye’s guilt and obsession to “make it up” to Diop, but there is a shift in how that manifests that, while still a bit jarring, was less painful to read about. There’s a lot more insight here into how colonialization negatively impacted Sengal and it makes it incredibly heartbreaking to read. While we see more anger in the first half, this half is focused more on a deep sadness as we are shoved back into reality. Diop really does an incredibly job showing the gritty details and effectively portraying how horrific war and colonization really are in these pages.
Because of the language barrier between the French and West African soldiers, the translators have an incredibly important part to play in the book. French and West African soldiers cannot understand each other with their translator and some things may be lost in translation or told differently because of that. It’s interesting to see the divide in this especially since these people have been conscripted to join the French forces and given many promises that would push them further away from their roots and more into French culture.
“To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even trouble, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
This work was brilliantly translated from French by Anna Moschovakis and shows an incredibly important look into Senegalese (and other West African) soldiers fighting for their French colonizers during World War I. It is a hard read, but I would recommend it if you have the stomach for it.
3.5/5
“But before you, Mademba, I was incapable of being a man. I let you curse me, my friend, you, my more-than-brother, as soon as you were dead, I knew, I understood that I should not have abandoned you.”
Plagued with guilt after failing to mercy kill his “more-than-brother”, Mademba Diop, we follow Senegalese Chocolat soldier (aka a tirailleur sénégalais) Alfa Ndiaye as he fights in the trenches for the French army during World War II. During the first half, Ndiaye is plagued with guilt, leading him to do a string of killings that would be considered “barbaric” and “savage” as he continues to lose his grip with reality. The more he does this, the more isolated he becomes from his trench as he is seen as “barbaric” and “savage” (ironically the exact reason that the Chocolat soldiers were recruited). This part of the book is insanely repetitive and written in a way that made me really feel how this traumatic event (and the general trauma of war) was breaking Ndiaye. His paranoia makes him an incredibly unreliable narrator at this time, but there is still enough of him grounded in reality that makes one question the hypocrisy of war.
The second half has more to do with Ndiaye’s past as we are transported back to Senegal and get a better understanding of the climate under colonialization. Part of this section is focused on Ndiaye’s guilt and obsession to “make it up” to Diop, but there is a shift in how that manifests that, while still a bit jarring, was less painful to read about. There’s a lot more insight here into how colonialization negatively impacted Sengal and it makes it incredibly heartbreaking to read. While we see more anger in the first half, this half is focused more on a deep sadness as we are shoved back into reality. Diop really does an incredibly job showing the gritty details and effectively portraying how horrific war and colonization really are in these pages.
Because of the language barrier between the French and West African soldiers, the translators have an incredibly important part to play in the book. French and West African soldiers cannot understand each other with their translator and some things may be lost in translation or told differently because of that. It’s interesting to see the divide in this especially since these people have been conscripted to join the French forces and given many promises that would push them further away from their roots and more into French culture.
“To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even trouble, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
This work was brilliantly translated from French by Anna Moschovakis and shows an incredibly important look into Senegalese (and other West African) soldiers fighting for their French colonizers during World War I. It is a hard read, but I would recommend it if you have the stomach for it.
3.5/5
September 23, 2021
Alfa Ndiaye tells the story of the "chocolat" soldiers in World War 1. He is from Senegal, a colony of France at the time. Alfa and his best friend Mademba are together in the trenches where Mademba lies dying, begging Alfa to finish him to stop his suffering. Alfa refused and then regrets his decision later after Mademba dies. Alfa believes he refused him, not out of altruism, but because he is too indoctrinated to think for himself. He vows to never make that mistake again.
The way the story is told is as if you were listening to him tell it. He repeats himself frequently. It is like a chant that you can't get out of your head. Alfa can't get it out of his head either. He relives the moment over and over and finds himself to be a coward and a bully and responsible for Mademba's death.
His obsession with Mademba's death takes over his life. He can't forget it and can't forgive himself for his part in it. Alfa seeks revenge on the blue eyes Germans, on his fellow soldiers, his commanding officers and himself.
The way the story is told is as if you were listening to him tell it. He repeats himself frequently. It is like a chant that you can't get out of your head. Alfa can't get it out of his head either. He relives the moment over and over and finds himself to be a coward and a bully and responsible for Mademba's death.
His obsession with Mademba's death takes over his life. He can't forget it and can't forgive himself for his part in it. Alfa seeks revenge on the blue eyes Germans, on his fellow soldiers, his commanding officers and himself.
June 6, 2021
Winner of the International Booker 2021
This is a troubling, harsh text awash with all kinds of violence: the carnage of WW1 trench warfare; the psychic torment of the narrator which manifests through cruel revenge and a kind of madness; the aggressive pressure of colonial and racial stereotypes which press the narrator into living up to his 'savage' identity, exploited by the French to terrify their German opponents but all too easy for him to internalise and adopt as his own: 'looking into the enemy's blue eyes, I often see a panicked fear of death, of savagery, of rape, of cannibalism. I see in his eyes what he's been told about me, and what he believed without ever seeing me'.
The stylised oral effect depends on exclamations and insertions as well as epic tropes: the 'three times' in the quotation above which recalls both Odysseus and Aeneas striving to hold their dead mother and father respectively in the underworld as well as the betrayal motif from the bible.
Do be aware that this is viscerally bloody in places though never gratuitously so given the subject matter and textual intention.
There were a few places where I was jarred by word choice and don't know whether this was in the translation or the original: 'to have slit your throat in that moment would have been the last good bit of fun I could have given you in your life, a way to stay friends for eternity.' 'Fun'? From context alone I was thinking more 'relief', 'aid', 'service' even 'comfort' - but I don't know what the original text has.
I also disliked the utilisation of sexualised female body parts as metaphors: 'seen from a distance, our trench looked to me like the slightly parted lips of an immense woman's sex', 'the brazen rumour ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air'.
But, niggles apart, this is intense and stark, a concentrated distillation of masculinity and bloodshed.
Many thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC.
Three times he asked me to finish him off, three times I refused. This was before, before I allowed myself to think anything I want. If I had been then what I've become today, I would have killed him the first time he asked, his head turned toward me, his left hand in my right.
This is a troubling, harsh text awash with all kinds of violence: the carnage of WW1 trench warfare; the psychic torment of the narrator which manifests through cruel revenge and a kind of madness; the aggressive pressure of colonial and racial stereotypes which press the narrator into living up to his 'savage' identity, exploited by the French to terrify their German opponents but all too easy for him to internalise and adopt as his own: 'looking into the enemy's blue eyes, I often see a panicked fear of death, of savagery, of rape, of cannibalism. I see in his eyes what he's been told about me, and what he believed without ever seeing me'.
The stylised oral effect depends on exclamations and insertions as well as epic tropes: the 'three times' in the quotation above which recalls both Odysseus and Aeneas striving to hold their dead mother and father respectively in the underworld as well as the betrayal motif from the bible.
Do be aware that this is viscerally bloody in places though never gratuitously so given the subject matter and textual intention.
There were a few places where I was jarred by word choice and don't know whether this was in the translation or the original: 'to have slit your throat in that moment would have been the last good bit of fun I could have given you in your life, a way to stay friends for eternity.' 'Fun'? From context alone I was thinking more 'relief', 'aid', 'service' even 'comfort' - but I don't know what the original text has.
I also disliked the utilisation of sexualised female body parts as metaphors: 'seen from a distance, our trench looked to me like the slightly parted lips of an immense woman's sex', 'the brazen rumour ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air'.
But, niggles apart, this is intense and stark, a concentrated distillation of masculinity and bloodshed.
Many thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC.
December 16, 2019
Πολύ καλό ξεχείλιζε το συναίσθημα ανάμεικτο με τη βία αφήνοντας μια γλυκόπικρη γεύση στο τέλος κάθε κεφαλαίου του. Και με φράσεις όπως : " Δεν είναι δίκαιο να πεθάνεις δίχως να γνωρίσεις όλες τις χάρες του σώματος" Κι ίσως ήταν λάθος που ορισμένες κριτικές στάθηκαν στο θέμα της στελέχωσης του γαλλικού στρατού από Σενεγαλέζους. Το βασικό θέμα του συγγραφέα θεωρώ ότι ήταν ν' αναδείξει συναίσθημα και προβληματισμούς ενός νέου ανθρώπου που αφήνει τις χαρές της καθημερινότητας και να βυθιστεί στην δυστυχία του πολέμου. Πέντε θα έβαζα αλλά οι τελευταίες σελίδες δεν ήταν αντάξιες των προηγουμένων. Αλλά αυτό δεν αλλάζει την επισήμανση ότι πρόκειται για ένα πολύ καλό βιβλίο που συστήνω να διαβάστε...
July 30, 2022
“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."
Set in the trenches during WWI, I was immediately drawn into David Diop's novella, At Night All Blood is Black. Our protagonist, Alfa, is a Senegalese soldier who fights with the French army. After the gruesome death of his best friend who he has refused to mercy kill, Alfa begins to sneak across enemy lines on a nightly basis to gut a German soldier. He then returns with the victim's hand and rifle. At first, he is lauded for these exploits, but after the fourth trip his fellow soldiers ostracize him and begin whispering that he is a soldier sorcerer. This is the beginning of Alfa's descent into madness.
While I found this intriguing, and I liked the non-Western perspective from the trenches, it began to feel quite repetitive. Concluding with a drawn out sex scene with a woman whose name he didn't know (really an extended metaphor for the violence in the trenches, but way too long) also detracted from the things I really liked about the work. Interesting, but sometimes frustrating as well. 3.25 stars
“Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.”
“Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created.”
Set in the trenches during WWI, I was immediately drawn into David Diop's novella, At Night All Blood is Black. Our protagonist, Alfa, is a Senegalese soldier who fights with the French army. After the gruesome death of his best friend who he has refused to mercy kill, Alfa begins to sneak across enemy lines on a nightly basis to gut a German soldier. He then returns with the victim's hand and rifle. At first, he is lauded for these exploits, but after the fourth trip his fellow soldiers ostracize him and begin whispering that he is a soldier sorcerer. This is the beginning of Alfa's descent into madness.
While I found this intriguing, and I liked the non-Western perspective from the trenches, it began to feel quite repetitive. Concluding with a drawn out sex scene with a woman whose name he didn't know (really an extended metaphor for the violence in the trenches, but way too long) also detracted from the things I really liked about the work. Interesting, but sometimes frustrating as well. 3.25 stars
“Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.”
“Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created.”
July 25, 2023
This book is definitely unique. It is written from the mind of a man who starts to deteriorate after the death of his friend and his inability to provide a mercy kill.
Overall there was a lot of depth and creativity in Alfa Ndiaye. I had a hard time getting lost in the madness as the constant repetition of thoughts and the shifting to timelines would knock me out of the shorter chapters' flow whenever I got involved with them.
It is worth the read but still sits at a 2-2.5 star read.
Overall there was a lot of depth and creativity in Alfa Ndiaye. I had a hard time getting lost in the madness as the constant repetition of thoughts and the shifting to timelines would knock me out of the shorter chapters' flow whenever I got involved with them.
It is worth the read but still sits at a 2-2.5 star read.
June 2, 2021
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2021
I decided not to review this book immediately after reading because my views on it were divided and unfocused, and four days later I still don't know how to rate it. It is a book with many admirable qualities, but the subject matter is dark and I didn't really enjoy reading it, and I was left rather unsure of the point the author was trying to make.
Most of the book is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier serving in the French army in the trenches of the Great War. At the start of the book his best friend Mademba Diop is killed, a death for which he feels partly responsible because of the nature of their banter about bravery. Alfa becomes determined to avenge Mademba by killing and dismembering enemy soldiers, bringing back their severed hands as trophies. I won't describe what happens after he is withdrawn from the front line because the book contains some dramatic and shocking twists, but the most enjoyable part of the story is a brief interlude describing his early life in Senegal.
I decided not to review this book immediately after reading because my views on it were divided and unfocused, and four days later I still don't know how to rate it. It is a book with many admirable qualities, but the subject matter is dark and I didn't really enjoy reading it, and I was left rather unsure of the point the author was trying to make.
Most of the book is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier serving in the French army in the trenches of the Great War. At the start of the book his best friend Mademba Diop is killed, a death for which he feels partly responsible because of the nature of their banter about bravery. Alfa becomes determined to avenge Mademba by killing and dismembering enemy soldiers, bringing back their severed hands as trophies. I won't describe what happens after he is withdrawn from the front line because the book contains some dramatic and shocking twists, but the most enjoyable part of the story is a brief interlude describing his early life in Senegal.
June 29, 2022
I now have a YouTube channel that I run with my brother, called 'The Brothers Gwynne'. Check it out - The Brothers Gwynne
When this won the Booker Prize recently, I looked at the blurb and was immediately drawn in. This is a story about the effects of war, the dehumanising consequences of conflict and the dramatic effects of loss, all whilst also engaging with race, masculinity, identity and more.
This is a shocking and engaging read which begins powerfully and maintains that intensity throughout. Some of the phrases come across as slightly clunky, but that is inevitable when English was not the original language. It has been translated from French and is not jarring at all so far, but merely has phrases that sound a bit out of place.
At Night All Blood is Black is certainly disturbing. It is unnerving and disturbing, through showing how someone. becomes dehumanised, and the presentation of this is masterful, but still unsettling. The exploration of psychology was amazing to read, and an experience I will remember for a long, long time.
When this won the Booker Prize recently, I looked at the blurb and was immediately drawn in. This is a story about the effects of war, the dehumanising consequences of conflict and the dramatic effects of loss, all whilst also engaging with race, masculinity, identity and more.
This is a shocking and engaging read which begins powerfully and maintains that intensity throughout. Some of the phrases come across as slightly clunky, but that is inevitable when English was not the original language. It has been translated from French and is not jarring at all so far, but merely has phrases that sound a bit out of place.
At Night All Blood is Black is certainly disturbing. It is unnerving and disturbing, through showing how someone. becomes dehumanised, and the presentation of this is masterful, but still unsettling. The exploration of psychology was amazing to read, and an experience I will remember for a long, long time.
September 7, 2023
Read in French. A bit of an uneven book. It starts powerful (“Moi, Alfa N’diaye”), with a dramatic scene on the battlefield of the First World War, narrated by a Senegalese skirmisher. Even afterwards, Diop manages to keep the attention going with a gruesome illustration of what war psychosis can do to a person. But past the halfway point (of this short book), the story becomes more of a reverie about village life in Senegal, in a much more jovial tone, a story that reminded me a lot of Chinua Achebe (Things fall apart). Diop then picks up the thread of war again, to end with a very short fairy tale. Not bad at all, but only half a success for me. And I'm left with an uneasy feeling that Diop inadvertently confirms the cliché of black Africans acting like monsters on the battlefield. Rating 2.5 stars.
June 27, 2020
Ωμό, σκληρό,αληθινό!
Ακόμα και αν είναι μυθιστορηματική γραφή,μπορείς να μεταφερθείς στην τότε πραγματικότητα των χαρακωμάτων του Α' Π.Π. & να καταλάβεις γιατί ήταν ένας πόλεμος που σημάδεψε την ανθρωπότητα (αλλά δεν έβαλε μυαλό & οδηγήθηκε στον Β' Π.Π;)
Ακόμα και αν είναι μυθιστορηματική γραφή,μπορείς να μεταφερθείς στην τότε πραγματικότητα των χαρακωμάτων του Α' Π.Π. & να καταλάβεις γιατί ήταν ένας πόλεμος που σημάδεψε την ανθρωπότητα (αλλά δεν έβαλε μυαλό & οδηγήθηκε στον Β' Π.Π;)
May 19, 2024
THE DARK PATH OF WAR
A really powerful, almost hypnotic novel set during World War I. The story is told from the perspective of Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for the French army. Deeply affected by the brutal death of his close friend and fellow soldier, Mademba Diop, Alfa becomes consumed by grief and guilt. This trauma leads him down a dark path, where he begins to lose his sanity amidst the horrors of war.
Alfa's descent into madness is marked by his ritualistic collection of enemy hands, a macabre attempt to avenge Mademba’s death and prove his own bravery. As he becomes increasingly isolated and unhinged, his comrades begin to fear him, further highlighting the alienation and psychological toll of combat.
Diop's novel explores themes of colonialism, the dehumanizing effects of war, and the complexities of friendship and loyalty. The narrative is deeply introspective, the style hypnotically vivid, delving into Alfa's internal struggles and the cultural and psychological conflicts faced by African soldiers in the European war.
The novel has received critical acclaim for its lyrical prose/unflinching portrayal of the violence and trauma of war. It won the International Booker Prize in 2021. Reading it in English was for me a pretty good experience, but I would like to try read it in the original French sometime.
A really powerful, almost hypnotic novel set during World War I. The story is told from the perspective of Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for the French army. Deeply affected by the brutal death of his close friend and fellow soldier, Mademba Diop, Alfa becomes consumed by grief and guilt. This trauma leads him down a dark path, where he begins to lose his sanity amidst the horrors of war.
Alfa's descent into madness is marked by his ritualistic collection of enemy hands, a macabre attempt to avenge Mademba’s death and prove his own bravery. As he becomes increasingly isolated and unhinged, his comrades begin to fear him, further highlighting the alienation and psychological toll of combat.
Diop's novel explores themes of colonialism, the dehumanizing effects of war, and the complexities of friendship and loyalty. The narrative is deeply introspective, the style hypnotically vivid, delving into Alfa's internal struggles and the cultural and psychological conflicts faced by African soldiers in the European war.
The novel has received critical acclaim for its lyrical prose/unflinching portrayal of the violence and trauma of war. It won the International Booker Prize in 2021. Reading it in English was for me a pretty good experience, but I would like to try read it in the original French sometime.
July 28, 2022
“The ones I might have told my secret thoughts to, my brothers-in-arms who will be left so disfigured, maimed, eviscerated, that God will be ashamed to see them show up in Paradise and the Devil will be happy to welcome them to Hell, will never know who I really am.”
“Don’t tell me that we don’t need madness on the battlefield. God‘s truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid.”
Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop are childhood friends from Senegal. They are “Chocolat” soldiers fighting with the French army against the Germans in World War I. When Mademba is mortally wounded he repeatedly begs Alfa to kill him. Alfa, respecting human law and the teachings of his parents, refuses to kill Mademba and he is consumed by guilt and driven to madness by his failure to act humanely. He begins sneaking out each night, torturing and killing German soldiers and cutting off their hands which he preserves. His fellow soldiers initially think he is heroic, but they soon sense his madness and he is eventually sent to the rear.
This was a beautifully written, devastating description of the horrors of war. If you are extremely squeamish you might want to skip this. It is also a vivid depiction of insanity. There are African fables and flashbacks to life in Senegal. I never got the feeling that this book was translated, so the translator, Anna Moschovakis, must have done a very good job. Dion Graham, the narrator of the audiobook, also did an excellent job.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
“Don’t tell me that we don’t need madness on the battlefield. God‘s truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid.”
Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop are childhood friends from Senegal. They are “Chocolat” soldiers fighting with the French army against the Germans in World War I. When Mademba is mortally wounded he repeatedly begs Alfa to kill him. Alfa, respecting human law and the teachings of his parents, refuses to kill Mademba and he is consumed by guilt and driven to madness by his failure to act humanely. He begins sneaking out each night, torturing and killing German soldiers and cutting off their hands which he preserves. His fellow soldiers initially think he is heroic, but they soon sense his madness and he is eventually sent to the rear.
This was a beautifully written, devastating description of the horrors of war. If you are extremely squeamish you might want to skip this. It is also a vivid depiction of insanity. There are African fables and flashbacks to life in Senegal. I never got the feeling that this book was translated, so the translator, Anna Moschovakis, must have done a very good job. Dion Graham, the narrator of the audiobook, also did an excellent job.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
June 22, 2023
به من نگفتند که در میدان های جنگ نیازی به آدم های دیوونه ندارند. به خداوندی خدا ، دیوانه ها از هیچ چیز نمی ترسند. سایرین، سربازهای سفید پوست یا سیاه پوست، فقط ادای دیوانه ها را در می اورند، صحنه های مضحک جنون آمیز به راه می اندازند تا بتوانند راحت تر خودشان را زیر گلوله های دشمن رو به رو بیندازند. این رفتار به آن ها اجازه می دهد بی آنکه زیادی بترسند ، به استقبال مرگ بشتابند....
May 27, 2024
به خداوندی خدا
نمونه بارز یک شروع بسیار جذاب و در پیش گرفتن روندی کاملا ملال آور.
دومین کتاب برندهی جایزه بوکر بینالملل که برای من ناامید کننده به پایان رسید. تمام مدت نسبتا طولانیای که درگیر مطالعه این کتاب کم حجم بودم مرتب از خودم میپرسیدم که چه دلیلی برگزار کنندگان بوکر رو متقاعد به انتخاب این اثر کرده و حالا چیزی جز موضوع جذاب و جدیدش به ذهنم نمیرسه.
حداقل با سطح دانش من از ادبیات(که کاملا ناچیز و ابتدایی هست) این کتاب ارزش چشمگیری به لحاظ ادبی نداره و شاید در زبان اصلی(فرانسوی) قابل تحسین باشه اما در فارسی محسوس نیست. هرچند که توانایی نویسنده در بکارگیری جریان سیال ذهن ستودنی هست اما احتمالا موضوع دردناک و تفکربرانگیز این کتاب بر دیگر ویژگی ها برای انتخاب شدناش برتری داره. در واقع با خوردن برچسب جایزه بوکر روی این کتاب به لیست مطالعه افراد بیشتری مثل خود من راه پیدا خواهد کرد و در غیر اینصورت مخاطبین محدودی خواهد داشت.
اما موضوع جذاب داستان این کتاب چه چیزی هست؟
جنگ جهانی اول. در برخورد اولیه موضوع بسیار تکراری و دورکننده است، حتی برای افرادی که این سبک کتابها رو میپسندند. اما بعد از مطالعه این کتاب با بخشی از تاریخ جنگ آشنا خواهیم شد که کاملا در تاریکی و سکوت بود. استفاده فرانسه از سیاهپوست های ساکن کشور های تحت استعمار در آفریقا.
فرانسه که در دو جنگ جهانی فشار بسیار زیادی متحمل شد برای جبران بخشی از این فشار دست به دامن قدرت و توانایی های مردم سیاهپوست ساکن کشور های مستعمرهاش شد و بطور ناعادلانهای اونها رو وارد جنگی کرد که برای اونها کاملا غریبه و ناملموس بود. افرادی که بخاطر ناهمزبانی و عدم تسلط به فرانسوی حتی توانایی گفتگو با همرزمان سفید پوستشون رو نداشتند. عملا فرانسه به دنبال سیاهی لشکر برای تامین گوشت دم توپ بود و سیاهپوست های کشور های تحت سلطه که جایگاه نازلی در قدرت داشتند این خلا رو به خوبی پوشش دادند.
آلفا ندیای به همراه عزیزترین شخص زندگیاش مادمبا که اون رو برادرش میدونه به خط مقدم جنگ اعزام شدند. همه چیز طبق روال معمول در جریان هست تا اینکه پیش چشمان آلفا، مادمبا شدیدا مجروح میشه. امیدی به زندگیاش نیست و محتویات درون بدنش بیرون پاشیده شده. مادمبا که درد طاقتش رو کور کرده سه بار از آلفا میخواد که راحتش کنه. اما اون هربار با قاطعیت این درخواست عزیزتر از برادرش رو رد میکنه و کنارش میمونه تا از شدت جراحت بلاخره جان میده. تا حد ممکن محتویات بدن اون رو سرجای خودش قرار میده و بدنش رو به سنگر های خودی برمیگردونه. این اتفاق شدیدا دردناک دید آلفا رو به جنگ و زندگی کاملا تغییر میده. مخصوصا رد آخرین درخواست مادمبا بارها به خاطرش میاد و مرتب باعث آزارش هست. بعد از این اتفاق ما با آلفای کاملا متفاوتی روبهرو هستیم که تا قبل از این شخصی شجاع و قدرتمند شناخته میشد. نه اینکه از میزان شجا��ت و قدرتمندی اون کاسته شده باشه، بلکه حالا اون شخصی روانی و متخاصم به نظر میاد. اطرافیان خودشون رو حدالامکان از آلفا دور نگه میدارند و اون رو شوم میدونند. تا جایی که آلفا این مطلب رو باور میکنه و خودش رو دلیل تیر خوردن هم رزمانش میدونه.
روایت ها تماما از قول آلفا هست و به تنهایی داستان گذشتهاش رو برامون شرح خواهد داد. خاطرات دور و نزدیک از جنگ و آرامش های ناپایدار زندگی.
اغلب جملات آلفا با سوگند خوردن آغاز میشن. به شکل به خداوندی خدا...
چند نقل قول:
عنوان اصلی کتاب هم "برادر روحی" هست که در ترجمه انگلیسی به "شب ها همهی خون ها سیاه است" تغییر پیدا کرده. با الهام یکی از جملات کتاب. و با این عنوان فرعی شناخته شده تر هست.
هفت خرداد صفر سه
نمونه بارز یک شروع بسیار جذاب و در پیش گرفتن روندی کاملا ملال آور.
دومین کتاب برندهی جایزه بوکر بینالملل که برای من ناامید کننده به پایان رسید. تمام مدت نسبتا طولانیای که درگیر مطالعه این کتاب کم حجم بودم مرتب از خودم میپرسیدم که چه دلیلی برگزار کنندگان بوکر رو متقاعد به انتخاب این اثر کرده و حالا چیزی جز موضوع جذاب و جدیدش به ذهنم نمیرسه.
حداقل با سطح دانش من از ادبیات(که کاملا ناچیز و ابتدایی هست) این کتاب ارزش چشمگیری به لحاظ ادبی نداره و شاید در زبان اصلی(فرانسوی) قابل تحسین باشه اما در فارسی محسوس نیست. هرچند که توانایی نویسنده در بکارگیری جریان سیال ذهن ستودنی هست اما احتمالا موضوع دردناک و تفکربرانگیز این کتاب بر دیگر ویژگی ها برای انتخاب شدناش برتری داره. در واقع با خوردن برچسب جایزه بوکر روی این کتاب به لیست مطالعه افراد بیشتری مثل خود من راه پیدا خواهد کرد و در غیر اینصورت مخاطبین محدودی خواهد داشت.
اما موضوع جذاب داستان این کتاب چه چیزی هست؟
جنگ جهانی اول. در برخورد اولیه موضوع بسیار تکراری و دورکننده است، حتی برای افرادی که این سبک کتابها رو میپسندند. اما بعد از مطالعه این کتاب با بخشی از تاریخ جنگ آشنا خواهیم شد که کاملا در تاریکی و سکوت بود. استفاده فرانسه از سیاهپوست های ساکن کشور های تحت استعمار در آفریقا.
فرانسه که در دو جنگ جهانی فشار بسیار زیادی متحمل شد برای جبران بخشی از این فشار دست به دامن قدرت و توانایی های مردم سیاهپوست ساکن کشور های مستعمرهاش شد و بطور ناعادلانهای اونها رو وارد جنگی کرد که برای اونها کاملا غریبه و ناملموس بود. افرادی که بخاطر ناهمزبانی و عدم تسلط به فرانسوی حتی توانایی گفتگو با همرزمان سفید پوستشون رو نداشتند. عملا فرانسه به دنبال سیاهی لشکر برای تامین گوشت دم توپ بود و سیاهپوست های کشور های تحت سلطه که جایگاه نازلی در قدرت داشتند این خلا رو به خوبی پوشش دادند.
آلفا ندیای به همراه عزیزترین شخص زندگیاش مادمبا که اون رو برادرش میدونه به خط مقدم جنگ اعزام شدند. همه چیز طبق روال معمول در جریان هست تا اینکه پیش چشمان آلفا، مادمبا شدیدا مجروح میشه. امیدی به زندگیاش نیست و محتویات درون بدنش بیرون پاشیده شده. مادمبا که درد طاقتش رو کور کرده سه بار از آلفا میخواد که راحتش کنه. اما اون هربار با قاطعیت این درخواست عزیزتر از برادرش رو رد میکنه و کنارش میمونه تا از شدت جراحت بلاخره جان میده. تا حد ممکن محتویات بدن اون رو سرجای خودش قرار میده و بدنش رو به سنگر های خودی برمیگردونه. این اتفاق شدیدا دردناک دید آلفا رو به جنگ و زندگی کاملا تغییر میده. مخصوصا رد آخرین درخواست مادمبا بارها به خاطرش میاد و مرتب باعث آزارش هست. بعد از این اتفاق ما با آلفای کاملا متفاوتی روبهرو هستیم که تا قبل از این شخصی شجاع و قدرتمند شناخته میشد. نه اینکه از میزان شجا��ت و قدرتمندی اون کاسته شده باشه، بلکه حالا اون شخصی روانی و متخاصم به نظر میاد. اطرافیان خودشون رو حدالامکان از آلفا دور نگه میدارند و اون رو شوم میدونند. تا جایی که آلفا این مطلب رو باور میکنه و خودش رو دلیل تیر خوردن هم رزمانش میدونه.
روایت ها تماما از قول آلفا هست و به تنهایی داستان گذشتهاش رو برامون شرح خواهد داد. خاطرات دور و نزدیک از جنگ و آرامش های ناپایدار زندگی.
اغلب جملات آلفا با سوگند خوردن آغاز میشن. به شکل به خداوندی خدا...
چند نقل قول:
وقتی به همه این بزدل ها فکر میکنم، نمیتوانم جلو خنده های خیلی خیلی بلندم در درون ذهنم را بگیرم.
جلو آدم ها جوری نمیخندم که در ذهنم میخندم. پدر پیرم همیشه به من میگفت: فقط بچه ها و دیوانه ها بی دلیل میخندند. من دیگر بچه نیستم. به خداوندی خدا، جنگ یکهویی مرا بزرگ کرد، به خصوص بعد از مرگ مادمبا دیوپ، عزیزتر از برادرم. ولی به رغم مرگ او، بازهم میخندم. به رغم مرگ ژان باتیست، بازهم در ذهنم میخندم. برای مرگ دیگران فقط لبخند میزنم، به خود فقط اجازه میدهم لبخند بزنم. به خداوندی خدا، هر لبخند لبخندی دیگر به دنبال دارد، مثل خمیازه به آدم هایی لبخند میزنم که حالم را بهتر میکنند آنها وقتی لبخند مرا میبینند نمیتوانند صدای قهقه هایم را که در ذهنم ط��ین میافکند بشنوند. خدا را شکر، وگرنه مرا یک دیوانه عصبی قلمداد میکردند.
آدم ها وقایع را به پیش نمیبرند، بلکه وقابع است که آدم ها را به پیش میبرد. وقایعی که به منظور برای هر انسانی اتفاق میافتد پیش از آن نیز برای انسان های دیگر اتفاق افتاده است. همه آنچه برای بشر اتفاق میافتد، قبلا نیز احساس شده است. هرچه در این دنیا بر سر ما بیاید، خواه خیلی مهم یا خیلی سودمند باشد، اتفاق جدیدی نیست. ما هستیم که احساس میکنیم آن اتفاق جدید است، چون هرکدام از ما منحصربهفرد هستیم، مثل برگ های یک درخت که هر کدام به رغم ظاهری مشابه غیر از برگ های دیگر همان درخت است.
عنوان اصلی کتاب هم "برادر روحی" هست که در ترجمه انگلیسی به "شب ها همهی خون ها سیاه است" تغییر پیدا کرده. با الهام یکی از جملات کتاب. و با این عنوان فرعی شناخته شده تر هست.
هفت خرداد صفر سه
Read
October 17, 2021Intense language, and a too-rarely heard perspective on the First World War are initially enticing in this very brief novella from the first Black, and first French, winner of the International Booker Prize since the award acquired its current format in 2016. The narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, is a young Senegalese man enlisted to fight in the trenches for France, a tirailleur.
An awareness of the compulsion to repeat trauma, and the way a skilled author can use that to make broader points about society and race may, for Anglo-American readers, bring to mind Toni Morrison's Beloved - though I am sure there are plenty of influences from modern Francophone and West African writing at work in David Diop's book that I was unable to spot.
Diop spells out some of the meanings of his story more explicitly than Morrison did in her 1987 masterwork. I thought at first that perhaps this was unnecessary by 2021, when many readers are better educated about racism - though the novel was first published in French in 2018, and French literary circles may be less open to racial justice material. Yet it makes sense to talk about an issue overtly: the narrator is a thoughtful young man with a lot to say about how he and his countrymen have little choice but to 'play the savage' when enlisted as soldiers by a colonising power. The novel is about the way that enforced and demeaning social roles affect people, how people may inhabit or become those roles, even when, or sometimes sadly because, they want to resist them, and because racism and colonialism can be double-binds to identity - and about what agency might mean in such constricted circumstances as being a racialised soldier thousands of miles from home. All this is achieved through the story itself, and through a melding of West African folklore with European literary devices used to signal unstable narrators.
Repetitiousness arguably sets in for a while about a third of the way through the text, despite its shortness; this experiential device naturally makes the reader a little more conscious of the repetitive brutality of war. Contemporary literature is about more than enjoyment.
Certain motifs familiar from West European and British First World War writing abound in the middle third or so of the book. These were rites of passage common to countless young men at this time, but how you find this will depend how interested you are in this period of history, how much you enjoy reading yet again about bingo-card life experiences such as the ambiguous possibly homoromantic friendships (the novel's French title is the multi-layered Frère d'âme), the beautiful girl our young hero spent time with before he went to war, the lost comrades, the survivor's guilt, the attractive nurse. Although Diop's prose in Anna Moschovakis' translation is consistently excellent, some readers, like me, find this type of war fiction too paint-by-numbers even when its creator is such a master craftsman. (It is still incomparably better, in both quality and novelty, than the workaday output of the late Hubert Mingarelli, whose WWII novellas were IMO inexplicably listed for the 2019 International Booker and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.) I am not really the book's proper audience - by which I mean readers who are interested in fiction about WWI for its own sake - as I would not have read this book were it not for the International Booker Prize. (I've read five of the six winners and also needed a short Booker winner for a separate reading challenge.)
Yet there is obvious value in showing how Ndiaye and his friends were similar in these war-fiction-cliché ways to their white Euro comrades -they were young men like the others, regardless of the Europeans defining the tirailleurs overwhelmingly by their skin colour and racialised, colonised status.
And At Night All Blood Is Black brings a relatively fresh interrogation of war and historical war fiction to the table, one which is more possible in the First rather than the Second World War context. What makes certain ways of killing and unpleasant death more acceptable than others? (Including at different places and times in history.) How important is intention? What really makes soldiers different from, say, serial killers?
(The narrative was not as graphic in its detail as I expected, but then I have, over the past nearly thirty years encountered numerous accounts of the goriest action described here in history books that dealt with periods several hundred years earlier than the novel. Readers with a background in medieval and early modern history may be more desensitised than those expecting the standard WWI carnage. In the last six weeks I think I've winced more at descriptions of this particular thing in a radio documentary or audiobook mentioning an early modern execution, and in some written piece on Classical history, than I ever did at the novel.)
Later in the book, we hear background about Ndiaye's childhood and family in Senegal, that his mother was from a Fulani herding family and his father a peasant farmer, and the tensions of the two families' ways of life, all of which was very interesting. The introduction of peanuts as a cash crop was an impending development in the village at this time. Both the Fulani and cash-cropping (apologies to anyone from the region including the author) gave me flashbacks to school geography lessons - in the UK in the 1990s - where these were topics we studied, more or less separately. The narrator's father's summation of why peanut monocropping would be inimical to his community, independence and way of life was infinitely more moving and eloquent than anything ever written as a GCSE answer.
Unlike previous International Booker years, I paid almost no attention to the prize whilst it was going on, as I had so much new going on in my own life. The only thing I recalled hearing about At Night All Blood Is Black - and that only after I'd started the book - was that one or two readers had found the sexualised metaphors excessive, especially given public conversations of recent years. (Though, with the book being published back in 2018, much of it may have been written pre-#metoo.) I have never been that bothered by such stuff, and always accepted it as a norm in literary fiction published in the second half of the 20th century. Though this did make me consider the difference between fiction of, say, the 1960s and later, and what soldiers of 100 years ago may have *said* as opposed to *thought*. (I wrote the last sentence thinking of recent tweets I'd seen about how some suffragettes at marches were verbally abused by police and thrown to male onlookers to be sexually assaulted.) I think this toughness of the prose also emphasises that this is a man's world as metaphors in Chinua Achebe also did. This is also a complex issue to raise where it is white Euro-American female readers who are finding metaphors in a book by a Black African man to be too sexualised. It is something where I think discussion is better dealt with by men and women of color, and possibly by younger people who are more sensitive to these types of sexual and potentially sexist metaphors in literature than I am.
Not least because the book is so short, and because the writing so good, there is plenty to recommend At Night All Blood Is Black even if it isn't your idea of perfect in every way. Most readers of contemporary translated literature would, I think, be interested in at least one out of the WWI angle and life in early twentieth century West Africa. And I would particularly recommend it to those who are drawn to First World War fiction, as it is probably the most powerful writing I've read about the conflict that wasn't a participant memoir.
(October 2021)
An awareness of the compulsion to repeat trauma, and the way a skilled author can use that to make broader points about society and race may, for Anglo-American readers, bring to mind Toni Morrison's Beloved - though I am sure there are plenty of influences from modern Francophone and West African writing at work in David Diop's book that I was unable to spot.
Diop spells out some of the meanings of his story more explicitly than Morrison did in her 1987 masterwork. I thought at first that perhaps this was unnecessary by 2021, when many readers are better educated about racism - though the novel was first published in French in 2018, and French literary circles may be less open to racial justice material. Yet it makes sense to talk about an issue overtly: the narrator is a thoughtful young man with a lot to say about how he and his countrymen have little choice but to 'play the savage' when enlisted as soldiers by a colonising power. The novel is about the way that enforced and demeaning social roles affect people, how people may inhabit or become those roles, even when, or sometimes sadly because, they want to resist them, and because racism and colonialism can be double-binds to identity - and about what agency might mean in such constricted circumstances as being a racialised soldier thousands of miles from home. All this is achieved through the story itself, and through a melding of West African folklore with European literary devices used to signal unstable narrators.
Repetitiousness arguably sets in for a while about a third of the way through the text, despite its shortness; this experiential device naturally makes the reader a little more conscious of the repetitive brutality of war. Contemporary literature is about more than enjoyment.
Certain motifs familiar from West European and British First World War writing abound in the middle third or so of the book. These were rites of passage common to countless young men at this time, but how you find this will depend how interested you are in this period of history, how much you enjoy reading yet again about bingo-card life experiences such as the ambiguous possibly homoromantic friendships (the novel's French title is the multi-layered Frère d'âme), the beautiful girl our young hero spent time with before he went to war, the lost comrades, the survivor's guilt, the attractive nurse. Although Diop's prose in Anna Moschovakis' translation is consistently excellent, some readers, like me, find this type of war fiction too paint-by-numbers even when its creator is such a master craftsman. (It is still incomparably better, in both quality and novelty, than the workaday output of the late Hubert Mingarelli, whose WWII novellas were IMO inexplicably listed for the 2019 International Booker and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.) I am not really the book's proper audience - by which I mean readers who are interested in fiction about WWI for its own sake - as I would not have read this book were it not for the International Booker Prize. (I've read five of the six winners and also needed a short Booker winner for a separate reading challenge.)
Yet there is obvious value in showing how Ndiaye and his friends were similar in these war-fiction-cliché ways to their white Euro comrades -they were young men like the others, regardless of the Europeans defining the tirailleurs overwhelmingly by their skin colour and racialised, colonised status.
And At Night All Blood Is Black brings a relatively fresh interrogation of war and historical war fiction to the table, one which is more possible in the First rather than the Second World War context. What makes certain ways of killing and unpleasant death more acceptable than others? (Including at different places and times in history.) How important is intention? What really makes soldiers different from, say, serial killers?
(The narrative was not as graphic in its detail as I expected, but then I have, over the past nearly thirty years encountered numerous accounts of the goriest action described here in history books that dealt with periods several hundred years earlier than the novel. Readers with a background in medieval and early modern history may be more desensitised than those expecting the standard WWI carnage. In the last six weeks I think I've winced more at descriptions of this particular thing in a radio documentary or audiobook mentioning an early modern execution, and in some written piece on Classical history, than I ever did at the novel.)
Later in the book, we hear background about Ndiaye's childhood and family in Senegal, that his mother was from a Fulani herding family and his father a peasant farmer, and the tensions of the two families' ways of life, all of which was very interesting. The introduction of peanuts as a cash crop was an impending development in the village at this time. Both the Fulani and cash-cropping (apologies to anyone from the region including the author) gave me flashbacks to school geography lessons - in the UK in the 1990s - where these were topics we studied, more or less separately. The narrator's father's summation of why peanut monocropping would be inimical to his community, independence and way of life was infinitely more moving and eloquent than anything ever written as a GCSE answer.
Unlike previous International Booker years, I paid almost no attention to the prize whilst it was going on, as I had so much new going on in my own life. The only thing I recalled hearing about At Night All Blood Is Black - and that only after I'd started the book - was that one or two readers had found the sexualised metaphors excessive, especially given public conversations of recent years. (Though, with the book being published back in 2018, much of it may have been written pre-#metoo.) I have never been that bothered by such stuff, and always accepted it as a norm in literary fiction published in the second half of the 20th century. Though this did make me consider the difference between fiction of, say, the 1960s and later, and what soldiers of 100 years ago may have *said* as opposed to *thought*. (I wrote the last sentence thinking of recent tweets I'd seen about how some suffragettes at marches were verbally abused by police and thrown to male onlookers to be sexually assaulted.) I think this toughness of the prose also emphasises that this is a man's world as metaphors in Chinua Achebe also did. This is also a complex issue to raise where it is white Euro-American female readers who are finding metaphors in a book by a Black African man to be too sexualised. It is something where I think discussion is better dealt with by men and women of color, and possibly by younger people who are more sensitive to these types of sexual and potentially sexist metaphors in literature than I am.
Not least because the book is so short, and because the writing so good, there is plenty to recommend At Night All Blood Is Black even if it isn't your idea of perfect in every way. Most readers of contemporary translated literature would, I think, be interested in at least one out of the WWI angle and life in early twentieth century West Africa. And I would particularly recommend it to those who are drawn to First World War fiction, as it is probably the most powerful writing I've read about the conflict that wasn't a participant memoir.
(October 2021)
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