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, an 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, ruthlessly exploited by the ruthless and racist French. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC.

Most accounts of World War 1 and the horrors of trench warfare are from the perspective of non-BIPOC narrators. Here are some statistics though: well over 4 million BIPOC men were mobilised into the European and American armies during the War, in both combat and non-combat roles. France recruited between 1914 and 1918 nearly 500,000 colonial troops, including 166,000 West Africans, 46,000 Madagascans, 50,000 Indochinese, 140,000 Algerians, 47,000 Tunisians and 24,300 Moroccans. (sources: British Library article by Dr.Santanu Das). This book is a visceral, haunting account of a Senegalese soldier in World War 1, Alfa Ndiaye enlists because his friend and almost-brother, Mademba Diop, enlists out of a sense of patriotism towards France. They contend with the unimaginable experiences of the madness of war, but also with the incredible racism of their commanding officers, who view them all as a monolith, firstly, and refuse to acknowledge their individual humanity. Diop writes of superior officers referring to them as "wild savages who are useful in frightening the enemy", which ironic in a war where everyone behaves with savagery and inhumanity. The writer brings out the inherent insanity of war, and the hypocrisies of colonialism-Ndiaye is constantly told by his superiors to behave "savage", but only to a point where they feel they can control him. Ndiaye's personal traumas mean nothing, unless they can be used to provoke further violence against the enemy. The enemy, in this case, the author is very careful to emphasize, being war itself. The writing is very powerful-everything about the war was so crazy, what extent of craziness was too much? In a situation where colonial soldiers were dying for countries that denied them rights in their own homeland, was Ndiaye's very specific form of revenge ( as violent as it is) really that much crazier?
My only issues with the book were a few paragraphs that unnecessarily objectified women, and used fairly violent imagery. The metaphors, of course, standing in for the violations of colonialism, but that felt gratuitous to me.
This is a short, but very powerful book. If you're thinking of reading a war novel, read this, instead of 'All quiet on the Western Front ' for the millionth time.

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

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

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

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

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

Whenever I think about the best literary work on World War I, my mind would fling towards Erich Maria Remarque’s magnum opus "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1929). But too often we forgot that the Great War was not only a war fought between several European powers. French colonies in Europe were also dragged into the mess, and many of the colonised saw this war as an opportunity for them to obtain French citizenship as was the case of our main character in this story, Alfa Ndianye.

Ndianye’s tale begins as a confession with his guilt over the death of his more-than-brother, Mademba Diop who begged for Alfa to finish him off since it was his best intention to be killed by his more-than-brother instead of suffering by the death that slowly pulls him out of his body. Alfa’s regret soon awakened the other side of him. African legionnaires who fought in the trenches were tasked to perform acts of savagery in order to frighten the enemy.

Alfa Ndianye did not miss this opportunity and mutilated the hands of his enemies to release his agonies over the death of Mademba Diop. The first three hands were cut, and he was praised by his captain, but after that, it was troublesome for him as real madness is not allowed on the battlefield. In the words of Alfa: “Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister. But when you seem crazy all the time, continuously, without stopping, that’s when you make people afraid, even your war brothers.”

David Diop’s prose has poetic elements to it. It lays open the psychological trauma of a soldier who lost comrade-in-arms on the battlefield, which turns an act of braveness into savagery. Unlike Remarque whose intention is to tell us that the war itself is the enemy, the main character in this story brings the sense that war is the thing that transforms human beings into savagery. Alfa Ndiaye, in his endless quest to seek the blue-eyed German soldier who murdered Mademba Diop, lost himself to the savage nature of the war, in that he describes himself in his self-confession as synonymous to death itself.

The novel, albeit a short one (only 192 pages), brings about the complexities of being a human who is faced with the savage nature of war. It is the kind of literary cinema, that seems to be imperfect if not read in a single sitting, and in fact, I found myself devouring more than half of the story on my first day of reading it. Originally written in French, the translation of Anna Moschovaki also feels natural that it still contains the beauty of the worldview of Senegal’s Wolof people who inhabit Gandiol, a town in Saint-Louis in northwestern Senegal where Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop originally from. This book indeed lives up to my expectation of a work longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021.

“They won’t imagine what I have thought, what I’ve done, the depths to which the war drove me. In today’s world, God’s truth, I allow myself the unthinkable”

In WW1 approximately 135,000 Senegalese soldiers (termed “Chocolats”), fought for the French army in Europe and of these around 30,000 died. Inspired partly by French soldiers’ letters home, David Diop imagines what a Senegalese soldier would have written. The result is a haunting, hypnotic read, a riveting confession of what is unthinkable and unspeakable, an unflinching denunciation from a man who has decided to call things by their name.

We meet Senegalese recruit Alfa Ndiaye as he is at the side of his dying more-than-brother Mademba Diop. Although Mademba has been disembowelled and his entrails are hanging outside of his body, he is still alive and for three times he beseeches Alfa to end his suffering. Alfa doesn’t comply, still conditioned by the laws of humanity and his paternal teaching: in his words “this was before I allowed myself to think anything I want”. But Mademba’s horrible death is a turning point for Alfa, who suddenly apprehends the inanity of human laws and begins to think for himself, no longer listening to the “voice of duty”. This realisation is the beginning of Alfa’s hallucinated descent into madness, which manifests itself in the macabre rituals to which he subjects the blue-eyed “Krauts” he ambushes on no-man’s land (in physical and spiritual sense). While his deeds are initially hailed as bravery, after the third time his comrades start considering him possessed, a “soul devourer” and a madman. The novella develops the theme of madness/possession/doubling, which allows to see reality with estranged eyes and expose the colonial mindset and the absurdities of war. However, as the novella digs into Ndiaye’s memory and explores other themes such as burgeoning sexuality, guilt, abandonment and rape, it becomes clear that this is also a tale of coming-of-age, where war trauma and all these themes intersect and merge with dire consequences.

Diop exposes the racialisation and negative stereotyping that led to cast Senegalese soldiers as savage brutes, who were armed with machetes and pushed “to play the savage” on the battlefield: while this was meant to scare the enemy, who “was afraid of savage Negroes, cannibals, Zulus”, it also made them easy, dispensable targets as they were encouraged to hurl themselves out of the trenches, “beautifully massacred while screaming like madmen”. Ndiaye understands that “France needs us to play the savage when it suits them” (certainly not in Senegal and back in the trenches), but he also decides that it is impossible to conveniently leave the horror and savagery on the battlefield. Even if unintentional, this is a very interesting reversal of Kurtz’s tale in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where darkness is now in the heart of civilised Europe and “the horror” is finally defined and told.

At Night All Blood Is Black is a visceral read, hallucinated and lyrical. I was totally captured by the way the story is told and estrangement is conveyed. Diop creates a memorable voice and unreliable narrator: he puts repetition to good use to create a prose that is rhythmic and hypnotic, mixing Christian allusions and African traditions and folklore; the battlefield, a backdrop for gruesome acts and meticulously crude details, comes alive with sensuous and sexual imagery that helps tie together the multiple layers of the novella (above all personification such as the trenches as “the slightly parted lips of an immense woman’s sex. A woman, open, offering herself to war, to the bombshells, and to us, the soldiers”, bullets as seed).

Although I found the first part more convincing than the second one, this is a story that absolutely needed to be told and a worthy contender for the International Booker prize shortlist.
4.5 rounded up

"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.2

A powerful, short, novel that raises questions about the violent echoes of both war and colonialism. A strong shortlist contender for the International Booker Prize

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, one of two books by Pushkin Press – who publish “the world’s best stories, to be read and read again.”.

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 heart 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 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.

"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.