In the cold of night, I took off my regulation trench coat and my shirt. I slid my shirt onto your body and tied the sleeves against your stomach, a very, very tight double knot that became stained with your black blood. I picked you up and brought you back to the trench. I held you in my arms like a child, my more-than-brother, my friend, and I walked and walked in the mud, in the crevices carved out by mortar shells, filled with blood-stained water, dispersing the rats that had left their burrows to feed on human flesh. And as I carried you in my arms, I began to think for myself, by asking for your forgiveness. I knew, I understood too late what I should have done when you asked me, eyes dry, the way one asks a favor of a childhood friend, like a debt owed, without ceremony, sweetly. Forgive me.
In At Night All Blood is Black, French-Sengalese author David Diop centres the voice of those who fought mostly unremembered by history — the West African soldiers who served in the trenches under the command of their French colonisers during WWI. Following an inner monologue that circles and meanders and splinters unpredictably, Diop places us in the fractured mind of one such Sengalese soldier: twenty-year-old Alfa Ndiaye, who signed up with his more-than-brother best friend, Mademba Diop; and after having Mademba die in his arms in the opening scene of the book, Alfa enacts a type of ritualised revenge against his German enemies (after all, at night all blood is black) that will at first be commended by his comrades, and eventually feared. When Alfa is ultimately relieved of active duty in order to “rest”, his memories of a childhood in a small Sengalese village add texture and context to his horrific experience of war in the present. This is a short novel that packs a hefty punch, and despite finding the whole thing disturbing and bordering on distasteful, I think that Diop does a service to history by telling this story.
The rumor spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air. I didn’t notice it right away, I didn’t recognize the change, I didn’t know what she was plotting. Everyone had seen her but no one described her to me. I finally caught wind of the whispers and learned that my strangeness had been transformed into madness, and madness into witchcraft. Soldier sorcerer.
Alfa and Mademba are in a mixed unit, with Chocolat and Toubab soldiers serving side by side; and although there’s no real overt racism between these brothers in arms, “Chocolat” seems to have derogatory overtones and a quick Google search tells me that the West African term “Toubab” (for a white European) is negatively associated with colonialism. When their Captain orders the African soldiers to attack like “savages” — with a rifle in one hand and a machete in the other as they cross the No Man’s Land in order to cause maximum fear in their German opponents — it is this play-acting at savagery that will lead to Mademba’s death. And when Alfa then decides to embrace the caricature of the savage — to be the Germans’ worst nightmare and marvel at the fantastical prejudices behind their frightened blue eyes — he will cross a line that makes his own side fear that he has become a dëmm; a devourer of souls. The longer Alfa plays this role, the looser his own grip on reality:
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.
This notion of doubling/mirroring/twinning is present throughout — the mixing of white and Black soldiers, Alfa and Mademba are physical and intellectual opposites, Alfa’s parents (his mother a beautiful young Fula migratory shepherd, his father an old sedentary peasant) are “exact opposites”, there is consensual and nonconsenual sex — and it’s unclear whether Alfa might be suffering from the kind of mental disorder that a French doctor can “wipe away”, or perhaps his condition is straight out of Sengalese mythology. Either way, shell-shocked or possessed, Alfa is left broken in a way particular to his experience as an African soldier serving in a unit commanded by his country’s colonial rulers. This was a tough read of war and a descent into madness — as gutting as a bayonet to the abdomen — and I was often turned off by the depiction and treatment of women characters, but there’s the ring of truth here and I applaud Diop for bringing this story forward.
