The book has a magnetic, entrancing style where the repetition of periapt sentences gives the novel an incantatory tone. The stream-of-consciousness approach is even more engrossing and appropriate when considering the central themes of the text, which are encapsulated in the three epigraphs to the novel. In that respect, I’d like to focus on two of the epigraphs in particular. One from Pascal Quignard reads, “Who thinks, betrays.” Another, from Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure says, “I am two simultaneous voices, one long, the other short.” The first of the quotes sets up an interesting juxtaposition of internal forces that ought to have no power and yet constitute an act in their own right: ideas that we theoretically cannot control nonetheless create an intentional act: betrayal.
The second quote is more direct to the central premise of the novel, though in a roundabout literary way. At Night All Blood Is Black is a novel of so many doubles, both touching and sardonic. The story focuses predominantly on Alfa Ndiaya, a black soldier from Senegal fighting on France’s side in World War I. His friend, Mademba Diop, is killed in the war. There is a graphic depiction of the death: “a long ribbon of his intestine had escaped from my shirt knotted around his waist [...] they wouldn’t have dared to neatly gather his guts into the sacred vessel of his body” (10). The book’s graphic depiction of the death follows from a powerful moment where Mademba, knowing that he’s dying, begs Alfa to kill him.
And Alfa doesn’t.
The first part of the novel is Alfa ruminating on his failure to fulfil his duty. He allows his friend to die a grim death rather than take care of whom he refers to as a more-than-brother. As the novel goes on, Alfa reveals more to the audience about why he feels responsible for Mademba’s death; the friendly ribbing and history of competition between them, he feels, drove Mademba out of the trench first at the most inopportune time. The novel is full of pathos for these characters and it’s hard not to feel invested in Alfa’s bonds.
From here, it’s difficult to describe why I found the novel so powerful, but I’ll start off by saying that for a war novel to grip my attention is no small feat. I often feel it’s all been done before and, despite their best efforts, tend to glorify combat. With Diop, not so. The novel is profoundly anti-war and offers some of the most grisly moments—juxtaposed ironically with moments of glory—that I can recall. In one moment, Alfa describes how the black soldiers are transformed into “savages” as a strategy; the German soldiers see them acting with frantic exaggerated “tribal” movements, but their French allies also see them as “savage.” Alfa narrates, “They need for us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes. I know, I understand, it’s no more complicated than that. The captain’s France needs our savagery, and because we are obedient, myself and others, we play the savage. We slash the enemy’s flesh, we maim, we decapitate, we disembowel” (15). In the next breath, Diop describes how the French soldiers started disobeying their commander so he sent them out of the trench one-by-one to be unceremoniously slaughtered by the enemy in a Full Metal Jacket parade of waste. It drives home the message that for all the pretence of civility, the “good guys” are even more stomach-wrenchingly disgusting.
The line between normalcy and transgression becomes a central motif in the novel. Alfa, avenging his friend, begins to lurk in the trenches, staying still and lying in wait for a blue-eyed victim. When they emerge for a cigarette, Alfa slices their knees and drags them away before torturing, killing, and dismembering them. Carrying on from the previous conversation about the soldiers’ savagery, he notes that “the only difference between them and me is that I became savage intentionally. They play a role only when they crawl out from the earth, but I play a role only with them, inside our sheltering trench” (15). The first three times he returns to camp with the dismembered hands of his victims, he is hailed as a hero; his cohorts even laugh and play practical jokes with the severed appendages. By the time he brings back the fourth, his comrades grow disgusted and terrified; they believe he is a dëmm, a devourer of souls. Alfa crosses an invisible boundary—it’s a more convincing version of one of the central characters in Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, if that serves as an adequate referent. Diop takes it further, though, by imbuing Alfa with a twisted paranoia. He collects and mummifies the hands and squirrels them away. The others are suspicious: “They thought I was an idiot,” he narrates, “but I’m not. The captain and the old Chocolat Croix de Guerre infantryman Ibrahima Seck wanted my seven hands so they could trap me. God’s truth, they wanted proof of my savagery so they could lock me up, but I would never tell them where I’d hidden my seven hands. They would never find them. They couldn’t imagine the quiet spot where they’d been laid to rest, dried and wrapped in cloth” (69). The madness of collecting these disturbing totems is exacerbated with the paranoia of having to hide the hands and I just find it all so compelling.
If I provide a short summary of the book it will neither do it justice nor spoil what’s so great about it, so I’m going to offer that here: following these de-handinations (not a word, disregard), Alfa is removed from the front lines and sent to the military hospital, where he draws pictures to illustrate his past, at which point he reveals to the audience stories of his past. The novel then returns to the present for a surreal de-re-personalization finale that I found impossibly compelling in its implications and its rich layering.
To return to the opening epigraph—“Who thinks, betrays”—a lot of the first section of the book revolves around what is acceptable to think and what is not. Moreover, it revolves around what is unthinkable. Alfa seemingly finds his freedom in his own mind: “No one knows what I think, I am free to think whatever I want” (15). Alfa can only bring himself to admit his reality inside his own impenetrable thoughts: “Since I’ve thought anything I want since then, I can admit everything to myself in the privacy of my mind. Yes, I told myself that I must be a dëmm [...] But I told myself, immediately after thinking it, that I couldn’t believe such a thing, that it wasn’t possible” (43).
The boundary of interior-exterior and self-other falls apart almost immediately: “what I think is that people don’t want me to think. The unthinkable is what is hidden behind the captain’s words” (15). There’s another kind of invisible boundary in the way that people think. When discussing his perception of himself as a dëmm, he immediately follows it up with, “At that time, it wasn’t really me who was thinking. I had left the door of my mind open to the thoughts of others, which I mistook for my own. I wasn’t hearing myself think anymore, but was hearing the others who were afraid of me. You have to be careful, when you believe you’re free to think what you want, not to let in the thinking of others, in disguise, the false thinking of your father and mother, the spurious thinking of your grandfather, the masked thinking of your brother or sister, of your friends, in other words, of your enemies” (43). The ambiguity of Alfa’s identity—of his perceptions—is so perfectly wrought in relation to the other themes in the text. There’s a battle between the interior-exterior and an affinity with / to / as others that appears in various forms throughout the novel. The uncertainty of how other peoples’ thoughts permeate your own and consequently how they manipulate your own agency is a compelling theme.
The dualities between thought/action and self/other are brief examples, but they recur in various forms throughout the text. At some level, truth and fiction emerge as another. When complaining of how the other soldiers treat him (“the bad side of my crimes had won out over the good side” (67)), he says “I became a dangerous madman, a bloodthirsty savage. God’s truth, that’s how things go, that’s how the world is: each thing is double” (67). On the one hand, this can be read that everything is repeated; on the other hand, it could mean that each thing is contradictory. The idea emerges even in the repeated phrase “God’s truth” that Alfa uses throughout the text. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially Alfa questions the omnipotence of God’s truth and so all of the professions to truth are actually a sign of their opposite; he doth protest too much.
Following his attacks on enemy soldiers, Alfa recognizes the randomness of fate that “made [Alfa] capture him and not someone else” (64). He elaborates that “It was written on high that it would be him I would find in the middle of the night (64) but then says, “Now I know, I understand that nothing is simple about what’s written on high. I know, I understand, but I don’t tell anyone because now I think what I want, for no one but myself, ever since Mademba Diop died. I believe I understand that what’s written on high is only a copy of what man writes here below. God’s truth, I believe that God always lags behind us. It’s all He can do to assess the damage. He couldn’t have wanted me to catch the little blue-eyed soldier in the hot pit of the enemy trench” (64). A few things worth of note here are that there’s an inversion of the truth. Alfa is using the incantatory phrase “God’s truth” takes on an ironic quality; he uses it to offer credibility to his account of events, but in the passage above we see that “God always lags behind us,” so essentially he is establishing truth himself only to be received later: “what’s written on high is only a copy of what man writes here below.” Thus, Alfa takes on a role as a kind of world-builder. The other thing worth noting is that Alfa does not want to tell anyone the truth and thinks for himself, supposedly, only following Mademba Diop’s death.
Alfa is pulled away from the front lines to be treated at the hospital. Despite the unreliable narration, it’s clear that he is being treated for psychological concerns and is provided with some level of rudimentary therapy. While he’s there, he professes that he’s rendered himself impenetrable to external ideas. He recounts, “Nothing could enter into the insides of my head. I know, I understand that the memory of my mother had calcified the entire surface of my mind so it was hard like a tortoise’s shell” (109). It’s interesting that this reaction emerges while externalizing his memories in a series of drawings. Ironically, he says that “there was nothing beneath this shell but the void of waiting” and then immediately says “the space where knowledge would have gone was already occupied” (109) — keep that line in mind for later. Alfa sees his mind as opened only when Mademba dies: “a big metal seed of war fell from the sky and cracked my mind’s shell in two. God’s truth, a new suffering joined with the old one. The two contemplated each other, they explained each other, they gave each other meaning” (109). It’s incredible how well-wrought these lines are. There’s a density to their presentation riddled with paradox and contradiction.
Returning a moment to the plot, Alfa draws pictures in the hospital which lead to a series of memories of figures from his past. Truth be told, I found this section the least compelling, though it is necessary for the ending of the book to deliver the way it does. When he’s drawing his mother, Alfa’s approach to art serves as a ‘key’ to the rest of the book: “What brings a drawing on a piece of paper to life is the play of shadow and light. [...] These glints of light leapt out from white slivers of paper that I had not colored in with black” (95). The focus on contrast and the hints of minimalism intimate the approach of the novel as a whole. With the slightest gestures, the full picture is provided.
Alfa also draws pictures that send his memories back to Fary Thiam, a romance he had before coming to war. He recounts their amorous tryst prior to coming to war and the jealousy it potentially inspired in Mademba. He then draws the seven hands he stole and we return to the internal/external dilemma: “I had to show them to Doctor Francois so that they would leave the inside of my head” (125). Unfortunately, he continues, “My seven hands spoke, they confessed all to my judges. God’s truth, I know, I understand that my drawings denounced me” (125). The external betrays the internal, and inner thoughts once again create a tangible reality with consequences.
The ending of the novel is one of the most surreal sleights-of-hand I’m likely to recall years from now. With roughly a third of the novel left, there’s a moment that happens in the hospital. It appears to me that Alfa rapes a nurse that had been caring for him but he is disembodied at the same time, insensible to her responses. I had to reread the section because it seemed un-real (not surreal). The novel then takes a strange turn and recounts a myth purportedly widely shared in Senegal. It effectively halts the momentum of the novel for a fair stretch. The narrator then gives commentary on the story that is in its own right fascinating: “I swear to you that I heard the story of the lion-sorcerer just before leaving for war. The story, like all interesting stories, is full of clever innuendo. Whoever tells a well-known story like the one about the lion-sorcerer and the fickle princess might always be hiding another story beneath it. To be seen, the story hidden beneath the well-known story has to peek out a little bit. If the hidden story hides too well beneath the well-known story, it stays invisible. The hidden story has to be there without being there, it has to let itself be guessed at, the way a tight saffron-yellow dress lets the beautiful figure of a young girl be guessed at. It has to be transparent. When it’s understood by those for whom it is intended, the story hidden beneath the well-known story can change the course of their lives, can push them to transform a diffuse desire into a concrete act. It can heal them from the sickness of hesitation, no matter the expectations of an ill-intentioned storyteller” (144). The penultimate passage to the novel gives a sort of manifesto to the book. It is both hidden and not, the shadow of a story traced around itself. What’s incredible, though, is how the passage frames other events in the text as well as it frames the mythic story. The stories Alfa and Mademba tell one another ultimately, in Alfa’s eyes, force Mademba to his own demise.
But the ending gets better. The narration continues, “But now that I think deeply about it, now that I take on God’s truth as my own, I know, I understand that Alfa left me a place in his wrestler’s body out of friendship, out of compassion. I know, I understand that Alfa heard the first supplication I uttered in the depths of no-man’s-land on the night of my death. Because I didn’t want to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, in a land without a name. God’s truth, I swear to you that now, whenever I think of us, he is me and I am him” (145). Diop pulls an incredible move here. The tell-tale signs of Alfa’s narration repeat in this passage—“God’s truth”, for one—but did you notice what happened? In the final pages we see Alfa externalized into the third person and the narrator is suddenly new; the narrator is suddenly a version of Mademba that has lived beyond his death. With no indication that there was a shift, the first-person point of view creates a moment of genuine surprise that then requires us to re-evaluate previous moments in the text.
Let me return to the moment when Alfa attacks the nurse. Following the moment, the next chapter starts with this narration: “Where I’ve come from, I swear, nobody has a name. I’m going to open my eyes that are no longer mine. I don’t know who I am. My name escapes me still, but I’ll remember it soon. Strange, the body beneath mine isn’t moving anymore. Strange, I sense its immobile heat beneath me. Strange, I sense, suddenly, hands pressing on my back, a back that doesn’t entirely belong to me yet, thighs that are not yet mine, a neck that doesn’t belong to me but that I absorb, that I accept as mine, thanks to the soft hands touching me. Strange, the hands are suddenly pummeling my back, my thighs, scratching at my neck. Beneath their scratching, this body that wasn’t yet mine became mine. I swear to you, it’s pleasant to leave nothingness. I swear to you that I was there without being there” (128). I’m fascinated by the framing of this moment. On my initial read-through, I found it compelling because Alfa is in a state of becoming. This idea of not-yet being who you are and the temporal flux of identity is always a compelling premise to me, and Diop’s phrasing is wonderful: “thighs that are not yet mine […] this body wasn’t yet mine became mine [...] I was there without being there”. All of those paradoxes of selfhood are an excellent reflection of identity. On rereading, though, the passage becomes more engaging. It seems, to me, that Mademba enters Alfa’s body. It’s a moment of re-becoming, but because Alfa had previously been talking about his first time with a woman, the memory becomes conflated with Mademba’s seeming re-embodiment.
Whether this is a metaphor or not is unimportant. On the one hand, there’s the magical layer, but at the more metaphorical level Alfa is haunted by the presence of his more-than-brother. We often think of holding those close to us in our hearts; here it may be quite literal. It also works on the level of processing memory; the fragmentation of selfhood that goes along with Alfa’s wartime trauma seems to be processed through a simultaneous experience of two selves. It’s a surprising twist that makes the book worthy of rereading.
Listen, I generally don’t like war stories. This book, though, is such a glorious exception. There is a poetry to the novel that is as disturbing as it is hauntingly beautiful. In describing the artillery, Alfa describes “the giant seeds falling from the metallic sky” (34). The idea of the artillery as ‘seeds’ gives it a haunting quality that insinuates growth from such a massively destructive force. The “seeds” are then personified: “they aren’t afraid of screams, they aren’t afraid to pass through heads, flesh, to break bones and to sever lives. Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. [...] But when you seem crazy all the time, continuously, without stopping, that’s when you make people afraid, even your war brothers. And that’s when you stop being the brave one, the death-defier, and become instead the true friend of death, its accomplice, its more-than-brother” (34). The image of something so innocent, seeds drifting in the wind, piercing skulls is just such a grotesque juxtaposition it’s hard to ignore.
All this to say, David Diop presents such a distinctive voice throughout the novel and explores a network of themes that tie together beautifully. It’s such a well-wrought book and offers an angle to war narratives I’ve never seen before. It’s still early in the year, but I would not be surprised if this is one of my best reads of 2023.
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