At Night All Blood is Black drops you straight into the trenches of World War I with Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France as part of the so-called “Chocolate” army. When he can’t mercy kill his severely wounded friend, something inside him snaps. It is a descent into revenge: brutal, methodical, and increasingly unhinged. Alfa starts taking trophies from his victims: severed hands that accumulate like a dark count of his psychological unraveling.

The French army initially leans into the racist stereotypes surrounding their African soldiers, painting them as savage, almost supernatural, and Alfa’s killings feed right into that propaganda machine. Enemy soldiers are terrorized. Command is pleased. But as the pile of hands grows, so does the unease among Alfa’s own unit. The nightmare he’s living becomes their nightmare too.

Diop tells a story about one soldier’s breakdown as well as invites the reader to reflect: What does war do to the human mind? How does it strip away everything that makes us human? The book operates in that brutal space between life and death, survival and destruction. And it refuses to let colonizers off the hook. The violence destroys not just bodies but entire psyches, entire national souls.

A heads-up: This is unrelenting. Graphic violence, trauma, suffering.

My Favorite Bits

• My thoughts belong to me alone, I can think what I want. But I won’t tell.

• The insides of the earth were outside, the insides of my mind were outside, and I knew, I understood that I could think anything I wanted to, on the condition that the others knew nothing of it. So I locked my thoughts back in my head after observing them from up close. Strange.

• They didn’t know what I thought of them. I found them foolish, I found them idiotic, because they didn’t think about anything.

• No one knows what I think. I am free to think whatever I want. And what I think is that people don’t want me to think.

• They don’t think much, but when they think, they think in dualistic terms. I’ve read it in their eyes. They think devourers of human insides are good so long as they devour only the enemy’s insides.

• 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.

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Author: David Diop
Publication date: 10 November 2020
Number of pages: 145 pages

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