At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

By David Diop and Anna Moschovakis

*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE*
*ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021*

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award

"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

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374720476

David Diop

David Diop (París, 1966) creció en Senegal. Actualmente reside en el sudeste de Francia, donde es jefe del Departamento de Artes, Lenguas y Literatura de la Universidad de Pau. Es especialista en literatura francesa del siglo XVIII y en las representaciones europeas de África en los siglos XVII y XVIII. En Anagrama ha publicado Hermanos de alma, su primera novela, galardonada en 2018 con los premios Choix Goncourt de España, Goncourt des Lycéens y Patrimoines, y posteriormente con el Globe de Cristal 2019 y el Premio Booker Internacional 2021, y La puerta del viaje sin retorno.

Book preview

I

… I KNOW, I UNDERSTAND, I shouldn’t have done it. I, Alfa Ndiaye, son of the old, old man, I understand, I shouldn’t have. God’s truth, now I know. My thoughts belong to me alone, I can think what I want. But I won’t tell. 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. The survivors won’t know a thing, my old father won’t know, and my mother, if she is still of this world, will never find out. The weight of shame will not be added to the weight of my death. They won’t imagine what I’ve thought, what I’ve done, the depths to which the war drove me. God’s truth, the family honor will be spared, the honor of appearances.

I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have. In the world before, I wouldn’t have dared, but in today’s world, God’s truth, I allow myself the unthinkable. No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did. I know now, I swear to you that I understood it fully the moment I realized that I could think anything. It happened like that, all of a sudden without warning, it hit me brutally in the head, like a giant seed of war dropped from the metallic sky, the day Mademba Diop died.

Ah! Mademba Diop, my more-than-brother, took too long to die. It was very, very difficult, it wouldn’t end, from dawn into evening, his guts in the air, his insides outside, like a sheep that has been ritually dismembered after the sacrifice. Except Mademba was not yet dead, and already the insides of his body were outside. While the others hid in the gaping wounds in the earth we called trenches, I stayed close to Mademba, I lay pressed against him, my right hand in his left hand, staring at the cold blue sky crisscrossed with metal. 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.

God’s truth, if I’d already become then what I am now, I would have slaughtered him like a sacrificial sheep, out of friendship. But I thought of my old father, of my mother, of the inner voice that commands us all, and I couldn’t cut the barbed wire of his suffering. I was not humane with Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend. I let duty make my choice. I offered him only mistaken thoughts, thoughts commanded by duty, thoughts condoned by a respect for human law, and I was not human.

God’s truth, I let Mademba cry like a small child, the third time he begged me to finish him off, pissing himself, his right hand groping at the ground to gather his scattered guts, slimy as freshwater snakes. He said to me, By the grace of God and of our marabout, if you are my brother, Alfa, if you are really who I think you are, slit my throat like a sacrificial sheep, don’t let the scavengers of death devour my body! Don’t abandon me to all that filth. Alfa Ndiaye … Alfa … I’m begging you … slit my throat!

But precisely because he spoke to me of our great marabout, precisely so as not to disobey the laws of humanity, the laws of our ancestors, I was not humane and I let Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend, die with his eyes full of tears, his hand trembling, groping the muddy battlefield for his guts so he could stuff them back into his open belly.

Ah, Mademba Diop! Only after you were gone did I finally begin to think. Only with your death, at dusk, did I know, did I understand that I would no longer listen to the voice of duty, the voice that commands, the voice that leads the way. But it was too late.

Once you were dead, your hands finally immobile, finally at rest, finally released from their shameful suffering by your last breath, I thought only that I should not have waited. I understood, one breath too late, that I should have slit your throat as soon as you asked me to, while your eyes were still dry, your left hand clasped in mine. I shouldn’t have let you suffer like an old solitary lion, eaten alive by hyenas, its insides turned out. I let you plead with me for reasons that were corrupt, because of thoughts that arrived fully formed, too well dressed to be honest.

Ah, Mademba! How I’ve regretted not killing you on the morning of the battle, while you were still asking me nicely, as a friend, with a smile in your voice! 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. But instead of coming through for you, I let you die condemning me, bawling, drooling, screaming, shitting yourself like a feral child. In the name of who knows what human laws, I abandoned you to your miserable lot. Maybe to save my own soul, maybe to remain the person those who raised me hoped for me to be, before God and before man. But before you, Mademba, I was incapable of being a man. I let you curse me, my friend, you, my more-than-brother, I let you scream, blaspheme, because I did not yet know how to think for myself.

But as soon as you were dead, with a final groan, your guts exposed, my friend, my more-than-brother, as soon as you were dead, I knew, I understood that I should not have abandoned you.

I waited a bit, stretched out next to your remains, and stared at the night sky, deepest blue blue, crisscrossed by the sparkling trails of the last tracer bullets. And as soon as silence fell on the blood-soaked battlefield, I began to think. You were no more than a heap of dead meat.

I set about doing what you hadn’t managed to do all day because your hand was too unsteady. I neatly gathered your still-warm guts and deposited them into your belly, as if into a sacred vessel. In the twilight, I thought I saw you smile at me and I decided to take you home. 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 bloodstained 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 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

Reviews for At Night All Blood Is Black

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A young African soldier in the WWI trench bound army of France stays by his childhood friend dying of a gut wound on the battlefield. We are in his mind, sharing his memories until it dissolves. It is a rough ride.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The International Booker Prize-winning book by David Diop and translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, is no heart-warming tale suitable for holiday reading. It's a hard, harsh read. The writing is lovely, the way the novel is structured is beautifully done and the story itself is grim. Alfa is a soldier in the trenches fighting for France in the First World War. He and his best friend came from Senegal to fight with les Chocolats, African soldiers from Frances colonies. And when the worst happens, Alfa is compelled to seek revenge on the other side. His fellow soldiers at first applaud his exploits, but are soon terrified of him. The story moves back and forth between Alfa's childhood and young adulthood, and his experiences in France, and the reader gets an ever more vivid look at what trench warfare did to the hearts and minds of the men who fought. This novel is brilliant, superbly written and absolutely devastating to read.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novella, listened to, is more of an epic poem. The prose is evocative and lyrical, sharing the deeply felt pain of failure, of betrayal, of war, all relative to the empowerment of love and connection. A young soldier fighting in a foreign war refuses to kill his mortally wounded, suffering friend. The immediate regret haunts him. A painful, powerful piece of literature!

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I can't say I really enjoyed this novel, but it does have an interesting sing-song cadence that reminded me of the technique in Batouala by René Maran which won the Goncourt in 1921 and is a landmark of African-authored French literature. David Diop is a literary historian, so he knows Batouala, the echoes must be intentional. Both deal in their own way with colonialism and western perceptions of Africans, and reveal the inner voice and world of a native African from this period (early 20th C). Maran's book is also a short but somewhat difficult read, with a jazz-age rhythm. One reviewer said Diop's book had both "echoes" and "premonitions", but I don't understand premonitions.

[anniemod · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When talking about WWI, most people think of the trenches and all the lives lost in the years of the conflict. What people may not always remember is that the big colonial empires are still out there and the men in those trenches were not just the youngsters of Europe. Alfa Ndiaye is from a small village in Senegal and does not speak a word of French but still decided to join the war - because then he can come back and be an important man in a nearby town. He does not join alone - his best friend, Mademba Diop, is there with him - until the day when Mademba dies. Alfa is haunted by that death - he found his friend still alive friend and refused to kill him, to spare him the suffering from dying in pain. The reason for refusal was humanity - he cannot kill a friend but as soon as Mademba is dead, Alfa's brain flips over and he realizes that his ideas of humanity had been flawed. So he decides to pay for it, redeeming his humanity - by killing people from the other side and taking their hands. Alfa narrates the story and as the novel progresses, he is less and less believable, we can see his mind unraveling from grief and guilt. While he narrates the story in the trenches, he also gives us the backstory - the small Senegalese village, the easy life before the war. People start to be afraid of him, even if he does not understand why (or is not ready to admit it). His mind finds correlations where they do not exist while it keeps getting less rational, all the way to the end of the novel where his mind simply breaks (even if some people may read these last chapters differently). The madness of war is finally fully reflected in the madness of a man. The story is beautifully written. Diop uses a lot of repetitions of expressions and parts of sentences which creates a story-telling cadence that can lull you in (until something horrible happens). There are a lot of metaphors and myths in all of it and I am pretty sure I missed a lot of them (for example 7 shows up a lot (7 hands, 7 traitors, 7 enamel pots in the party when the boys were 16; it cannot be a coincidence but I am not sure what 7 means in this culture). But even when you do not know what they mean, they add to the tapestry of the short novel - as do all the myths and stories that are told in full. The novel's journey is almost entirely in a man's mind - he may be reporting real events sometimes but trying to separate reality from imaginary may not be so easy, especially as the novel progresses. Guilt and shame and grief rob Alfa of everything that the war did not take from him. And we are right there to see how he unravels. I am not surprised that the novel won the Man Booker International Prize and Anna Moschovakis translation probably helped with that. It is a bit hard to get into the novel at first, the repetition is almost bothersome - until it just start working and you cannot imagine the novel without it. It is a disturbing novel - but then a novel about a war will always be disturbing. It is the lack of hope at the end which almost gets you - all the way to the end I hoped that Alfa's journey is not one way. And yet, I knew that there is no path back. Strongly recommended - although with a warning about its darkness and language.

[carltonc_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Short but powerful story of war and its horror.This book gains part of its power from depicting the fighting on the Western Front in the First World War from the “foreign” viewpoint of a Senagalese twenty year old, Alfa Ndiaye, who can’t speak French, and whose French speaking friend and comrade in arms, Mademba Diop, dies at the start of the book.About the first half of the book is set on the Western Front, with the remainder at a convalescent hospital, where Alfa tells the story of his life in Senegal.This sounds simple, but the story is both horrific and moving. I don’t know whether it deserved to win the International Booker, but it’s a great read.I don’t read French, so Anna Moschovakis’ translation made this for me.

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alfa Ndiaye is a young Chocolat from Senegal, one of the approximately 450,000 young men from North and West Africa who were conscripted to fight for the French Army on the front lines against Germany during World War I. At least 30,000 of them died in battle, and very few of the 2.3 million Africans who were mobilized during the war gained anything from their participation, as they remained poorly treated subjects of the European colonial powers and would not gain their independence and freedom for nearly half a century. As the novel begins, Alfa is traumatized by the protracted death of Mademba Diop, his childhood friend and fellow soldier, who suffered for days next to his brother-in-arms after he was ambushed by a German soldier while trying to prove his bravery to him. Alfa takes it upon himself to avenge Mademba’s death, by ambushing one German soldier after another and bringing grisly “trophies” back with him to the trenches where his infantrymen are stationed. They initially brand him a hero for his single minded bravery and successful missions, but they ultimately began to fear and shun him as he becomes more determined and more mentally unstable. His commanding officer takes Alfa off of the front lines and has him admitted to a military psychiatric hospital. However, instead of finding peace and internal stability Alfa descends slowly into madness, as he slowly unravels and is transformed into an unreliable and very disturbed narrator, up to the book’s unexpected ending.‘At Night All Blood Is Black’ is a superbly written and translated analysis of the horrors and effects of warfare on one sensitive young man, who is tasked to mercilessly kill enemy soldiers by hand yet maintain his humanity, and a glimpse of a largely unknown piece of history of the essential roles that millions of Africans played in World War I, which is fully deserving of being named the winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

5th read from the 2021 Booker International Longlist; 2nd read from the shortlistAnother short book from this year's judges. This one, at least, is fiction. Alfa Ndiaye is the Senegalese narrator, a soldier fighting for France in World War I. He discusses how he failed his best friend/brother-not-brother on the battlefield. He remembers their childhoods, their teen years, and what he has done since Mademba's death. The French wanted their West African soldiers to be "savages", so he has obliged them.This book is good. The writing is excellent, it is lyrical and repetitive in a way that makes sense. But it is just so short--lots of blank pages between chapters and so forth make it seem longer than it is.Good book, but I really don't think it is major-prize material. It is more of a novella than an novel.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At Night All Blood is Black is the story of a Senegalese soldier who comes unraveled after the death of his closest friend during WWI. Because this story is narrated by a person who is struggling with his sanity, the prose can sometimes be difficult to follow. There is a considerable amount of circular thought and repetition. At first I wasn't sure if this might simply be authorial style or the product of a translated work, but flashbacks in the story highlight a more lucid style. The story is interesting in summary, but I personally found the implementation too jarring to allow myself to be fully immersed in its telling.

[modioperandi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is an epic-ally conceived, structured, and written novel. To finish off his brother in arms, his more-than-brother, disemboweled on a battlefield. Finish off his friend, whose inside lies on the ground. Complete his "more than brother", who begs him to put an end to his sufferings. Three times, Alfa Ndiaya will refuse to exalt this last wish of Mademba Diot. All his life, Alfa Ndiaya will regret it. He would never endorse this decision taken between the trenches, as West African "Chocolates" supported the French during the 1914-18 War.This refusal to finish Mademba will lead Alfa on a quest for revenge: gut the "blue eyes" and keep a hand of its victims, hands that will become mummified trophies. Gradually, in the eyes of his captain and his comrades, both the Chocolates and the Toubab (the whites), this attitude will make him oscillate from bravery to madness. People will come to avoid being near him during assaults, judging him to be too reckless and drawing too much attention with his savage cries.“By the truth of God,…” and "my more-than-brother" These phrases repeated dozens of times in this short book. That and several other sentences or bits of sentences. The use of repeated motifs is stunning in its breadth and effect. A, to use the original word, shell-shock effect where everything is repeated, and in a rather naive style, to this reader explores the mind and character of a man losing himself to the madness of war to the effects of all the atrocities he faces and commits. The first steps are inventive and fascinating. The impact of an event on the psyche of a young soldier is skillful and beautiful the purposeful repetition and fragmentary nature of the writing itself of the patterning and flow of the story speaks to the idea of this powerfully wounded man. The effect is that the book is unputdownable and it whetted my appetite for more and more of the story. I feel that I have never encountered a book quite like David Diop's At Night All Blood Is Black. It feels wholly original while being set in a time and place many know from history. David Diops work here is unparalleled in its literary effects to not only tell the story of madness and war and loyalty but to structure it to use style itself in such a powerfully stunning way is totally brilliant. There is nothing quite like this book.