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A Powerful Voice from the Marginalized
In the century since World War I, the canon of modernist literature emerging from that seismic conflict has focused almost exclusively on European perspectives. But the millions of colonial troops conscripted from Africa and Asia to bolster French and British ranks have remained largely unheard voices. David Diop's visceral 2018 novella At Night All Blood Is Black provides a powerful, long-overdue window into this neglected experience through the haunting story of Alfa Ndiaye, a young Senegalese recruit descending into trauma and madness on the Western Front.
Descending into Madness on the Western Front
From the gut-wrenching opening pages depicting his friend Mademba's agonizing death, Diop thrusts readers directly into the dehumanizing brutality and psychological horror of trench warfare. Filtered through Alfa's distorted memories, the fragmented, poetic narrative style brilliantly mirrors his fracturing psyche. The modernist prose captures the chaos and existential dread of this hellscape, where even God seems impotent: "God's truth, I believe that God always lags behind us...That's war: it's when God lags behind the music of men." Unable to euthanize the suffering Mademba as he begged, a guilt-stricken Alfa develops an obsessive need for atonement. He begins secretly venturing into no man's land to kill German soldiers and sever their hands, perversely symbolic stand-ins for his failure to "cleanly, humanely" end Mademba's misery.
What differentiates the work of At Night All Blood Is Black by Diop is his enigmatic view on the paradoxical and contradictory situations the colonial African soldier was finding himself. In poetic childhood vignettes, he presents us glimpses of when Alfa lived in rural Senegal and had a deep bond with Mademba only to die later in the European catacomb. Diop then shows the contrasts between lively moments of humanity towards Alfa by the French officers who are themselves cruel and racist. The colonels order the Africans to "play the savage" for the Germans and blacken themselves with the primitive caricatures that will most unnerve the enemy troops. Thus for Alfa, instead of trying to break free from the racist prescriptions made to him, he ironically and deliberately decides to adopt the “savage" image his colonizers both fear, and at the same time, need from him. This is the heartbreaking oxymoron that Diop focusses on. The depiction of this gruesome stage of imperial atrocities does raise questions on who between the French and their colonized subjects is the "civilized."
Transcending the European Horizon
Symbolically, Diop weaves his tale of the mythical world knowledge that holds onto the distant heritage of the African spiritual traditions. Whether Alfa’s bond with Mademba is a mere psychic manifestation of a mentally scarred soldier, whose mind, war-trauma driven, has been shattered into pieces, is another question to be answered by medical experts or psychiatrists. Would it then be the physical devouring the soul that we contemplate or a form of metaphysical soul-devouring, that transcends in the rigid western philosophies that does not comprehend it? Alfa's cross-cultural and spiritual essence transcends the European horizon and is unable to answer in a yes or no manner. This story opens up the mind to the idea that reality may be differently interpreted, and life courses may be reshaped by the unexpected.
Pushing Past Conventional Narrative Comforts
Make no mistake, this is not a light reading easily consumed. The use of a fractured structure, explicit reference to bodily violence, and the absence of convenient, morally strictly uplifting symbols by Diop enable the audience to distinguish hollow, tragic heroes from the array of characters. Of course, the symbolic meaning of a Senegalese soldier who cuts off the hands of his colonial oppressor to the audience is not clear but it deliberately provokes discomfort among the readers by means of three atrocities i.e. mutilation, castration, and subjugation. But it is that all that counts for him as the most successful goal. Through plunging us into such overwhelming madness and savagery dripping all over this instance of colonial occupation, he thus demonstrates the breakdown of the "savage and civilization" divide and renews the fact that both the ones swine-ing in the dirty fruit of imperialist warmongering's rewards and those actually killing are humanized and atomized.
An Indispensable Modernist Masterpiece
For readers willing to push past conventional narrative comforts and explore this shadow world, At Night All Blood Is Black provides a vital, immersive window into an unjustly marginalized facet of the World War I experience. Within this thin and narrow prose, Diop uses his poetic voice and epic form to lift the novella into a masterpiece and an indispensable part of the modernist writing emerging from the trenches. This is a story calling for the return of these unpleasant facts of colonization and their hidden costs that are being paid to this day.
By: Joshua Jackson
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