Mademba’s name is a nod to parenté à plaisanterie (kinship jokes), a custom in parts of Central and West Africa in which certain ethnicities or regional groups engage in playful teasing and taunting between families to tighten kinship bonds. By making this choice, author David Diop hovers over the text, binding the two “more-than-brothers,” adding freight to Mademba’s death and its repercussions for Alfa. Mademba Diop shares the author’s family name. A woman, open, offering herself to war, to the bombshells, and to us, the soldiers.” As Alfa returns to his comrades, the trench looks to him as “the slightly parted lips of an immense woman’s sex. Using language that conflates spirituality and sexuality with grisly battle imagery, Alfa’s story descends into a hellscape. He judges his failure to act as an abandonment for which he must redeem himself. This reference to Jesus’ imprecation during the Last Supper that Peter would thrice deny him, makes what follows only more ironic.Īlfa carries Mademba’s dead body back over the battlefield, horrified with himself for having chosen to honor the laws of his ancestors, which prohibit mercy killing.
Three times Mademba asks, and three times Alfa refuses. His “more-than-brother,” Mademba Diop, joins him, and is mortally wounded during battle.Īs Mademba lies with his guts spilling out “like a sheep that has been ritually dismembered after the sacrifice,” he implores Alfa to slit his throat and end the pain. He lives in France and serves as head of the arts, languages, and literature department at the University of Pau and Pays de l’Adour, where his specialties include eighteenth-century French literature and the study of European representations of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Īt Night All Blood is Black is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye, who has enlisted in the French army in WWI to fight as a Chocolat, as recruits from the African colonies were called, alongside white French soldiers. The book delves into the brutal details of WWI and colonial domination, invoking canonical texts against a world that is anarchic, violent, and surreal.ĭiop was born in Paris and raised in Senegal. The result is a warning against war and its savage consequences. In under 150 pages, the book engages biblical tropes as it takes readers to the bloody trenches of World War I through the troubled account of a Senegalese soldier fighting in the French army. Anna Moschovakis), combines a war story with allegory and myth.
David Diop’s new novel, At Night All Blood is Black (tr.
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