READING IDEAS FOR THE WEEK

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, Pushkin, £8.99

At just 145 pages, David Diop’s slim novel is small but impactful. It opens with our narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, watching his “more than brother” Mademba Diop, die slowly from an abdominal wound. Despite his pleas for Alfa to “finish him off ”, Alfa refuses, believing it would be wrong to kill his friend. But this inaction has changed him, and so begins his descent into psychological collapse.

We learn Alfa and Mademba are childhood friends and grew up together in Senegal, before becoming so called “Chocolat soldiers”; men recruited from Imperial French territories to build up the French force against the Germans in the First World War.

They are expected to be more brutal than their white counterparts – “The captain’s France needs us to play savage when it suits them” – so when Alfa begins to bring back severed hands of German soldiers, at first, he is lauded as a hero. His guilt from allowing his friend to die a painful and dehumanising death has driven him to taking enemy soldiers into no-man’s-land to re-enact Mademba’s death, with a different ending, doing what he wishes he had done for his “more than brother”, before taking their hand as a trophy.

However, after the fourth hand, Alfa gets a different reaction from his trench mates, “suddenly, nobody was slapping me in the shoulder and laughing”.

The same racist stereotypes the French hoped to play on to intimidate the enemy are now backfiring on them, as their marvel has turned to fear and suspicion. Alfa’s isolation further detaches him from reality and, despite their incriminating nature, Alfa cannot part with his severed hands and eventually he is sent away from the front lines to recover.

Here, Alfa recounts more of he and Mademba’s lives before the war, accentuating the distance between their community and their colonisers’ war in Europe, their stories often unheard in Western literature.

Describing the brutality of war, David Diop’s prose is stripped back and emphatic, but flows rhythmically, allowing what could be the most repulsive imageries to be an enjoyable reading experience.

As Alfa’s narration becomes increasingly unreliable, his repetition of phrases and images appear to reflect his state of mind. However, Alfa knows little French, so when his monologue that spans multiple pages for the reader is translated into just one line by an interpreter, we understand the necessity of his emphasis and repetition to get his story across.

A deserving winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize.