The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘After three severed hands, they cheered’
In the International Booker winner, a Senegalese soldier descends into madness on the Western Front
AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK by David Diop, tr Anna Moschovakis 140pp, Pushkin, T £7.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £8.99, ebook £8.99
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David Diop’s novel comes freighted with expectations. Not just because it has won a clutch of big prizes, most recently the International Booker, but because of the claims made for its unusual ferocity. Does its incantatory first-person story of Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese rifleman who, amid the savagery of the Great War’s Western Front, unravels into murderous madness, live up to the praise bestowed on it? Does it change our view of that conflict, and of war? Does it change us?
The answer is a moveable yes. Though concise at 140 pages, At Night All Blood Is Black accumulates its power through alternating bursts of atrocity and calm. It begins with Alfa’s lament that he was unable to save his “more-thanbrother” Senegalese comrade Mademba, dying with his belly torn open in no man’s land, his spilled guts “slimy as freshwater snakes”, and that he was unable to respond to his friend’s pleas to finish him off.
Mademba’s death is the moment Alfa realises: “I could think anything”. Revenge is planted in him, “a giant seed of war”, at first in the shape of retaliation against the “blue eyes” by ambushing them and returning to his trenches with their severed hands, to be applauded by his “toubab” (white) and “chocolat” (Senegalese) comrades. “For the first three hands I was a legend, they cheered me when I returned… I was performing, in their place, the grotesque savage, the enlisted savage obeying orders”. He embodies the propaganda value of the black soldier, sowing “a panicked fear of death, of savagery, of rape, of cannibalism” among the German enemy. But after the fourth hand his comrades shun him, uncomfortable at his relentlessness, at his dissolving the distinction between war and murder, audacity and insanity.
He’s seen as a “dëmm”, a devourer of souls, and his French captain (whom Diop makes clear is a murderous brute) sends him behind the lines to recuperate, but his breakdown accelerates. Revenge slips into the logic of insanity, into misreading reality – “Mademoiselle François returned my smile right away and her gaze lingered on the middle of my body” – and to a climax of explosive violence, in chillingly lyrical prose.
The novel’s language is its hallmark. Short, imagistic sentences, a choral repetitive poetry, and a virtue made of mobilising the limited powers of expression of a Senegalese
man who speaks little French, convey an interior world increasingly trapped by war, deracination and voicelessness. When the trap is finally sprung, and Alfa’s identity fractures completely, Diop’s artistry is revealed, forcing the reader to reevaluate his story from the start.
This is praiseworthy and prizeworthy – and frustrating. Why? Because Diop’s subject is madness, the motor of his novel colonialism and racism, war ends up being the least convincing dimension of his narrative.
For comparison, I reread Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Where Remarque makes you feel, again and again, the extreme emotional stress of combat through the sheer literalness of awful events, Diop’s novel substitutes for that sense of lived experience a series of graphic, even lurid set pieces: Mademba’s death, the chopping of hands, Alfa’s hospitalisation – tableaux rather than a connected narrative.
You might argue that madness and connectedness are alien bedfellows, and that unlived experience doesn’t disqualify Diop from writing about the Great War any more than it disqualifies, say, Gustave Flaubert from writing about a country girl who’s addicted to popular novels. But At Night All Blood Is Black (elegantly translated by Anna Moschovakis) leaves the impression that the casual racism and xenophobia Alfa and his tirailleur comrades suffer are somehow lessened by Diop’s savage confection of war. Alfa’s experience is alienating, but I am less sure it qualifies as a universal narrative of how war drives human beings to insanity.
Unexpectedly, that meticulously observed localness which can make a novel great is present here, in fits and starts, several thousand miles from the trenches, when the novel’s vivid flashbacks to Alfa and Mademba’s boyhoods in rural Senegal, as farmers’ sons and love rivals, compel precisely because Diop, who grew up in Senegal, writes about them with the intimacy and attentiveness of having been there.