At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
A Senegalese guy named Alfa Ndiaye finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I despite never having left his village before. Mademba Diop, a fellow soldier in the same regiment, begs Alfa to kill him so that he won’t have to suffer a torturous, drawn-out death in No Man’s Land when he sustains a major injury during combat.
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
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When Alfa is unable to carry out this mercy killing, madness sets in as he begins to perceive this rejection as a callous act of cowardice. He starts a macabre ritual in an effort to seek forgiveness for himself and get revenge for the death of his companion.
Every night, while hiding behind enemy lines, he hunts down and kills a blue-eyed German soldier, carrying his severed hand back to his base unscathed. At first, Alfa’s teammates are in awe of his accomplishments, but soon, whispers spread that this super soldier is actually a sorcerer and soul-eater rather than a hero. Plans are made to remove Alfa from the front and separate him from his expanding group of hands, but how does one communicate with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to atone for the death of his friend? This outstanding book, which is laced with bullets and black magic, fills in a gap in the history of World War I.
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop is a brilliant account of a man’s journey into madness that combines oral storytelling customs with the grim, everyday terror of life in the trenches. A Senegalese soldier serving in the French army’s trenches during the First World War provides the narration for this book. There were many African soldiers, including in the British Army. The associations the word evokes are thoroughly probed in this story of cruelty. These warriors are really young, lost in a strange world where people are actively attempting to murder them.
It describes how Alfa’s mental anguish began when he was a young boy and remembered seeing his mother go to look for her father and siblings. That period of his boyhood had an impact on his development and independence, which caused him to move in with Diop and his family, who was more than just his best buddy. Now fast forward to Alfa accepting his war-torn environment and the domain of being an emotionally and psychologically troubled soldier of war. He was forced to abandon physical combat after losing more than the closest friend in front of him on the battlefield.
