The novel, though originally written in French, is grounded in the worldview of Senegal’s Wolof people, and the specificity and uniqueness of that culture’s language comes through even in Anna Moschovakis’s translation. It is manifested in a brutal ritual: Each night, Ndiaye sneaks away under darkness to kill a “blue-eyed enemy” soldier from the German line and brings back his severed hand.Īs violent and disturbing as these encounters are, they are rendered with such artistic grace that one derives a strange pleasure in reading about even the bloodiest of nights. In the trenches, Ndiaye’s affliction soon becomes a sort of psychological self-flagellation. He takes his character into the depths of hell and lets him thrive there. Diop realizes the full nature of war - that theater of macabre and violent drama - on the page. This transgression against the dead - or the delusion of such - fills the story with a mythic affliction that recalls the old sailor’s in Samuel Coleridge’s epic poem “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The narrative voice brims with innuendoes and habitual repetitions like “I know, I understand” and “God’s truth,” which imbue the character with an edgy eccentricity.īut this book is about more than a lone man’s spiritual burden.

The novel begins after he has helplessly watched his friend Mademba suffer a slow and agonizing death, unable to put an end to his misery despite the man’s pleas that Ndiaye slit his throat. Ndiaye’s tale is fueled by guilt and a singed conscience. The narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, is an African legionnaire fighting for the French in the trenches of World War I, who tells the story sometimes in the form of sordid confession, other times in the form of sobering testimony. AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK By David Diopįrom the very first pages, there is something beguiling about “At Night All Blood Is Black,” a slim, delicate novel by the Senegalese-French writer David Diop.

At night all blood is black analysis