Reading guide: At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis

Alfa and Mademba are two of many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the First World War, dutifully climbing out of their trenches to attack France’s German enemies whenever the whistle blows. Then Mademba is mortally wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comrades in arms. How far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?

At Night All Blood is Black won the International Booker Prize in 2021. 

David Diop was born in Paris and grew up in Senegal. He now lives in France, where he is a professor of 18th-century literature at the University of Pau. At Night All Blood is Black is Diop’s second novel. It was shortlisted for 10 major prizes in France and won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens as well as the Swiss Prix Ahmadou Korouma. It has been translated into 13 languages and won the Strega European Prize in Italy.

‘This story of warfare and love and madness has a terrifying power. The protagonist is accused of sorcery, and there is something uncanny about the way the narrative works on the reader. We judges agreed that its incantatory prose and dark, brilliant vision had jangled our emotions and blown our minds. That it had cast a spell on us.’

‘In writing At Night All Blood is Black I wanted to allow the reader to inhabit the mind of a young African man, to give them unfiltered access to his experience of war. The choice of a stream-of-consciousness narrative allowed me to amplify the internal voice of this young man who, like all his African brothers-in-arms during the French colonial period, had no way of making himself heard.’

Read the full interview here

‘Alfa and Mademba are characters who remain very close to me. Sometimes I find myself in this situation, where I have already imagined my characters before beginning to write them. They are like image-sources, both visual and sensorial, that precede their own transcription. For example, I had very precise images in mind of Alfa and Mademba as children, hunting game in the brush, which inspired a scene in At Night All Blood is Black. Because of this, rereading my text revives impressions and images that existed prior to their elaboration. As a consequence, my two characters live in my memory with the same ‘reality’ as do people I haven’t seen for a long time, or those who have passed on.’

Read the full interview here

Written in a series of vignettes and told out of chronological order, the book often intersperses violent scenes of war with flashbacks of Alfa’s life back in Senegal, including descriptions of his first love. How did you find the contrast between the two extremely different realities? 

After Mademba is disembowelled by a German soldier, he repeatedly asks Alfa to kill him and quickly end his suffering. But Alfa is unable to commit the mercy killing, and instead Mademba dies slowly, in agony. What do you think of Alfa’s decision, and why do you think he made it even though Mademba was begging him to put him out of his misery?

Every time Alfa kills a German soldier, he brings back a severed hand. Why do you think he chose to avenge Mademba’s death in this way, and why do you think he chose hands in particular?

Diop includes several sexual metaphors to describe the trenches, with one example comparing a trench to a woman’s body. ‘Seen from a distance, our trench looked to me like the slightly parted lips of an immense woman’s sex’ (p.9). Why do you think Diop used such explicit descriptions? What effect do they have?

When Alfa brings back the first few severed hands of German soldiers, the French soldiers praise him and call him brave, describing him as a hero. But they change their minds once Alfa keeps bringing back more hands. Why do you think the French soldiers changed their minds, after initially accepting the ritual?

Alfa reflects on the temporary madness he believes is needed to survive war, saying,  ‘Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.’ What do you think he means by ‘temporary madness is bravery’s sister?’

In an interview with the Booker Prizes website, Diop said that he didn’t want Alfa to be a French speaker and that he had translated Alfa’s thoughts into French. Diop wanted the reader to understand that Alfa was thinking in Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal: ‘Like every language, Wolof has its own rhythm, its own unique patterns of speech, which I replicated in French through the repetition of certain phrases and constructions. The great challenge for my translator Anna Moschovakis, and her great success, was to reproduce this same rhythm in the English language, so that the reader would understand that the text is haunted by an African voice.’ What did you think of the layering of languages in the novel? Did it feel like an African voice haunted the text?

The phrase ‘God’s truth’ occurs over 100 times in the book. Why do you think Diop decided to use the phrase so frequently, and what impact does the repetition have?

According to Samuel Fury Childs Daly from the Los Angeles Review of Books, ‘One of the blurbs on the back of the book comes from the French novelist Mathias Énard, who writes that Diop ‘erects a beautiful monument to the Senegalese riflemen, and seeks to restore their African dimension; to listen to them, to understand them.’ Do you think Diop has achieved this in his novel?

In his most recent interview for the Booker Prizes website, Diop says, ‘the book’s ending is open; the narrative system is, intentionally, ambiguous. We don’t really know who is speaking. Is it Mademba, is it Alfa? This ambiguity took me by surprise when I was writing, and I decided to preserve it at all costs.’ What did you think of the ambiguous ending?