At Night All Blood Is Black
SynopsisPlot
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
Story
About this book
Alfa Ndiaye has never left his village in Senegal before the day he is sent to fight for France during the First World War. Classified as a so-called Chocolat soldier, he serves alongside his childhood friend Mademba Diop in the trenches of the Western Front. When Mademba is gravely wounded in No Man's Land and begs Alfa to end his suffering, Alfa cannot bring himself to do it. That failure becomes the seed of something that overtakes him entirely.
Consumed by guilt and grief, Alfa begins crossing into enemy lines each night, killing a German soldier and returning with a severed hand. His comrades first treat these acts with awe, then with growing fear. Whispers spread that Alfa is not simply brave but something else: a sorcerer, a devourer of souls. The men around him begin looking for ways to remove him from the front and from his accumulating trophies.
David Diop draws on West African oral storytelling patterns to shape Alfa's voice, which circles back on itself with repetition and incantation. The novel is short and tightly compressed, set between the trenches and fragments of memory from Alfa's life before the war. It was originally published in French under the title Frère d'âme.
