Listen to this voice that takes us into the madness of massive violence-with the warning that its vision of human duty offers no closure and much soul-searching. I want to say it’s our human duty to read this book, which students across France chose to win a scholastic version of the Prix Goncourt. Most of all, Diop’s short, sharp, and serrated novel is a visceral dramatization of how our humanity and inhumanity are forever intertwined.

Battle hollows out “human law,” that which dictates we not kill our fellow humans, and in doing so turns its ranks inside out, sometimes literally, physically, and always psychologically. 'David Diop’s All Blood is Black at Night is an unrelenting take on war, race, masculinity, and colonialism. While the physical setting is circumscribed-trenches bracketing no man’s land, with flashbacks to a village life that seems infinitely far away and long ago-the moral scope is immense. In denying his “more-than-brother” a mercy killing, “I had been inhuman by obeying duty’s voice.” After his friend dies, he is free of “the voice of duty, the voice that commands, the voice that leads the way.” His atrocious vengeance on the “blue-eyed” enemy-whose blood, at night, is as black as his own-takes a lesser role in his conscience, even as it consumes his life.Īlfa’s rhythmic, repetitive oaths and laments his pleas for understanding and forgiveness his description of the trench as “open like the sex of an enormous woman, a woman the size of the earth,” out of which men leap screaming to kill: all give the narrative both a suffocating intimacy and a sense of a nightmare too vast to escape. It’s an honour for me to see At Night All Blood is Black alongside 12 other novels of such excellent quality, from all over the world. The first was not killing his childhood friend, disemboweled in battle, condemning him to a slow, agonizing death. David, what has it been like to be longlisted My editor Daniel Seton let me know the news of the longlisting.

(Senegal, then a French colony, contributed thousands of men to the French war effort.) His narrative teeters between two transgressions. Written by Anna Moschovakis (trans.) David DiopĪlfa, a Senegalese soldier, delivers a harrowing confession from the Western Front of WWI France.

At night all blood is black a novel