At Night All Blood Is Black - Book Review
At Night All Blood Is Black is a novel by David Diop (English translation by Anna Moschovakis), set in the trenches of the Great War (though this is implied and not explicitly stated) and narrated by a Senegalese soldier, Alfa Ndiaye. At less than 150 pages, it is a short read and the ruminations of Alfa tend to stall the narrative flow. Yet it is a forceful story and tackles a wide variety of issues, ranging from colonialism, race relations, mortality and particularly, the impact of war on the human psyche.
The novel opens with Alfa Ndiaye mourning the death of his best friend, his “more-than-brother”, Mademba Diop, and as it progresses, we are witness to his attempts at coming to terms with this loss. The lives and stories of Alfa and Mademba before they became dispensable soldiers, are revealed expertly through the course of the novel and contextualise Alfa’s anguish, his need for bloody vengeance, his inability to accept Mademba’s death.
The one passage that really stayed with me, is about the difficulties in translating. This is quite meta given that the passage (reproduced below) is itself translated from the French original:
To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade once sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the trust at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.
The passage appears at a climatic juncture of the book when Alfa needs a translator to communicate with French officials, but even of and by itself, it is beautifully written and captures the essence of what language can (and oftentimes, cannot) convey. This is an abiding theme as the reader is made privy to Alfa’s stream of consciousness while he barely communicates with those around him.
It is a novel that is meant to shock and make the reader uncomfortable. There are portions which are fairly graphic and make for difficult reading. However, the violence is not gratuitous; it is simply the way in which Alfa expresses his pain as he works through unbearable grief. The ending is feverish, heart-breaking, but ultimately, inevitable.
I knew very little about this book going in, but it was well worth the read. Notwithstanding the travails of translation, it undoubtedly succeeds in making books written by non-white, non-English speaking authors accessible to a wider audience.