"At Night All Blood Is Black" by David Diop: A Poetic Exploration of Life and Death

Manav Manhas: It was perfect, really enjoyed!

India on Nov 26, 2023

E C: Perfect as expected

United Kingdom on Oct 18, 2023

Brittany: I’d heard good things about this story and decided to give it a go. It gives you a great understanding of the ways of war and how it can change a person by slowly pushing them to the depths of darkness, but other than that… the book was okay.

It was a hypermasculine (the best word I can use to describe how the women in the story were often reduced to plot devices, and how many of the metaphors were women-centric, not in the greatest way) ride into the repetitive ramblings of a man changed by not only war but his friend’s slow, painful death.

I’m curious to read David Diop’s other novel, and hope I enjoy it more than AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK.

United States on Oct 10, 2023

Michelle Bryant: This book had me finish it in one day and then buy it for people and beg them to read it. The story has so much depth, and the very start will break your heart.

United States on Sep 06, 2023

C. J. Kemp: I really feel like, for some reason, Diop started writing one book, one idea, and he lost the thread of it about halfway through and finished a completely different book. I liked the first half. I didn't so much like the second half. I wonder why he did that. I assume it's because he's inexperienced and none of the publishing houses really have editors anymore who can keep an inexperienced writer on track.

United States on Aug 07, 2023

Ben: A sharp indictment of French colonialism, a dark story of horror and madness, and a detailed ethnographic insight into the cultures of Senegal in this very grim short novel set in the trenches of WWI.

United Kingdom on May 20, 2023

Kindle Customer: When the war started, France went to Africa to get warriors from the different tribes of their colonies. The African soldiers were not use to this style of war. The protagonist (Alfa) saw his best friend died. He begged Alpha to kill him and Alfa didn't do it. This hunted him for the rest of his life. Because some awful things Alfa did in the war that he ended in a psychiatric ward. He repeated a couple of phrases that were his mantra. His soul was broken. The last 10 pages were very confusing. He switch from first person to third person. What did he do? I hope is not what I think.

United States on Nov 01, 2022

ashish_the_readerashish_the_reader: …this book doesn’t have a beginning. It starts with an ellipsis and God's truth, reading this book feels like intrusion. It’s like coming upon a mind with the ability to voice it’s ramblings; a mind that is hurtling towards madness and one can do nothing but be the speculator of this spectacularly hypnotic narration. In this short and slim book, Diop tells the story of Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting in the Great War and how after losing his more-than-brother Mademaba, he embarks on a journey to avenge the death of his friend. It’s brutal and explicit in its depiction of war and death.

It is the kind of a book that one could easily finish in a day, if they are strong enough to digest the gruesome and detailed descriptions of torn bellies and unrelenting cycle of violence. It took me more than two days to tick this off and more than a week to get my thoughts into something that is cohesive and not just a few adjectives. The narrative which is like reading the transcription of someone’s mind, is extremely repetitive and at the same time refreshing. It’s almost like listening to a poetry performance, one could feel the cadence throughout.

My...

India on Apr 29, 2022

Vigilantius: This is a remarkable, visceral scream from a soldier descending into madness amidst the brutality and mud of trench warfare in World War One. The man is Senegalese, 135,000 of whom fought for their colonial masters in Europe in WW1. However, in my view, Diop’s work is not primarily a work of racial protest but a sonorous lament against the capitalist, dehumanising pressures which produce war.

The style is mantra-like - drawn from the spiralling epics of West African griots. It teeters on the edge of being simplistic, but it works well for a short work, mesmerically weaving back and forth across a few key episodes, inside the mind of the narrator: Alfa has been driven to extreme savagery by the general violence and the particular circumstances of the death of his 'more-than-brother' Mademba, for whose extinction he blames himself. He does frightful things to captured Germans in no-man’s-land, revisiting on the enemy the death that he had not granted to the disembowelled Mademba.

Alfa starts to think beyond the male world of group-think duty, to begin to understand what is really of value in humanity, even as he tips slowly over the edge, ‘hearing the others who...

United Kingdom on Nov 13, 2021

Linda Buist: Insanely captivating brilliant narrative from main character Alfa. His voice transfixed and completely locked me in. I read 75% of this novel when I first picked it up and forced myself to put it down. David Diop 's story flows. It tells how Alfa's tormented mind started during his youth recollection of seeing his mom leave to find her father and siblings. That part of his youth influenced his growth and independence driving him to move in with his more than best friend, Diop and his family. Fast forward, Alfa catapulted into accepting his war torn battlefield and realm he fit into being disturbed emotionally and psychologically as a functioning soldier of war.

Losing his more than best friend right in front of him on the battlefield pushed him completely out of the realm of physical war. Hell bent into raw emotional , psychological and spiritual combat with the enemy, he avenged his more than best friend's death, with episodes of hearing voices, out of body experiences, hallucinations, that were clearer signs of his deteriorating mental state. I  wasn't surprised but had to reread chapters 21 to 24 because Alfa's double mindedness then, suicide(ation)almost didn't...

United States on Aug 01, 2021