Being Created

At Night All Blood Is Black

by David Diop

“Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created.”

― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

The story is about a Senegalese soldier named Alfa Ndiaye who is fighting for France. After Mademba, his "more-than-brother," is mortally wounded and Alfa can't kill him out of mercy, he goes into a ritualistic madness. Every night, Alfa sneaks into enemy lines, kills a German soldier, and comes back with their hand. At first, his friends praised him for being "brave," but as he collected more and more hands, they started to see him as a "soul-eater" or sorcerer.

The book looks at "temporary madness" as a way to stay alive and how the line between a hero and a monster is often drawn by who is doing the killing. Diop shows how French leaders used stereotypes of "African savagery" to scare their enemies, colonizing not only their bodies but also their minds. The unbearable guilt of watching Mademba die slowly and painfully is what drives Alfa's journey. The writing seems to put you in a trance and is almost like an oral history or a dark poem. Anna Moschovakis's English translation is great because it captures the rhythm of Alfa's thoughts, which are imagined in Wolof even though they are written in French.
The last few chapters seem to be very unclear and symbolic. This was a hard book to read at times, but it was worth it.

View all my reviews