At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

“Seen from a distance, our trench looked to me like the slightly parted lips of an immense woman’s sex. A woman, open, offering herself to war, to the bombshells, and to us, the soldiers.”

Alfa Ndiaye’s simile comparing the trench to a woman’s vulva symbolizes his new, unchaste freethinking following Mademba’s death. He rejects the propriety of strict social laws and sees himself making sexual conquest of the Earth by entering the trench. This language also reveals a misogynist strain in Alfa’s character, as he reduces women to their genitalia and associates female genitalia and sexual willingness with the wrongness of war.

“The captain’s France needs for us to play the savage when it suits them. They need for us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes.”

Alfa Ndiaye unmasks the racist nature of French colonial expectations for the Senegalese soldiers and provides an additional layer of complexity by showing how the soldiers are asked to be complicit in a performance of their stereotyping as “brutal savages.”

“When they see me reach for my machete, the blue eyes of the enemy from the other side extinguish themselves for good.”

Alfa’s description of his murders of German soldiers repeatedly emphasizes their blue eyes—a symbol of racial difference—and that they are “from the other side” of the battle line. This literal and symbolic othering of Germans allows Alfa to perform his murder. He utilizes the machete, a symbol of European constructions of “savage” African colonial subjects. He takes pleasure in this moment, in fulfilling the German enemy’s worst expectations.

“If at this moment his blue eyes don’t dim forever, then I lie down next to him, I turn his face toward mine and I watch him die a little, then I slit his throat, cleanly, humanely. At night, all blood is black.”

The title of the book appears in this passage, in which Alfa describes murdering a generalized German soldier, any one of the many he has killed. The soldier’s “blue eyes,” which symbolize their racial difference, are juxtaposed with the phrase, “At night, all blood is black,” which points to a common humanity in all wartime death, whatever the victim’s race.

“He was in the middle of a full-blown attack against the enemy on the other side, gun in his left hand and machete in his right, his performance in full swing, he was fully playing the savage, when he fell upon an enemy from the other side who was pretending to be dead.”

Alfa implies that Mademba performing the “savage” role led to his death since he was taken unawares by an enemy while doing so. The phrase “an enemy from the other side,” which Diop uses often, is either a redundancy (all Germans are on the other side of no-man’s-land) or implies the existence of an enemy from the French side, alluding to the tensions of serving France as a colonial subject.

“God’s truth, I was inhuman. I didn’t listen to my friend, I listened to my enemy.”

In this ironic passage, Alfa classifies his failure to finish off his friend Mademba as “inhuman,” in contrast with his slitting the throats of the men he disembowels. In the moral logic of this passage, to kill is humane and to fail to do so is “inhuman.”

“I saw in their eyes that they understood. I was performing, in their place, the grotesque savage, the enlisted savage obeying orders.”

When Ndiaye returns with the first three hands, he sees that his fellow West African soldiers understand his trophy-taking as an act, an overplayed fulfillment of French stereotypes about Africans. By claiming to do it “in their place,” he claims to be acting in some way as a substitute or an extension of the other African soldiers.

“God’s truth, you’d have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth. The bullets from the enemy on the other side, the giant seeds falling from the metallic sky, they aren’t afraid of screams, they aren’t afraid to pass through heads, flesh, to break bones and sever lives. Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.”

This passage claims that soldiers court or perform temporary “madness” to overcome their reasonable fear and follow their orders to leave their trenches and attack. The metaphor of “madness” as bravery’s sister undermines the valor typically associated with bravery. Here, Alfa tries to parse his own actions of vengeance and trophy-taking, struggling with the difference between acceptable and unacceptable acts of violence in war.

“My brothers in combat, white or black, need to believe that it isn’t the war that will kill them, but the evil eye. They need to believe that it won’t be one of the thousands of bullets fired by the enemy from the other side that will randomly kill them. They don’t like randomness. Randomness is too absurd.”

Alfa reveals the appeal of superstition to soldiers. It provides a way to make meaning amid the random deaths that are rampant in modern warfare and beyond the soldiers’ control.

“[…] into a battlefield where not even the smallest plant can grow, not even the slightest shrub, as if thousands of locusts have been gorging themselves, without rest, month after month. A field sowed with thousands of tiny metallic seeds of war that produce no harvest. A scarred battlefield made for carnivores.”

Alfa’s description of the battlefield emphasizes its sterility by using agricultural metaphors. The battlefield is compared to an agricultural field devoured by locusts, and the “tiny metallic seeds of war” is a persistent metaphor for the shells and landmines that kill indiscriminately. The agricultural language emphasizes and raises a protest against the senseless deaths of war.

“You killed him with your words, you disemboweled him with your words, you devoured the insides of his body with your words.” From there to the thought that I am a dëmm, a devourer of souls, there’s hardly any distance, any air.”

Alfa tells himself that he killed his friend “with [his] words” because, as he has just admitted in Chapter 7, he taunted his friend about his family totem, the peacock, just before his final battle. In taking responsibility for his friend’s death at this moment, Alfa begins to think of himself the way his trench mates do, as a “dëmm, a devourer of souls”—a dangerous sorcerer to be shunned.

“It was impossible for them, seeing the severed hand of an enemy from the other side, to keep from thinking, And if it were mine? It was impossible for them to keep themselves from thinking, I’ve had enough of this war.”

The severed hands here transform from trophies—symbols that alienate the enemy from humanity—to symbols that emphasize the common humanity of people on both sides of the trenches, an insight that makes one question and reject war altogether.

“I don’t believe the proprietor of the fourth hand in my collection had done anything wrong. I could read it in his blue eyes when I gutted him in la terre à personne, ‘no-man’s-land,’ as the captain said. I could see in his eyes that he was a good boy, a good son, still too young to have known a woman, but a good future husband, certainly. And here I had to fall on him, like death and destruction on innocence. That’s war: it’s when God lags behind the music of men, when he can’t untangle the threads of so many fates at the same time.”

As Alfa ponders the youth of his fourth victim, he compares himself to “death and destruction” falling on the innocent. He then offers a metaphorical definition of war as being when God—like a slow-moving dancer—lags behind the music provided by man’s activities. In believing God’s powers to be limited in the face of war, Alfa places human powers above God.

“The captain loves war the way men love a capricious woman. The captain indulges war shamelessly. He showers war with presents, he spoils her with countless soldiers’ lives. The captain is a devourer of souls. I know, I understand that Captain Armand was a dëmm who needed his wife, war, to survive, just the way she needed a husband like him to support her.”

After recounting how Captain Armand had the “traitorous friends” killed, Alfa uses an extended metaphor of marriage to explain Captain Armand’s devotion to war at all costs (61). It is his French captain, he concludes, who is truly the dëmm, the sorcerer devouring souls through his willing sacrifice of his men. By building this metaphor out of a Wolof word for sorcerer, Alfa pushes back against the narrative that would locate “evil” and “savagery” within Black Africans, implying that the true evil in this war originates higher up the chain of command with the European powers.

“The seven hands that I have left are like my smile, they show and hide simultaneously the destomaching of enemies that makes me explode with secret laughter.”

Alfa’s secret laughter here alludes to his hidden inner life of freethinking and alienation, though he is apparently being read as friendly and charming by the people around him. To Alfa, the smile and severed hands both point to the moment he disembowels his enemies, while others read these signs without understanding the reference to these incidents and, through them, to Mademba’s death.

“When I had won four wrestling matches in a row, glistening in the moonlight, a hostage to my admirers, Mademba’s eyes always said: ‘I envy you, but I love you too.’ His eyes said: ‘I would love to be you, but I am proud of you.’ Like all things in this base world, the look Mademba gave me was double.”

Alfa’s wrestling prowess encapsulates his physical strength and beauty. Mademba’s way of looking at Alfa with simultaneous love and envy is one of a growing list of meanings that Alfa asserts are doubled or double-edged. Doubleness or duplicity looms increasingly large in his worldview.

“I know, I understand that the memory of my mother had calcified the entire surface of my mind so it was hard like a tortoise’s shell. I know, I understand that there was nothing beneath this shell but the void of waiting. God’s truth, the space where knowledge would have gone was already occupied. So I preferred to work in the field, to dance and wrestle to prove the extent of my powers, to not think about the impossible return of my mother, Penndo Ba. It was only once Mademba was dead that my mind opened enough to let me see what was hiding there.”

Alfa has a revelation after Mademba’s death, realizing how profoundly waiting for his mother’s return has impacted his character. Instead of learning, he has spent his life armoring his mind against the grief of her absence. He uses a simile comparing his mind to a tortoise’s shell, except that inside this tortoise’s shell is only an empty space, a void. Mademba’s death cracks open his mind enough for him to see inside, alluding to other traumas Alfa has suppressed.

“God’s truth, I know with certainty that Mademba never experienced the pleasure of entering the insides of a woman’s body. I know it, he died even though he wasn’t a man yet. He would have become one if he had known the tender, wet and soft sweetness of the interior of a woman he loved. Poor, incomplete Mademba.”

Alfa links sexual initiation and adulthood in this moment. He concludes that Mademba died “incomplete” and not yet a man because he had not yet had sex. This passage will turn out foreshadow his later efforts to allow Mademba to supernaturally or symbolically experience sex with a woman; the toxicity of this viewpoint is emphasized by Alfa raping Mademoiselle François. The language, “the insides of a woman’s body,” creates an echo with Alfa’s repeated use of the word “insides” (22) to describe the internal organs of disemboweled enemies or the spiritual devouring of a dëmm.

“My father is a soldier of everyday life who only lived to protect his wives and his children from hunger. Day after day, in the river of time that is life, my father filled our bellies with the fruits of his fields and his orchards.”

Alfa uses a metaphor to compare his father to a soldier, a peaceful one who fights hunger instead of an enemy army. The beauty of his mission and his means of fulfilling it contrast sharply with Alfa’s life as a soldier in the war. In addition to standing in contrast to militarism, Alfa’s father and his many fields and orchards also reject market agriculture and monocultures, marks of a modernization that are threatening traditional ways of life in Gandiol.

“So, to cleanse the insides of my head with big buckets of mystical water, I drew my seven hands. I had to show them to Doctor François so that they would leave the inside of my head.”

When Alfa expresses that he wishes for his mind to be cleansed with the “mystical water” of battlefield psychiatry, it seems as if he is now interested in healing. This passage echoes the “big buckets of water” (30) that Alfa’s trench mates used to help him clean his uniform after his first few exploits. Alfa’s actions here do not have their intended consequences; rather than helping him, Doctor François is disturbed by Alfa’s drawing and distances himself from him.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle François, for opening your little notch, so close to your guts. God’s truth, vive la guerre! God’s truth, I plunged into her the way one plunges into the powerful current of a river one wants to cross, swimming furiously. God’s truth, I thrust into her womb as if to disembowel her.”

Alfa implies that Mademoiselle François consented to this encounter by “opening [her] little notch,” but the violent language marks out the encounter as rape. The observation that Mademoiselle François’s vagina is “so close to [her] guts” and that he thrusts “as if to disembowel her” connects this rape to Alfa’s disemboweling of German soldiers. His excited exclamation of “vive la guerre” or “long live the war!” show that this is a violent rather than a life-giving act.

“The thickness of my body, its excessive power, can only bring combat to the minds of others, can only bring battle, war, violence, and death. My body accuses my body. But why is it that my body’s bulk and its excessive power can’t also mean peace, tranquility and calm?”

A dissociated Alfa—narrating as Mademba—continues to orient himself in Alfa’s large, powerful body. He understands how this body will be perceived as a threat and feared by people around him but questions this overdetermined meaning, providing a dream of peace that is especially ironic given that he indulges these thoughts just moments after committing rape and murder.

“I am the sowing and the harvest. I am mother and daughter. I am night and day. I am fire and the wood it devours. I am innocent and guilty. I am the beginning and the end. I am the creator and the destroyer. I am double.”

Using paradoxical language, the narrator proclaims his “double” nature, frequently through images of destruction and darkness linked with beginnings. This speech constitutes a refusal to provide one answer—a name—because Mademba or Alfa still doesn’t know his name—and a declaration that the whole world is made of good and evil, creation and destruction unified.