At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-8

Chapters 9-13

Chapters 14-20

Chapters 21-25

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Promiscuous Women

Content Warning: The source material contains graphic depictions of rape and violence, including murder and torture.

Despite the all-male environment of the front lines, female genitalia is a frequent motif and allows for an early look at Alfa’s misogynistic tendencies, even in the absence of female characters upon whom to vent them. The trenches are repeatedly compared to female genitalia, beginning when Alfa carries Mademba’s body back and observes, “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” (13). To Alfa, even thinking this thought is allowing himself to break with social and moral conventions and think something “unmentionable” (13). A vulva, even one constructed from dirt and only in the imagination, is “unmentionable.” Later, this motif allows the men’s emergence from the trenches to attack the enemy to be compared to birth into a cruel and dangerous world: “[T]he trench birthed me and I began to scream” or “I leap, shrieking, from the earth’s womb” (17, 19).

It’s not only trenches that have female bodies and promiscuous tendencies in At Night All Blood Is Black: rumors do, too. When fellow soldiers begin to decide that Alfa may be a sorcerer, the rumor spread until “the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air” (30). The promiscuous behavior of this rumor and Alfa’s language to describe it escalates until the rumor “chase[d] after [him], half-naked, shameless, like a fallen woman” (32). The other soldiers, enjoying the fun “lifted her skirt as she passed” or “pinched her ass” (32). Once again, for Alfa, the female body is a symbol of immorality and his feelings of powerlessness in the trench; he attempts to grasp power by reproducing patriarchal power structures. This brutality is revealed starkly in his rape of Mademoiselle François, which he describes as “thrust[ing] into her womb as if to disembowel her” (114).

The Machete

When the men leap from the trench with the “regulation rifle in the left hand and savage machete in the right,” (16) the machete symbolizes how the Senegalese soldiers are viewed as “savages” by both their French colonial commanders and the German enemy. Machetes are frequently associated with agricultural labor—used to cut sugarcane—and travel in tropical regions. Machetes lack the noble and chivalrous cultural associations of swords, though they serve the same battlefield function as an edged weapon for hand-to-hand combat.

When asked to “play the savage” (16) to make the enemy afraid, the men do so at the expense of their dignity and, often, their lives, for they climb from the trenches to be massacred without questioning the fruitlessness of the project. The frequent appearance of machetes throughout the book renders their bravery tragic and their performance—the role-playing of colonial expectations—increasingly ironic. While the captain pretends to value the soldiers’ bravery, his view of them as “inhuman savages” contributes to the devaluing of their lives and deaths. When Alfa Ndiaye begins to use the machete to incapacitate, disembowel, kill, and mutilate his enemy, he forces his comrades and his French commanders to confront the true brutality of the war.

The Hands

When Alfa brings home “an enemy rifle and the hand that carried it” (17-18) he makes literal the synecdoche by which a rifle and the hand would usually refer to the entire man. Here, the rifle and hand indicate an enemy’s death, thus playing the role of a bounty object. This was famously the case in the Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium from 1885 to 1908 when baskets of hands were presented as proof of the deaths of Congolese laborers who failed to meet the rubber quotas imposed by their colonizers. These incidents would have been well known in France in 1910 as a result of high-profile international propaganda campaigns by reformers, adding further context to the ironic comeuppance involved in Alfa, an African colonial subject, bringing home amputated European hands.

The meaning of these hands is not fixed, however. When Alfa first returns to the trench with the hands, they appear to be a symbol of his victory, but he later explicitly names them as symbols of fear, stating, “The severed hands are our fear, brought inside from outside the trench” (43). With a little imagination applied, these body parts could imply one’s own death instead of just the enemy’s death, and become unwelcome mementos that remind all the men just how close death may be for them, too.

Alfa collects the hands in his recreations of Mademba’s death, so the hands also represent his unresolved trauma and guilt over his friend’s death. This symbolism is strengthened by Alfa preserving the hands in salt, preventing them from decaying naturally. Alfa believes he is cured when he buries the hands in the dead of night, but his condition deteriorates after this, and he rapes and kills Mademoiselle François. This symbolizes how burying trauma, in this case literally, is not the same as reckoning with it and healing.