Margaret Attwood once concluded that “war is what happens when language fails”. David Diop further shows in his At Night All Blood Is Black that the language fails with respect to not just the foes but also the friends. In its short and succinct form, the book presents a scathing but mesmerising account of the battlefield and its multiple players.
The novel is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye who comes from the French Senegal and is fighting on the French side against the Germans in a European World War II battlefield. His “more than brother”, Mademba Diop, was fighting alongside until he is killed. The circumstances of the latter’s death make Alfa question the sanity of war, its commanders (the alleged “lovers” of war), its soldiers, its morals and, of course, himself. The narration is so personal that the reader but fears intruding into Alfa’s privacy and thoughts.
In the initial few chapters, Alfa presents his recollection of Mademba’s death. Here, the novel is many things at once – a eulogy for the brave Mademba; a letter of regret for Alfa’s own failure as a friend, as a human – or his success as a soldier, a disciple of societal teachings; or even an attempt at redemption over the same mistakes. This David Diop does through the dazzling usage of repetition - passages and phrases which are laments and apologies and discoveries – Alfa’s incremental understanding of the war, and of Mademba’s death as a part of it. Undoubtedly, as Diop himself says, “Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created.”
As the pages turn, the madness spreads to other players (the Jean-Baptiste for whom we cannot feel bad enough) and is taken back into the Senegalese childhood (where violence, physical and mental, direct and indirect – and its scars – begin to collect and the story begins to form). Sights of playful and pure childhood provide the necessary soothing to the reader and it is here, in the past, which was both gentle and ignorant, that the novel begins to sound like a fairy tale.
The novel drives the reader through the various aspects of Alfa’s persona through this structure. It does not struggle to portray either the bitter and heart-wrenching part of his personality or the underlying child that resides within every person. It strives to understand how one leads to the other – how one aspect transforms into the other – and how one finds the id and the superego hopelessly interwoven, not knowing where one becomes the other.
At its core, the novel explores the interaction of war and the civilised
world – how one produces the other – only at a more personal level. This is
also the main achievement of the book. Madness (the acceptable and the
unacceptable, the one at the battlefield and the one at home, and where the
differences lie between these) varies with perception (“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.”). Perception is
subjective, societal and personal. The soldier, in the guise of Alfa, fights
this second war beyond the battlefield – and it is to study this war that you
must read this book.
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