At Night All Blood Is Black is an English translation of a French novel, Frère d’âme, by David Diop. David Diop is a French novelist and literary scholar who was born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese father. He lived in Dakar, Senegal from ages five to 18. He holds a doctorate from La Sorbonne in 18th-century French literature and specializes in French-language African literature and French representations of Africa and Africans in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Frère d’âme, his second novel, was published in 2018, and its English translation, At Night All Blood Is Black, was published in 2020. It won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2018, and the translation won the International Booker Prize in 2021. The novel is historical fiction and set during World War I, focusing upon the experiences of Senegalese Tirailleurs, colonial riflemen who served in France. It depicts the bloody and brutal conditions of trench warfare and the traumas of both war and colonial subjectivity.

This study guide refers to the e-book published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2020. American poet and novelist Anna Moschovakis is the translator.

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

Plot Summary

The narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, opens the novel with the vague confession that he has done something he knows he should not have. He then explains his terrible regret: When his childhood friend from his home village in Senegal and more-than-brother Mademba Diop was disemboweled by a bayonet on a World War I battlefield, he took a long time to die.

The book flashes back to that scene. Mademba asks Alfa to slit his throat and end his suffering, but Alfa, thinking of their families, religious teacher, and moral codes, refuses. Instead, he stays by Mademba’s side and holds his hand while he dies in agony, writhing and cursing him. After he dies, Alfa gathers up his intestines and tries to bandage them back inside him, then carries his friend back to their home trench. The other Senegalese Tirailleurs believe what he is done is brave and will cause him to be awarded the Croix de Guerre, but Alfa is unenthusiastic. He comes back a changed man. He is now determined to think for himself rather than allowing the morals and voices of others to determine his actions, as they did when Mademba asked him for mercy.

After Mademba’s death, Alfa begins a campaign of terror against the German enemy. When his unit leaves the trenches, he ignores the order to retreat and stays out long after the cease-fire, capturing enemy soldiers. Each time, he immobilizes them, ties them up, gags them, and disembowels them, watching as they suffer. When he deems they have asked him for mercy with their eyes, he grants them the mercy he refused Mademba and slits their throats. Afterward, he returns to the trench, bearing his victim’s rifle and the hand that held it as trophies.

At first, Alfa’s trench mates celebrate his bravery, but a turning point comes when his friend, the jokester Jean-Baptiste, is killed while wearing the first severed hand on his helmet as a taunt to the Germans. Soon, the other soldiers fear Alfa and start a rumor that he is a dëmm, one who devours the souls of friends and foes alike.

After Alfa has collected a total of eight hands, his captain informs him that he needs to go rest for a month in the Rear. There, he meets Doctor François, who looks at him kindly and encourages him to draw to express his feelings and cleanse his mind from the war. Alfa recalls his childhood in the village of Gandiol and how his family and childhood friendship with Mademba shaped him. He buries his collection of severed hands and seems set, briefly, on healing.

While in the Rear, Alfa also grows interested in Mademoiselle François, Doctor François’s daughter, a nurse. He believes she is attracted to him, so he sneaks into her bedroom and climbs into bed with her.

The narrative breaks and then resumes with a confused narrator engaged in raping Mademoiselle François. This figure alternately claims to be Alfa, Mademba reincarnated in Alfa’s body, and a dëmm. Despite the narrator’s intense focus on his own sensations and body, Mademoiselle François resists and ultimately dies.

In the book’s close, interrogators attempt to learn the narrator’s name, but the translator can only interpret from his long, macabre, and paradoxical speech that he claims to be life and death.