At Night All Blood Is Black moves forward in time, to World War I, offering a gripping and altogether unsettling portrayal of trench warfare from the perspective of a Senegalese soldier fighting for the French on the Western Front.Īt Night All Blood Is Black reads like a thriller and unspools like a dark poem. His first novel, 1889, l’Attraction universelle, published by L’Harmattan in 2012, follows a delegation of Senegalese men and women who come to France as part of the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris. Today, he is a specialist of eighteenth-century literature at the University of Pau. Even before its translation into English, the French novel had received rave reviews and garnered unanimous praise from critics, winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and the Prix Ahmadou Kourouma.īorn in Paris to a French mother and Senegalese father, Diop grew up mostly in Dakar. 1966) became the first French writer to take home the International Booker Prize for the English translation of Frère d’âme (literally, “soul brother”), elegantly translated by the American poet Anna Moschovakis as At Night All Blood Is Black and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It was only this year, living in Paris, that I finally picked up a copy.

But a dissertation has a way of drastically narrowing one’s field of vision, so I had missed some of the early buzz around David Diop’s novel Frère d’âme (Seuil, 2018), told from the perspective of a tirailleur. I knew a bit about the tirailleurs and had seen Ousmane Sembène’s film Le Camp de Thiaroye (1988), about a little-known 1944 massacre of West African soldiers by the French at an army base just outside of Dakar. In 2019, I was in Dakar for the summer doing research for my dissertation and learning Wolof. The gesture is irksomely, though perhaps unsurprisingly, paternal: it turns out the sculptor was French. The Frenchman has his arm around the tirailleur’s shoulder.

On the right, immediately recognizable by his characteristic flat cap, is a Senegalese tirailleur, the archetypal and somewhat mythic figure of the West African soldier.

The area is crowded with tourists waiting for the ferries to Gorée Island, and I have to navigate a whirl of taxis in order to get close enough to make out a white marble plaque that reads “La Place du Tirailleur.” On the left, with his raised arm holding an olive branch, is a mustachioed French poilu, a trench soldier from WWI. Just in front of the gare centrale in the Plateau region of Dakar, in the middle of a rond-point, is a bronze statue of two men atop a white pillar. It’s hard to miss, but I passed it twice before realizing what I was looking at.

At the night all blood is black