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Book Review: At Night All Blood Is Black

By Marie Veronic Thomasi

World War I, French trenches, Senegalese soldiers, Senegalese “Frère d'âme” (soul brothers). A man kneels in pain, distraught by his dying “Frère d'âme.” The dying man pleads for death, begging his best friend to end his suffering. But this kneeling man can't do it, he can't imagine taking his Frère d'âme's life, he can't imagine having to go home and tell the family he grew up with that he killed their son, that he killed their brother. So he sat back and watched his best friend, his “plus que frère” (more-than-brother), die from an enemy attack, and thus began an astonishing story of immense complexity.

Alfa watched his best friend Mademba die, his insides hanging outside his body (I'll spare you the gruesome details I had to read). He couldn't kill his best friend, so he waited for him to die, then took his corpse back to the trenches. No one was surprised, they'd seen too much–in war, gruesome deaths are inevitable. They were used to dead friends, to the remains of their bodies, to grieving Frère d'âme. Because of that, they paid little attention and got back to the basics: “How can we win this war so that France will give us our pension? (spoiler alert: France never paid its Senegalese soldiers). We take a leap into Alfa's current mental state as he kills the enemy and brings back their severed hands with the weapons still in them. At first, his comrades-in-arms celebrated him because they wanted the enemy to die mutilated. However, Alfa kept coming back every day with more hands. The soldiers were afraid and thought Alfa was a “dëmm” (“dëmm” or “doma,” Wolof for demon, witch, evil spirit, that sort of thing). Later, we learn that Alfa disemboweled these men just as they had disemboweled his friend. He only killed the blue-eyed men because Mademba had told him that his killer had blue eyes, doing so by playing dead and approaching them when they were alone because that's how his friend had been killed.

When we explore his mental state, it's clear that Alfa suffers from PTSD and that his symptoms have decided to manifest themselves in a very specific way. When someone hurts us, we think about getting even. This thought process, combined with war and the loss of someone you grew up with, can make you do things that others could never have imagined. However, the Senegalese (especially at that time) believe in evil spirits, totems, and so on. The soldiers immediately drew conclusions that Alfa was a “doma” and that they couldn't approach him, but they couldn't make him angry either in case he decided to curse them. Alfa played along, let them believe what they wanted, and collected a total of seven hands before his general sent him away.

The emotion felt after reading the first few chapters of this book (chapters summarized above) is immense because of the writing style employed by the author. He's repetitive in his adjectives and in the feelings felt by the characters. But even though I've summarized half the book in just a few paragraphs, the repetitiveness never makes you want to put the book down. On the contrary, it intrigues you further. He's very deliberate in the way he talks openly about gore, sex, and all the other things that people (especially those of his culture) would find taboo and not approach so openly. The fact that he's a poet comes through loud and clear. Even if most of the things he said aren't relevant to the story or plot, they are important to the characters and their development or personalities. This is what makes this story truly literary rather than commercial. The aim of this story is not to explore a grand plot, nor does it have a conventional or happy ending, but it instead focuses on the development and complexity of the characters. This story is the definition of literary fiction.

After being “banished” from the trenches, Alfa is sent to a hospital. At the hospital, Alfa constantly shifts from his current point of view to his past point of view (before the war), between the ages of 16 and 20. He didn't speak French, the doctor didn't speak Wolof, and there was no translator (not like in the trenches), which was common among soldiers. To psychoanalyze them, the doctor asked them to draw. It is through these drawings that we continue to learn more about Alfa's and even Mademba's past. We learn the story of Alfa's mother. She was the fourth wife of Alfa's father, the daughter of a shepherd who passed through Gandiol, Alfa's native village. Her father and brother were always traveling and coming back to see her, but one day they didn't come back, then the next and the next, until she couldn't take it anymore and went to look for them. She left, her son was six, and she promised him she'd come back. She never came back, but Alfa's father followed her trail as far as he could, and they all later assumed that she had been kidnapped by the North Africans to be made a slave. He then went to live with Mademba, they became the best of friends, and they fell in love with the same woman, but Alfa got her in the end. People kept saying that Alfa was a “doma” because he was handsome, strong, etc., but that his best friend was ugly and skinny. So people began to warn Mademba, telling him that Alfa was a “doma” who took away all his beauty. Nevertheless, they remained friends, so much so that Mademba convinced Alfa to help him train so they could both go to war. They wanted money and citizenship so they could settle in Saint-Louis (the capital of Senegal at the time), and Alfa wanted to free his mother from slavery.

All these events were explored through his various drawings; the last drawing Alfa made was of his seven hands. Alfa had explained that after each drawing, the doctor smiled at him and admired his talent, but after the hands, Alfa explained that the doctor had stopped smiling. He was distraught, worried, and discouraged. The war had killed this man's spirit and there was nothing he could do.

This is where the story ends for Alfa, as the final chapters are set in a point of view that is unclear to us until the very last sentence. In these chapters, a man explains (in the middle of a sexual encounter) that he doesn't feel like himself, that he doesn't feel like he's in his own body, that he feels like a wrestler, a brute, but he doesn't know if it's him or not. He had to test his new body to find out if he just felt like one or if he was one. Up till then, I'd thought it was Alfa, that he was in fact a “doma," and that he was possessed. However, the narrator then tells the story of a princess who wanted a prince without scars, but this prince ended up being a “doma” and was bad for her, and our narrator now compares this story to the relationship between Alfa and his lover, Fary. The narrator explains that he understands why Fary chose Alfa, because she was a capricious princess and wanted a "sorcier-lion" (lion sorcerer, a prince without scars). Now we understand who the narrator is, it's none other than Mademba, then the author writes:

“But now that I think about it deeply, now that I make God's truth my own, I know, I understand that Alfa left me a place in his wrestling body out of friendship, out of compassion. I know, I understand that Alfa heard the first plea I uttered in the depths of the earth to no one, the night I died. Because I didn't want to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, in a land without a name. God's truth, I swear to you that now, every time I think of us, he is me and I am him.” And so the story ends.

We ask ourselves many questions: Was Alfa really Mademba all this time? Did they swap roles throughout the story? Are there things we should have noticed that would have allowed us to tell them apart? Was the “doma” actually Mademba the whole time? Was he jealous or envious of Alfa? Did Mademba want to be Alfa?

As literary tradition dictates, we'll never know.

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