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

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

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

Alfa Ndiaye opens the narrative with a confession of an unexplained and shameful action. The narrative flashes back to the day his best friend, Mademba Diop, died on the battlefield, disemboweled. He first asks and then later begs Alfa to end his life, but Alfa does not, and Mademba dies slowly.

As soon as Mademba is dead, Alfa regrets not having mercy on him. He says that it was “precisely because he spoke to me of our great marabout [a religious leader], precisely so as not to disobey the laws of humanity, the laws of our ancestors that I was not humane” (10). This experience is transformative for Alfa, and he swears to begin to ignore the laws of God and man and think for himself from now on.

Chapter 2 Summary

After Mademba’s death, Alfa carries him across the battlefield and back toward the French line. As he approaches his trench, he believes that it looks like a woman’s genitals, an “unmentionable thing” he would not have thought of before he gave up propriety (13). Once inside the trench, his fellow soldiers welcome him as a hero and predict that he will be awarded the Croix de Guerre, but he secretly thinks that he does not care about the medal.

Chapter 3 Summary

Alfa resumes his life in the trench, but he is now play-acting for his fellow soldiers. He sees them as “foolish” and “idiotic” for obeying orders that cost them their lives when they “leap from the trench, their rifles in their left hands and their machetes in their right” (15). Standing apart from the life of his unit, Alfa sees how Black soldiers “play the savage” to fulfill French expectations (16).

Alfa begins exacting revenge for Mademba’s death. Ignoring orders to retreat, he hides himself on the battlefield and captures enemy soldiers. He then disembowels them and slits their throats. Finally, he removes their right hands and returns to his trench with his victims’ rifles and hands. His trench mates see him as a hero and a legend, a “totem.” They help him clean himself and reward him with food and tobacco.

Chapter 4 Summary

This chapter reveals more details about Mademba’s death. During an attack, Mademba pauses to look at a German soldier who appears dead, only to have the man jump up and bayonet him. As he stays by Mademba’s side afterward, Alfa presses him for these details about the attack.

Chapter 5 Summary

Alfa describes how he reenacts Mademba’s death with a captured enemy, first opening his belly and then slitting his throat with his machete “as soon as he’s made a second plea with his eyes” (27). Alfa uses the machete to cut off the enemy’s hand and takes it back to his trench. He smells so much of death that even the rats run from him.

Chapter 6 Summary

The trench mates’ attitudes toward Alfa change after he returns with the fourth hand. They no longer see him as brave and strange but instead believe he may be having a crisis or practicing witchcraft. The rumor about his possible evil is described with an extended metaphor, growing bolder until “the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air” (30). Other soldiers no longer want to help or touch Alfa when he returns to the trench after the battle.

Chapter 7 Summary

Alfa tells how the rumors evolve to say that he is a sorcerer and is responsible for Mademba’s death. He now retells the story of the day his friend died, including the detail that he taunted his friend about his family totem, the peacock, and implied that his own totem, the lion was much stronger. This inspired Mademba’s reckless bravery; he left the trench first and was killed.

Chapter 8 Summary

In this chapter, Alfa concludes that, because of the role his words played in Mademba’s death, there is truth in the rumors that he is a “dëmm, a devourer of souls”—a dangerous sorcerer who eats men’s insides (38). As soon as this thought appears, he rejects it, classifying it as the thought of his sergeant and enemies. He continues, however, to regret his hurtful words and the impact they caused.

Chapters 1-8 Analysis

After Mademba Diop’s death, Alfa becomes alienated from his fellow soldiers, first by his freethinking and later by their reactions to his increasingly disturbing actions on the battlefield. These chapters introduce one of the novel’s key themes: the strain of living under colonial stereotypes. From his outsider’s position, Alfa is able to comment on the racial and colonial dynamics in his regiment. When his French captain tells the Black soldiers, “You, the Chocolats of black Africa, are naturally the bravest of the brave. France admires you and is grateful,” he is wrapping a racist stereotype in compliments (16). Symbolized by the “savage machete” in the right hand of each soldier, this white belief in African “barbarity” overdetermines the soldiers’ actions.

He also recognizes the true fruitlessness and randomness of the many deaths his unit suffers, as when he states:

God’s truth, you’d have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth. The bullets from the enemy on the other side, the giant seeds falling from the metallic sky, they aren’t afraid of screams, they aren’t afraid to pass through heads, flesh, to break bones and sever lives (31).

His emphasis on the illogical, metallic, and mechanized nature of this warfare and death highlights the pointlessness of combat. Alfa’s personal quest to kill a single enemy on each sortie in a face-to-face reenactment of Mademba’s death is, by comparison, a defiant act of meaning-making. He refuses to let Mademba’s death—or this enemy’s—be meaningless and inconsequential, repeatedly asserting that he is not rejecting but reclaiming his humanity through these actions.

Alfa’s ritualistic killings also bear the mark of trauma. According to literary theorist Cathy Caruth, “trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetition of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (“Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History.” Yale French Studies, no. 79, 1991, pp. 181). Alfa, struggling with his guilt over Mademba’s slow and painful death, recreates the circumstances over and over by kidnapping and maiming German soldiers. When they beg for mercy, he grants it; however, no number of mercy killings can bring Mademba back or change the circumstances of his death. With no intervention, Alfa is doomed to repeat this cycle of killing and rescuing.

Chapter 8 raises a contrasting possibility when Alfa entertains the idea that the rumors are true and he is a “dëmm, a devourer of souls” (38). Ultimately, however, he sees the possibility of his own evil like the possibility that he is “a savage”—as ideas planted by his Toubab (white African) sergeant and German enemies. Alfa’s moment of waffling about his own identity speaks to the challenges of constructing a stable identity under the pressurized gazes of hostile others.