At Night All Blood Is Black
David Diop · 2020
A Senegalese soldier in WWI becomes a terrifying killer after his friend's death. Diop's short, brutal novel rewrites the history of the Great War from the perspective of the African soldiers who were used and forgotten: the largest underrepresented story of that conflict.
The case against
Incantation is the method: 'God's truth' and its sister phrases recur every few paragraphs, and the trance either carries you or numbs you well before page fifty. Diop's violence repeats with the same ritual cadence, severed hands accumulating like a refrain. Then the ending dissolves into a possession riddle that trades the book's moral force for ambiguity.
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