Brawny Alfa is convinced to enlist by his studious ‘more-than-brother’, Mademba Diop, whose ‘white school’ education has ‘put it into his head that he should save the motherland’. It belongs to Alfa Ndiaye, the son of a peasant farmer and shepherd’s daughter from the Senegalese village of Gandiol. In At Night All Blood is Black, sublimely translated by Anna Moschovakis, Diop imagines one of these missing soldier’s voices. Over the course of the war, 30,000 of them lost their lives. No small silence, for a regiment that recruited almost 200,000 men from Senegal and French colonies across West Africa. For all his searching, Diop could not find a single letter from the colonial ranks of the Tirailleurs sénégalais (‘Senegalese riflemen’). But the collection had a conspicuous gap. Diop says he was inspired to write this novel – now shortlisted for the International Booker Prize – after reading a collection of letters from France’s ‘Poilus’ (‘the hairy ones’), the affectionate term for the troops who fought for France in the First World War.
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