It’s the one question everyone keeps asking who is David Diop? He is a Franco-Senegalese writer and academic born in Paris in 1966. He was raised in Dakar, Senegal. His father is Senegalese, his mother French and this dual cultural heritage is apparent in his literary works. He studied in France, where he now teaches 18th-century literature. His first novel was published in 2021 it was called 1889, l’Attraction universelle and is about a Senegalese delegation at the 1889 universal exhibition in Paris. His next book, about a European traveler to Africa, is set to come out this summer.
His second book is called At Night all Blood is Black. This is tells a story of Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese tirailleur (infantryman) and the main narrator of the novel (he uses the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in most of the text). He is fighting on France’s side – and on French soil – during World War I. The novel starts with the narration of a traumatic event that the African soldier has witnessed: the long and painful death of his best friend, Mademba Diop. The traumatic event directs Alfa’s vengeance that could also be perceived as self-punishment. He kills German soldiers in a similar way, reproducing and repeating the traumatic scene. He then cuts one of their hands off and keeps it with him. This results in Alfa being sent to a psychiatric hospital where doctors attempt to cure him. It deals with the concepts of war neurosis and shell shock that appeared then (what is now referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder). The form of the novel associates elements of an inner monologue as well as a testimony. This allows the reader to see, through the perspective of a colonial subject, the horrors of war.
This book won the Booker prize in 2021. Before we get to that it’s good to see why this book matters. It initially addresses the issue of France colonizing the Senegalese troops for the war. The involvement of African soldiers during the two World Wars is rarely taught in French schools or discussed in the public sphere. The violence exercised during recruitment in French West Africa, their marginalization from other troops re not voiced out in any form of teaching either. With this book Diop has managed to break through this stereotypes associated with Senegalese troops.
The Booker Prize is a massive win for this book. This is because the book exposes a specifically French history that is connected to France’s colonial endeavors. And even though the novel focuses on France, it connects to other histories as it indirectly points to the fact that other European colonial powers also resorted to using colonial troops during wars and erased their role in subsequent commemorations.
