“I wanted to show that this character – like a lot of soldiers – didn’t know where they were on the front.” What mattered to Diop was fiction’s ability to convey raw emotion. He deliberately does not specify exact battlefields, battalions, dates or places. From here, the novel twists and turns in shocking and surprising ways to the end, taking in the story of the protagonist’s Senegalese family.ĭiop says he didn’t want to write a historical novel. When one, Mademba Diop, is killed in the trenches, the other, Alfa Ndiaye, descends into his own way of coping – diligently committing the extreme violence expected of him by the war and carefully slicing trophy hands from corpses. His novel tells the story of two childhood friends deployed from Senegal (the original French title, Frère d’ âme – literally, soul brother – is a play on the term frère d’armes, or brother in arms). But he found more “emotional intensity” in the stream of consciousness of a young rifleman in the trenches. The injustices of the poor pay and low veterans’ pensions of African fighters deployed by France in both world wars were well documented, but the inner lives of soldiers brought from France’s African colonies to the trenches – their lived experience of the European war – had not really been told.ĭiop first considered filling the gap by writing his own fictional soldier’s letter. Despite being referred to as Senegalese, they came from all over west Africa, including Senegal, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, and never got the prominence they deserved in French history books. Photograph: Roger Viollet/Roger Viollet via Getty Imagesįrance, which had a vast colonial empire at the time of the first world war, deployed more than 135,000 African riflemen on European battlefields, where at least 30,000 were killed. It’s also possible there was a form of self-censorship among the African riflemen.”įrance deployed more than 135,000 tirailleurs sénégalais on European battlefields during the first world war. You have to remember that letters were monitored to keep up the morale of the troops and the country. There are letters, of course, but they are impersonal, administrative letters. “Because I have a double cultural sensitivity,” Diop says, “I wanted to find out if there were any letters written by the tirailleurs sénégalais.
It was “hypnotically compelling”, the Booker judges said. After more than 100 years of first world war literature, in all forms and all languages, critics found something new in Diop’s modern take. It was a massive critical hit and bestseller in France, winning several prizes across Europe. His novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, is a gripping, twisty account of industrial warfare, colonialism, violence, youth and friendship. The novelist, who was born in France but spent his childhood in Dakar, Senegal, after his French mother and Senegalese father met at university in Paris in the 1960s, was floored by the young soldiers’ “intimacy with war”.
He was struck by emotion when reading the letters of young French men fighting in the trenches of the first world war – shellshocked teenagers faced with the unmeasurable carnage of trench warfare, a sacrificed generation who often died before their letters reached home.
D avid Diop, the first French novelist and the first writer of African heritage to win the International Booker prize, along with his translator Anna Moschovakis, likes to seek out stories in historical gaps and missing narratives.
0 kommentar(er)
