At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

Alfa’s unraveling into murderous violence is related not only to war trauma but also to the acute strain of living under racist colonial stereotypes about Africans. This tension is thus central to the book’s postcolonial themes, highlighting the impossibility of constructing a stable or healthy identity under the hostile gaze of the colonizers. Alfa is constantly aware of how poorly France rates its African subjects. When the captain tells his Black men, “You, the Chocolats of black Africa, are naturally the bravest of the brave” (16), he hears in the captain’s “naturally” an essentializing viewpoint, where the men of “black Africa” are living out a racial destiny through their courage rather than exhibiting exemplary personal qualities. He hears the stereotype behind the idea of bravery as a racial characteristic. In the European colonial logic, the diverse people of Senegal lacked culture, civilization, and history before they had contact with European enslavers and colonizers. Colonizers, by this logic, brought the gift of civilization and Christianity to “primitive” African people; their theft of lives, land, and resources is both obscured and justified by this sleight of hand. To compliment the Senegalese Tirailleurs as “naturally the bravest” is thus to utter words that reinforce and justify the subjugation of them and their homeland (16).

These stereotypes are on Alfa’s mind, too, as he encounters his German victims. Germany has African colonies, too, and a set of stereotypes about Africans that mirror the rest of Europe’s. Alfa sees the fear of “savagery, of rape, of cannibalism” in his victim’s eyes (20)—a neat evocation of a suite of generalized colonial stereotypes about African people as “uncivilized,” sexually powerful, aggressive and deviant, and that they are cannibals. Alfa is clearly hurt that his trench mates and enemies alike believe he is a “savage”—though in his case, the fears ironically become justified. These stereotypes play a role in inflaming Alfa to murder by inspiring him to become the colonizer’s worst nightmare.

The French arm Alfa and the rest of their African troops (but not their European units) with the “savage machete.” Images of African soldiers waving the machete featured prominently in both French and German propaganda about the ferocity and “savagery” of French African troops. The French encouraged the image so Germans would fear them, and Germans used the image to incite racist panic and paint themselves as victimized by the “barbarity” of these particular French colonial troops. Alfa, typecast as “savage” by friend and foe alike, takes the role and the props that are foisted upon him to their logical extreme when he uses the machete to take German hands.

When Alfa first considers the possibility that he might be a dëmm, he concludes that the idea was planted in his mind by his Toubab [white African] sergeant and “blue-eyed enemies” (39). His mistake is in leaving “the door of [his] mind open to the thoughts” of those who mean him harm and eventually embracing, rather than resisting, their ideas (38). Readers of At Night All Blood Is Black thus should not conclude that the colonizers’ stereotypes are true, but rather that they have destructive power. Once inside Alfa, they transform him in their image.