At Night All Blood is Black
At Night All Blood Is Black is a novel by French author David Diop. First published in French on August 16, 2018, by Éditions du Seuil, it won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens that same year.
"Only after you were gone did I finally begin to think. Only with your death, at dusk, did I know, did I understand that I would no longer listen to the voice of duty, the voice that commands, the voice that leads the way. But it was too late."
"To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single."
"That’s war: it’s when God lags behind the music of men, when he can’t untangle the threads of so many fates at the same time."
"...I had been inhuman by obeying dutys voice. But I was now free to listen no longer, to no longer obey the voices that command us not to be human when we must."
"My brothers in combat, white or black, need to believe that it isn’t the war that will kill them, but the evil eye. They need to believe it won’t be one of the thousands of bullets fired by the enemy from the other side that will randomly kill them. They don’t like randomness. Randomness is too absurd. They want someone to blame, they’d rather think that the enemy bullet that hits them was directed, guided by some cruel, malevolent, evil intent."
"Dont tell me that we dont need madness on the battlefield. Gods truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid. Youd have to be mad to obey Captain Armand when he whistles for the attack, knowing theres almost no chance youll come home alive. Gods truth, youd have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth."
