Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.       

“AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK” by David Diop (First published in French in 2018 with the title “FRERE D’AME” [Soul Brother]. English translation by Anne Moschovakis published 2020); “THE LAST GIFT” by Abdulrazac Gurnah (first published 2011)

            Africa is a huge continent which now produces many writers who have reached international audiences. So I do often feel daunted by my ignorance of African literature. On this blog I have sometimes reviewed books about Africa written by Europeans. But only once have I reviewed on this blog a book by an African, namely Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, and that was written way back in 1958. So I decided to educate myself a bit by reading two more recent works by distinguished African novelists. One writes in French. The other writes in English.

            The Francophone first. David Diop was born in Paris of Senegalese parents and he grew up in Senegal. He is now a professor in a French university, specialising in two subjects: classical French literature and European representations of Africa. Frere d’Ame [Soul Brother] is the more relevant title for his novel, as it concerns, among other things, the strong bonding of two men and the complete disorientation of one when the other dies. Perhaps the Anglophone translator thought Soul Brother sounded too like an African-American phrase, so translator (or publisher) chose to re-name it At Night All Blood is Black, a passing phrase which does occur in the novel.

Some context. The story is set in the First World War, when the French army was hard pressed and France decided to recruit (or dragoon) as many soldiers as possible from France’s African colonies, including Senegal. On the front line, in the trenches, are Senegalese soldiers, suffering frequent bombardments but admired by the French top brass for their sheer ferocity in battle. These African soldiers carry both rifles and machetes when they charge or crawl across no-man’s-land, ready to hack German soldiers apart as often as they shoot them.

Frere d’Ame is narrated throughout by the Senegalese soldier Alfa Ndiaye. From the very first page we are aware that he is suffering long-term trauma. His best friend who came from the same village as he, Mademba Diop, has been mortally wounded by an exploding shell. His guts are hanging out, he is suffering a long, painful death and he repeatedly begs Alfa Ndiaye to shoot him quickly and put him out of his misery. But Alfa Ndiaye cannot bring himself to kill his frere d’ame and Mademba Diop dies in drawn-out agony. This is the trigger that sends Alfa Ndiaye spiralling down through guilt, then grandiose fantasy about himself and ultimately into complete, unhinged madness. In that sense the novel is about a man psychologically crushed and destroyed.

Alfa Ndiaye is already a killer. Now, in a sort of revenge on white people, he becomes even more savage. He not only kills and mutilates German soldiers, but he slices off their hands and takes them back to the French lines as trophies. At first he is admired for this, but gradually the African soldiers come to fear him as a sort sorcerer for the way he seems invulnerable and always comes back alive. And even the French officers who once praised him for his courage, and suggested he could win the Croix de Guerre, are becoming queasy about his methods. Alfa Ndiaye himself comes to believe he is a demi-god; a force of nature.

Alfa Ndiaye’s narration is deliberately repetitive. Again and again he comes back to the slow death of Mademba Diop, an obsession like an insistent drum being sounded. Hammered into us is the understanding that this is the event that changed him. Again and again he introduces events by saying “God’s truth”. Referring to the Germans facing them, he calls them “the enemy of the other side”, which may subtly suggest that he sees “enemies on this side” as well. Only one French soldier actually befriends him, Jean-Baptiste; but Jean-Baptiste goes crazy in battle and is killed, making Alfa Ndiaye even more unhinged. He becomes critical of the French officers who lead them, especially their Captain Armand.

He declares: “What I think is that people don’t want me to think. The unthinkable is what’s hidden in the captain’s words. The captain’s France needs for us to play the savage when it suits them. They need for us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes… The captain’s France needs our savagery, and because we are obedient, myself and the others, we play the savage. We slash the enemy’s flesh, we maim, we decapitate, we disembowel… the only difference between me [and other Senegalese soldiers] is that I became savage intentionally.” (Chapter 3) Later he describes the officer: “Captain Armand is a small man with matching black eyes drowning in continuous rage. His matching black eyes are full of hate for anything that isn’t war. For the captain life is war … The captain indulges war shamelessly. He showers war with presents, he spoils her with countless soldiers’ lives. The captain is a devourer of souls. I know, I understand that Captain Armand was a demm [demon] , who needed his wife, war, to survive…” (Chapter 13)

Obviously one major thrust of this novel is a critique of the misuse and corruption of Africans by their colonial masters. But, anti-colonial though Frere d’Ame may be, David Diop nowhere suggests that traditional Senegalese life was perfect. As Alfa Ndiaye succumbs to paranoia and madness, a sympathetic French psychiatrist, Dr. Francois, tries to heal him by getting him to draw pictures of home. This sends Alfa Ndiaye into thinking of the good things there, but also the bad – the woman he wanted to marry but who was denied him by tribal codes; the chieftain who was ready to sell out his followers by accepting the French idea of raising cash crops rather than the crops the community relied on; the regular raids by Moors looking for slaves. No people is devoid of sin and fault. As for Alfa Ndiaye, his final actions in this novel are unforgivable. Not just madness, but pure evil has clawed into him.

Interesting to note that in 2018 Frere d’Ame was the winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens – a junior branch of the Prix Goncourt judged by a panel of senior students in French high-schools. And in 2020, the English-language translation At Night All Blood is Black won the Booker International Award.

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A few years later, in 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah won an even more prestigious award - the Nobel Prize for Literature.  There are some similarities shared by Abdulrazak Gurnah and David Diop. Not only were both African-born, but both eventually made careers in European universities. However, while David Diop is a French-speaking Senegalese, Abdulrazak Gurnah (whose first language was Swahili) is an English-speaking Tanzanian of Arab descent. He fled from Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) in 1968, when he was twenty and Zanzibar was going through a violent revolution. He first taught English and post-colonial literature at a university in Nigeria, and then moved to England where he became a professor at the University of Kent. Abdulrazak Gurnah, so Wikipedia tells me, is a prolific author, having written eleven novels, seven collections of short stories, and many essays of literary criticism. I chose to read one of his less-touted novels, The Last Gift (published 2011).

The Last Gift is set largely in England. Maryam and her much-older husband Abbas live quietly in Norwich. They have two adult children, son Jamal and daughter Hanna. Maryam knows nothing about her ancestry as she was literally a foundling who was passed through a number of unsatisfactory carers before she was adopted by the Mauritian woman Ferooz and her Indian husband Vijay. Maryam’s own ethnicity is unsure. As for Maryam’s husband Abbas, he has never spoken to either wife or children about his own specific origins, only vaguely saying that he came from East Africa. When Maryam first met him and fell in love with him, she knew him – according to his own definition of himself – as a wandering sailor who had seen much of the world. Hanna and Jamal are deprived of any sense of ancestry and forebears, and as they mature into young adulthood, they become more inquisitive. What is played out here is the loss of an essential part of identity. Who are we when we do not know who our people are? Yet at the same time, Hanna and Jamal are (almost) thoroughly British. They have never lived in any country but England, and another stream of ideas has to do with their assimilation.

The crisis which frames the novel comes when Abbas, even though he is only in his early 60s, has a “diabetic crisis”, causing a kind of stroke which makes him bedridden and barely capable of speaking. But in this state, his mind turns back to his early childhood and young manhood in Africa, which he has never disclosed to wife or children. And gradually we learn of the drastic circumstances that made him flee from his country of origin. Given that his backstory is unfolded bit-by-bit through the novel, I will not go into the details. But at the very least I can say that the novel has much to do with the many things that can force somebody to flee from home – refugees become refugees for many and various reasons. Bit-by-bit, too, we learn why Maryam ran away from her foster-parents, Ferooz and Vijay, when she was young; and why she chose never to contact them again.

 

Abdulrazak Gurnah is obviously aware of the pockets of racial prejudice that there are in England, but they are not a major theme in the novel. There’s an unpleasant episode where an Anglo shopkeeper clearly resents selling something to Jamal because of the colour of Jamal’s skin. There’s a very minor subplot about Jamal and his Italian girlfriend befriending and protecting a man of a minor ethnicity, who is being harassed by local teenage Anglo thugs. Most excruciating are the scenes in which Hanna visits the home of her English boyfriend Nick. Nick’s family are rural, Anglican (uncle the local vicar) and apparently welcoming Hannah courteously. But as Nick’s father – a former colonial official – gets further into table-talk, his tone becomes unbearably condescending to Hanna. However, while the faults of England are there to see, Abdulrazak Gurnah does not idealise the country from which Abbas came – ruled by tight codes, tribal, making it difficult for young people to get a good education. As in David Diop’s Frere d’Ame, it is made clear that no people is devoid of sin and fault.

More important to the novel are the ways the younger generation, Hanna and Jamal, are growing away from their parent’s culture. The fact is, both these younger people are working their way into the middle classes. At one point “Abbas nodded slowly and turned back to the muted television, which was showing a nature programme. He too had learned to retreat from Hanna, who had once been so dear to his life. She turned against him after she went to university, not with anger or rudeness, not at first, but with sullen and withdrawn resistance.” (pp.81-82). At another point, Maryam is surprised and a little shocked that Hanna’s boyfriend Nick is making dinner for her. Surely it is women’s work to prepare dinner? Incidentally, apparently as part of the assimilation process, Hanna decides to change her name to Anna.

In this novel, then, we have many ideas presented and discussed. And in a very humane way. The riddle of Abbas’s origins are worked out; and the ancestry of Maryam is more-or-less worked out. This is satisfying to the reader, but even more it confirms the importance of genealogy.