PARIS — As a child, the Senegalese French author David Diop
was used to seeing soldiers not unlike Alfa Ndiaye, the narrator of his novel
“
At Night All Blood Is Black.” In Senegal, men who had fought for France in the
two world wars often took part in national parades, yet when Diop started
reading letters by French soldiers, infantrymen from colonized African
countries were nowhere to be found.
اضافة اعلان
“It felt unsatisfying, because in Senegal, we knew what
they’d done for France,” Diop, a professor of 18th-century literature at the
University of Pau in southwestern France, said in an interview this month. “It
made me want to write a fictional letter from a Senegalese soldier.”
Since its release in France in 2018, “At Night All Blood Is
Black” has helped fill the void. Diop, 55, won several awards, including the
Goncourt des Lycéens, a sister prize to the prestigious Goncourt that is voted
on by high school students. The English-language version of “At Night All Blood
Is Black,” translated by Anna Moschovakis, was published by Farrar, Straus
& Giroux in November and is now a finalist for this year’s International
Booker Prize. The winner will be announced Wednesday.
“At Night All Blood Is Black” has also contributed to a
reckoning with colonial history in French fiction. Alice Zeniter met with
similar acclaim for “The Art of Losing,” a multigenerational novel set during
and after the Algerian war for independence, which was translated into English by
Frank Wynne and published in the United States in March, also by Farrar, Straus
& Giroux.
While progressive theories about race and postcolonialism
have ignited bitter culture wars in France and drawn accusations of
Americanization, Diop’s and Zeniter’s success shows that there is also a desire
for more open discussion about France’s history with Africa.
Zeniter, who is of Algerian descent, found that writing
fiction helped her sidestep a polarized public debate. “It offers a suspension
of judgment in order to explore a life that’s different from ours,” she said in
a video interview.
“Literature can be a way of moving people before they turn
to rational explanations of history,” Diop said. “It may be a clue that
remembrance is necessary to achieve a sense of balance in France.”
As Diop tells it, balance between his own two cultures came
fairly naturally. He was born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese
father, who had come to France to study. The family later moved to Dakar — a
change the 5-year-old Diop did not find especially dramatic.
“I was lucky that my French and Senegalese families both
acted very warmly toward my parents. I received a lot of love from both sides,”
he said. “I didn’t experience my two cultural identities as a source of conflict.”
Diop moved back to Paris after finishing high school to
study literature. While his mother, a devoted reader, had nurtured his love of
a wide range of French and African authors, at university he became fixated
with the 18th-century “Lumières,” the humanist Enlightenment movement led by
the likes of Voltaire and Denis Diderot. “I was drawn to their activism and
commitment to human rights. I won’t say I lost them, but at the time I had
political ideals,” Diop said with a laugh.
Raised on France’s universalist values, Diop said he did not
experience racism as an academic of color, and he is careful to distance his
writing from activism. He finds notions such as cultural appropriation, he
said, “oppressive” — “Flaubert created a Madame Bovary even though he wasn’t a
woman” — and prefers to think of literature as “freedom.”
“We shouldn’t lock ourselves up in mental prisons,” he said.
(At one point during our conversation, Diop gently asked: “Don’t you think
these questions around race are being imported into countries where issues
weren’t being addressed in those terms?”)
Still, “At Night All Blood Is Black” alludes in no uncertain
terms to the racial dynamics at play in the trenches of World War I. African
soldiers from colonized countries were outfitted with machetes to inspire
greater fear. Alfa, Diop’s main character, picks up on the performance of
savagery that is expected of him, and he takes it to another level by venturing
out every night to murder a German soldier and bring back his severed hand.
Diop and Zeniter both drew from the work of historians to
fill in the blanks. “I read them the way an academic shouldn’t: without taking
notes. I wanted what had really made an impression on me to reemerge when I
started writing,” Diop said.
When it came to the Algerian War, Zeniter found “a colossal
amount of scholarship,” she said. “It makes it much easier to move forward
without being scared of making a huge mistake.”
Diop was also inspired by Wolof, the language he spoke
growing up in Senegal, to lend Alfa — who does not speak French in the novel —
a voice of his own. “I tried to mold French,” he said, “to make it sound a
little like Wolof when it’s spoken in formal circumstances, using rhythm and
repetition.”
He credited the 20th-century Ivorian novelist Ahmadou
Kourouma with bringing a uniquely African flavor to French — a form of
“reappropriation,” as Diop put it, in countries where French became the
official language under colonial rule.
Both Diop and Zeniter were overwhelmed by the reactions from
readers in France. When Diop did events for “At Night All Blood Is Black,”
which has sold 170,000 copies in the country, people would bring him “letters,
photos of their grandfather or great-grandfather with African infantrymen,” he
said. Zeniter received hundreds of letters from former soldiers, she said, who
confided in her about their experiences during the Algerian Independence War.
“It made me realize what a void there was in terms of
stories about that time. It’s clear that the ability to talk about it out loud
was smothered,” Zeniter said.
Read more
Lifestyle
.jpg)
.jpg)
