Following closely on The Shadow King in my reading programme, this is another novel about war and colonialism. But it's the First World War this time, and the colonial subjects are some of the 180,000 "Senegalese riflemen" who fought for the French in various theatres of war. They were not actually all Senegalese, but came from various parts of West Africa. At least 30,000 of them died.

Soul Brother is by David Diop, an academic as well as a novelist, born in Paris but raised in Senegal, father Senegalese, mother French.

Published in 2018, its original title is Frere d'Ame. (An English version came out in 2020, under the title "At Night All Blood Is Black". That's a direct quote from the book, but conveys so much less of the book's meaning than the original. Nevertheless, this English version made Diop, in 2021, the first French writer to receive the International Booker Prize.)

A mass of useful background information on the book can be found here. (I just LOVE these French "dossiers pedagogiques"...) Particularly interesting are the sections that detail the historical and linguistic context.

A propos of the latter, did you know that the French, faced with the need to create a common language among African soldiers who didn't necessarily speak the language of the empire or share a mother tongue, deliberately taught a bastardized version of French, which was deemed to be "easier"? So, for instance, rather than a verb conjugation (je pars, tu pars, etc), the soldiers were taught to use infinitives (moi partir, toi partir, etc). You can read more examples here. Did other colonial administrations practise this infantilizing policy? I don't know.


The Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, March 2018. I was moved to see these West African artefacts there, so many years after living in Cote d'Ivoire. There's always the fear that I'm using them inappropriately in a post like this, but my intention is to allude to their spiritual and cultural power

Anyway, I suspect I'm stalling because Soul Brother is a really difficult book to talk about. It's powerful. It's moving. And it's shockingly graphic in parts. Unlike The Shadow King, which I found overly complicated, this is disarmingly simple, at least on the surface. The first-person narrator, Alfa Ndiaye, employs a Wolof-influenced, almost incantatory style, with frequently repeated phrases ("by God's truth...", "I know, I have understood..."). Diop uses this unadorned prose, however, to build up layers of meaning. When you reach the end, you feel you want to go back to the beginning. (The ending is enigmatic, and merits a discussion, so even more than usual, caveat lector if you've not read the book already.)

Alfa, as well as suffering the general horrors of trench warfare, has faced a particularly heart-wrenching personal tragedy. He has literally watched his best friend, his "more-than-brother" Mademba Diop, die in horrible agony on the battlefield. It was slow and excruciating. Alfa's descriptions keep returning to those spilled innards ("the inside outside"), as though he can't tear his mind from them, and he cannot forget that Mademba asked him three times to finish him off, but he refused, out of a sense of duty.

He now bitterly regrets that failure. Once Mademba was dead, "as soon as the silence settled on the battlefield, now bathed in blood, I began to think"; and this newly acquired ability to think changes everything: "If I had been then what I have become today, I would have killed him the first time he asked, his head turned towards me, his left hand in my right hand. By God's truth, if I had already become what I now am, I would have cut his throat like the throat of a sacrifical lamb, out of friendship. But I thought of my old father, of my mother, of the internal voice that gives us orders, and I did not know how to cut the barbed wire of his suffering. I didn't behave like a human towards Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend. I let duty dictate my choice..."

The crisis in his thought processes triggered by the horror of witnessing Mademba's long-drawn-out death, and the guilt he feels for not curtailing his friend's pain, give him an ability to see through the horrible hypocrisy of war.

Alfa deems his comrades stupid because they don't think about anything. Whether they're black or white, soldiers always say yes, he says. The black soldiers are ordered to play the savage in order to frighten the enemy, who are, they are told, "afraid of savage negroes, cannibals, and Zulus". The commanding officer plays on their family rivalries to spur them on to reckless feats of bravery, a rifle in one hand and a machete in the other. (Diop explains in an interview that France provided a machete as part of the African troops’ accoutrements. They were the only soldiers to be kitted out with that particular weapon, and the aim was to scare the enemy by playing on the image of a savage black soldier.)

"Nobody knows what I think," says Alfa, "I am free to think what I want. What I think is that they don't want me to think. The unthinkable is what is hidden behind the words of the captain. The captain's France needs us to play the savage when it's convenient. It needs us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes."

As though to call out this prejudice, as though to cut through all the crap we talk about international humanitarian law and the rules of war, Alfa starts on a macabre hand-hunting venture: "When I leave the belly of the earth, I am inhuman by choice; I become just a little bit inhuman. Not because the captain has ordered me to, but because I have thought of it and willed it. When I burst screaming from the womb of the earth, I don't intend to kill lots of enemies opposite me, but to kill one, in my way, quietly, calmly, slowly."

He entraps his victims, eviscerates them, and then -- if they have not died already -- slits their throats. Then he takes their rifle, cuts off the right hand that holds it, and returns with these trophies to the trench.

It's cruel and vicious and twisted. Is he doing it out of vengeance for Mademba? Or is he doing it because the innate brutality of a serial killer has been released by his trauma? Or are these bloody acts more akin to a sacrifice, with the enemy soldier as "the expiatory victim who allows the narrator to replay, obsessively relive, the opening scene of the death of Mademba, while also rewriting its ending" (because he quickly dispatches his victims after spilling their guts).

We're left to figure that out. And it's disconcerting.

Alfa is fighting a war. He's supposed to kill people. And those he kills more conventionally may well suffer just as much, if not more. He's probably killing fewer by doing it this way... Yet we are revolted and disgusted by this personalization of war, because it's supposed to be impersonal...



By the time he's on his fourth hand, his comrades have started to fear him. At first (seeing only the trophies, and ignorant of his modus operandi), they're congratulatory. But then they start to see him as strange... Rumours take off, and the strange person becomes the mad person, and then the mad person becomes the sorcerer. He comes to be seen as a sorcerer soldier, a devourer of people's insides, a "demm".

Madness is everywhere on the battlefield, of course. You have to be mad to obey the signal to attack, Alfa points out, when you know you have so little chance of returning alive. "Temporary madness allows you to forget the truth of the bullets. Temporary madness is the sister of courage in war. But when you give the impression of being mad all the time, continually, without stopping, then you frighten people, even your comrades. Then you begin to be seen no longer as brother courage, fooling death, but as the true friend of death, its accomplice, it's more-than-brother."

His comrades start to avoid him. They have come to believe that what they need to fear is not the war but the evil eye: "Chance is too absurd. They want to identify someone who is responsible; they prefer to think that the enemy bullet that hits them is steered and guided by someone evil, bad, and ill-intentioned. They believe that this evil, bad, and ill-intentioned person is me."

Alfa's apparent invulnerability stokes this myth. He becomes taboo, like a totem.

Ah yes, totems... The Diop totem animal is a peacock; the Ndiaye equivalent is a lion. A codified and socially sanctioned joking relationship is a traditional part of the bonds between certain clans and families in West and Central Africa. So Alfa routinely makes fun of Mademba's totem.

But he talked to Mademba about his "poultry" totem on the morning of his death. And now he thinks that's why Mademba was at the head of the charge, trying to show that he wasn't a peacock, but was courageous. "It's because of me that he went out first. It's because of totems, our joking relationship, and me, that Mademba Diop had his stomach slit open that day by a half-dead enemy with blue eyes."

So now he has two sources of guilt: not only did he not put Mademba out of the misery that Alfa was condemned to witness, but also he taunted Mademba, with the result that he was trying to prove something. The little voice in Alfa's head tells him that the two are connected: He wasn't able to dispatch Mademba because he had already killed him by his mockery. "'Wait a while,' the little voice in my head was to whisper, 'soon you will understand that you were the blue-eyed enemy of Mademba Diop. You killed him by your words. You eviscerated him by your words. You devoured the inside of his body by your words.'"

At some point between the fifth and sixth hands (this is the way Alfa measures time now), there is a mutiny among the white soldiers. The seven who persist in their refusal to obey have their hands tied, and are given the choice to either climb out of the trench, where they face certain death (but retain a pension for their families), or be shot by their comrades (and have their families informed of their dishonourable death). The cynical cruelty of this procedure sits alongside Alfa's off-the-rails violence in a continuously unfolding tableau of horror.

The seventh severed hand brings things to a head. The captain doesn't want Alfa on the battlefield any longer, an attitude the soldier interprets like this: "As soon as the attack is finished, you have to put your rage, your pain, and your fury away. Pain is tolerated. You can bring it back so long as you keep it to yourself. But rage and fury are not to be brought back to the trench. Before returning there, you have to take off your rage and your fury, get rid of them. Otherwise you're no longer playing the game of war. Madness, after the captain's whistle has signalled retreat, is taboo... You can't rejoice long over the fear of the enemy opposite because you're fearful yourself. Severed hands -- that's fear that passes from outside to the inside of the trench."

From the perspective of the clairvoyance that struck him after Mademba's death -- "like a big seed of war from the metallic sky" -- he recognizes: "By God's truth, everything carries within itself its opposite. Until the third hand, I was a war hero. Since the fourth I have become a dangerous madman, a bloody savage. By God's truth, this is the way things go, this is the way the world goes: everything is double."

Doubling will become an increasingly important theme.



So Alfa is sent to the rear to rest. Captain Armand tells him: "Your way of making war is a bit too savage... You have to promise that when you return you will no longer mutilate enemies, agreed? You have to be content with killing them, not with mutilating them. Civilized war forbids that."

Behind the lines, Alfa meets Dr Francois, who tries to help him deal with his trauma. And he meets Mlle Francois, the doctor's daughter. This section fills in the history of the soul brothers, returning to the time they were still in their village.

We learn more about the relationship between Alfa and Mademba, and the disparities that now gnaw away at the survivor: "Mademba's eyes ... told me: 'I'm jealous of you, but I love you as well.' His eyes told me: 'I would like to be you, but I'm proud of you.' Like everything in this world, Mademba's gaze towards me was double... I know, I have understood that all my beauty and all my strength killed Mademba, my more-than-brother, who loved me and envied me at the same time. It is the beauty and the strength of my body that killed him." People in their home village apparently tried to separate the boys, alleging that Alfa was eating Mademba's strength little by little.

We also learn that Alfa's mother disappeared when he was nine. She went to look for her nomadic Peul family, and never returned. No-one really knows what befell her. It is surmised that she was kidnapped, perhaps by the Moors of the north, and sold as a slave.

Alfa joined Mademba's family after his mother's departure. While Mademba is keen to learn, and goes to a French school, Alfa feels as though the memory of his mother has grown over his mind like the shell of a turtle, stopping him taking anything in. "It was only when Mademba died that my mind opened to let me see what was hidden in there. You could say that, at Mademba's death, a big metallic seed of war fell from the sky and split the shell in two. By God's truth, a new suffering joined an old suffering. The two contemplated each other, the two explained each other, the two explained themselves to each other, the two gave each other meaning."

We learn that it was Mademba who wanted to sign up, seeing the war as a way of getting out of the village. He is rejected by the recruiters the first time, but Alfa trains him up so that he's accepted next time round -- another bit of guilt to add to the mosaic.

We learn of Alfa's relationship with Fary Thiam, which goes against ancestral custom (they're the same year group) and family rivalry (the two fathers do not see eye to eye). But its physicality makes Alfa "a complete man", as opposed to "poor, incomplete Mademba".

Dr Francois asks the patients to draw: "Our drawings are there to help him wash our minds of the filth of war." Alfa's first drawing is of his mother; his second of Mademba. But his third is of the seven hands... He has already got rid of them, and there's a revealing passage that indicates he might be recovering: "Dr Francois had begun to clean the inside of my head of the filth of war. My seven hands, they were fury, revenge, the madness of war. I didn't want to see the fury and madness of war anymore, just as my captain couldn't bear to see my seven hands in the trench anymore." So he buries them. He thinks he might have been seen while undertaking this action, and waits a few days to see if anyone denounces him. But no-one does. "So, to wash the inside of my head with great buckets of mystical water, I drew my seven hands. I had to show them to Dr Francois to get them to leave the inside of my head."

He soon realizes, however, that the witnessed burial and the drawing constitute a fateful step: "My seven hands have spoken. They have admitted everything to my judges. By God's truth, I know, I have understood that my drawing denounced me. Dr Francois, after seeing them, didn't smile at me any more as he had done before."

The ending, as I said, is enigmatic, and the final few chapters are distinctly strange. But this sentence is the turning-point, in my opinion.

Alfa, despite having suffered a particularly violent kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of a particularly horrific experience -- which comes on top of the previous horrific experience of losing his mother, and which is compounded by terrible guilt feelings with regard to Mademba (he trained him for this war, he mocked him, he is physically stronger, and he didn't finish him off when he was asked to) -- has been doing well. Everything has pointed to that. But then he finds himself rejected by the doctor whose good will he had valued.



In the final few chapters, the person of the narrator keeps switching back and forth, between Alfa and someone who seems to be Mademba. There is a description of a sexual encounter with Mlle Francois, but it's a rape, and almost certainly a murder (it's not spelled out, but it doesn't sound good).

By the end Alfa seems to have lost any firm grip on his identity, and seems to think he can atone to Mademba by letting him inhabit and feel through his own strong body.

The idea of doubling persists. He is asked who he is. A devouring shadow, he says, but also a gentle evening breeze; the prisoner and his guard; the father and the son; the night and the day; the innocent and the guilty: "Je suis double." Unable to render all this, the translator sums up: "He said that he was death and life at the same time."

The book ends with a story. It is peopled by a vain king, his capricious daughter, a sorcerer-lion-prince, and a hunter who kills the lion, and gets to marry the princess. Not everyone is a fan of this final chapter, and I'm not entirely convinced myself. Nevertheless, it is the voice of Mademba-in-Alfa that sounds the final clarificatory note: "But now, I know, I have understood that Alfa gave me a place in his wrestler's body out of friendship, out of compassion. I know, I have understood that Alfa heard the first plea I made from the depths of no man's land on the evening of my death. Because I didn't want to remain alone in the middle of nowhere under a land without a name. By God's truth, I swear to you that the moment I think of us, now he is I and I am he."

So, for me, the final chapters indicate that deep pain, moral and mental disorientation, the longing for forgiveness, and the sting of rejection have combined to result in a terminally split identity.

(I'm much less convinced by a second possible explanation of the ambivalent ending -- which is that Alfa and Mademba have always been one and the same person.)

For a while, says Roussel, Diop "read everything about the Great War. He noted in particular that a boat called the Flandre left the south of France with surviving Senegalese infantrymen, often crippled, including 99 madmen, who were landed in Dakar, and then returned to their villages. 'The figure of these African soldiers who had lost their minds often comes up in West African literature,' says David Diop."

(How many people who survived actually didn't survive entire? Remember I wondered about my grandfather... For certain, if there's any kind of flaw in your character, warfare is going to crack it further open.)

What seems absolutely incontrovertible, however, is that Alfa will soon be dead. The book begins: "I know, I have understood, I shouldn't have..." Back then, we rapidly come to understand that he means he shouldn't have let his friend suffer. But by the end of the book we're pretty sure that the sex-war conflation of language in the encounter with the nurse points to something else he shouldn't have done, which goes way beyond the possibly ambiguous morality of the battlefield.

Daly comments: "Diop’s book is morally inscrutable, and as a meditation on war, race, and colonialism, it cuts like a dull knife... [He] gives us no landmarks to orient ourselves in the no-man’s-land where he sets his story -- a brave decision at a time when many readers demand moral clarity from stories about the past... Any attempt to divvy up its characters into heroes and villains is bound to fail." All true. As Daly says, the severed hands recall colonial barbarities in the Congo Free State; but Alfa's actions also encapsulate "the very things that Europeans evoked to tar the honor of African soldiers".

But there's one moral thread that's very clear, I think: War is utterly evil.