Savagery, Epistemic Disobedience and Disabled Memory in At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

This chapter offers an analysis of At Night All Blood Is Black, originally published in 2018 by David Diop as Frère d’âme. Relying on Western conceptions of war trauma, the chapter first approaches the portrait of the central protagonist, a tirailleur sénégalais, as a generic reflection on the debilitating violence of the First World War. Second, it situates the protagonist’s deeds in a decolonial perspective as acts of epistemic disobedience which denounce the pretended universality of Western knowledge. Furthermore, Branach-Kallas argues that Diop uses excess and ambivalence as strategies that serve to challenge colonial stereotypes of savagery and the alleged superiority of European, and specifically French, culture. By exploring the numerous facets of the figure of the dëmm, borrowed from Senegalese culture, the author proposes a decolonial interpretation of trauma in Diop’s novel. The chapter closes with an analysis of Diop’s idiosyncratic poetics and its function in constructing a “disabled” memory of colonialism in France.