At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

The novel’s French title, Frère d’âme, is a phrase that means something like Spirit Brother or Brother of the Soul. Anna Moschovakis chose to name the translation after a line from Chapter 3, At Night All Blood Is Black. How do these differing titles shape different reader expectations before starting the book? How do they impact its themes?

Chapters 16 through 19 contain detailed recollections of Alfa and Mademba’s childhoods. What is the effect of Diop’s choice to situate these memories here, in the latter half of the novel, rather than earlier?

Does Diop undermine or support early 20th-century European stereotypes about Africans in At Night All Blood Is Black? Explain your answer.

African American writer and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk about double consciousness, a Black experience of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” How does Alfa experience this phenomenon? What impact does it have on him?

“Traduttore, traditore” is a famous Italian saying that means “the translator is a traitor.” How is translation depicted by Diop in At Night All Blood Is Black? Is the translator a traitor? Use text evidence to support your answer, and then step back and explain what implications Diop’s ideas about translation have for your experience of reading this French novel in an English translation.

Throughout his novel, Diop uses many phrases repeatedly. Choose one of these repeated phrases to trace. What does the repetition emphasize? Does the phrase change its meaning across its appearances?

The first moral dilemma that Diop presents in this narrative is whether Alfa should have ended Mademba’s suffering when it was evident he was fatally wounded. What are the arguments presented for and against this act? Where does the book ultimately come down on the question of mercy killing?

Wilfrid Owen’s 1920 poem, “Dulce et Decorum est,” is known for its ironic undermining of heroic battlefield deaths. How does Diop deploy irony? What does irony in Diop’s book call into question?