Ten million soldiers died fighting in World War I, many of them in the trenches. The large-scale slaughter permanently changed not only the way Europe governed and considered weaponry, but also how people made art. Mechanized brutality rendered former modes of expression like realism obsolete. The subsequent reckoning with industrialized warfare and voracious nationalism ushered in movements such as Dadaism, Futurism, and the canon of literary modernism, influencing writers in the Anglosphere from Virginia Woolf to T.S. Eliot.
The modernist canon that emerged from the trenches, however, largely excludes the approximately 2.3 million Africans who supported the French and British armies. (It also excludes hundreds of thousands of nonwhite soldiers and laborers from the colonized world, many of them Indian, as well as nearly 400,000 Black Americans.) In his treatise “La Force Noire,” French Gen. Charles Mangin spearheaded the effort to recruit from the colonies’ strategic “reservoir” of men, campaigning for Senegalese soldiers in particular to be sent to the front. Now, over a century later, the French Senegalese writer David Diop gives a long-overdue, high-modernist treatment to the experience of the West Africans who served and died in the trenches in his novel At Night All Blood Is Black. First published in France in 2018, the translation by Anna Moschovakis marks Diop’s English-language debut.
