At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

Alfa’s childhood memories in Chapters 14 through 19 take place in Senegal during its time as a French colony, placing At Night All Blood Is Black in the robust postcolonial literature canon. Though born in and presently residing in France, David Diop spent much of his childhood in Senegal and leverages his expertise as a scholar of colonial depictions of Africa and francophone African literature to render the setting, allowing the novel to explore the experience of Senegalese colonial subjects in the early 20th century.

Senegal is a coastal West African nation named for the Senegal River. It is predominately Muslim, and the overwhelming majority of its ethnically and linguistically diverse residents speak Wolof as a first or second language. Alfa has a typical linguistic experience, then, in that he speaks both Wolof and Fulani in childhood but not French, despite his later service in the French army.

Portuguese and French traders, including slave traders, were present in the region from the 1400s and 1600s respectively. The French established a trading station on the island city of Saint-Louis in 1659, which the characters in At Night All Blood Is Black later dream of moving to. Saint-Louis later became the capital of the French West Africa colonies when the French began to conquer inland territory in the 1850s. In 1848, French law made Saint-Louis one of four cities (the Quatre Communes) in the colony in which African colonial subjects were granted full French citizenship, at least nominally. The capital of French West Africa was moved to Dakar in 1902, but Saint-Louis remained the capital of Senegal and the point of departure for valuable shipments of gum and peanuts to Europe. Alfa and Mademba dream of attaining French citizenship rights and moving to Saint-Louis to work as wholesalers after the war. This would have put them in the thick of the vibrant life of a capital city and port and made them part of the colonial import/export trade.