Why did I get this book?
A colleague at another college generously offered to convene a book club focused on recent African novels and I signed up. This is our first book, to be discussed next week.
Is it what I thought it was?
I didn’t have strong preconceptions about it, other than knowing that it was by a Francophone author and it was focused on the experiences of West African soldiers stationed in Western Europe during World War I and that it was highly acclaimed. It’s all that, so yes.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I often assign novels in my African history courses. Over the years, I’ve fretted more about doing so in the sense that this tends to treat fiction in a reductive way, as illustrative or documentary of a history and not as a work of fiction that requires attention for what it is. But at the same time, novels and films deliver unmistakeably powerful outcomes in history (and anthropology) courses—films make what students are studying vivid and materially tangible; novels provide a way to talk about interiority, consciousness and experience that historical scholarship simply can’t.
So I might use this in a course. It poses some important challenges if it’s used to talk about the experience of the tiralleurs senegalais, the West African soldiers—I’d absolutely have to also use some of the (extremely strong) historical scholarship available in tandem. The novel’s extended ironic redeployments of stereotypes and its attempts to psychologically re-locate and dis-locate the battlefield traumas of World War I into and through West Africa might really throw some students if there wasn’t a lot of contextual work done alongside.
Quotes
“The rumor spread. It spread and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air.”
“Don’t tell me that we don’t need madness on the battlefield. God’s truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being made, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the otherside. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid.”
“Humans are always finding absurd explanations for things. I know this, I understand it, now that I’m able to think what I want. My brothers in combat, white or black, need to believe that it isn’t the war that will kill them, but the evil eye. They need to believe that it won’t be one of the thousands of bullets fired by the enemy from the other side that will randomly kill them. They don’t like randomness. Randomness is too absurd.”
“Here, there isn’t any real sun. There’s only a cold sun that doesn’t dry anything. Mud remains mud. Blood never dries. Our uniforms only dry by the fire. That’s why we make fires. Not only to try to warm ourselves. Mostly to dry ourselves.”
“I know, I understand that Captain Armaud would do whatever possible to continue to make love to war. I understand that he saw me as a dangerous rival who could spoil his whole love affair with war.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The most interesting and successful part of the novel for me was the always unsettling but to me at least sometimes darkly and disturbingly funny reworkings of European stereotypes about African combatants. The entire novel takes place in the mind of the protagonist, who insists that the trauma of seeing his closest friend from home killed on the battlefield has set him free to think and do whatever he wants, beyond any law. Much of what follows can be read as the unravelling of his interior self, as suffering and delusion. But what kept striking me is that Diop has the protagonist re-enacting the racial mythology that the French tried to use against their enemies in the fighting in Europe—that their colonial troops were savages who would mutilate the bodies of enemies, eat human flesh and rape white women. In reality, the West African troops fought much like the French did when stationed on the horrific battlegrounds of World War I, and with far less pre-existing reason to do so. What I saw as disturbingly funny is the mimicry that the novel is working with, that the protagonist in his own mind (we’re never sure how much is literally happening) begins to cut off hands, practice sorcery, eat flesh—terrifying and exciting his fellow soldiers. (And in reality also, taking body parts from enemies was very much something that Europeans did to one another in war as well as to non-Western forces that resisted their colonial conquests.)
I’m anxious about how the conversation next week is going to go in terms of gender. There’s some highly gendered images throughout (like the first quote above) but in the second half of the novel, the protagonist begins to remember home more and more and remembers his first sexual experience. At first, it seems like a simple memory set alongside his other reminiscences—a classic trope in wartime fiction and memoirs, the homefront, the family, the sweetheart left behind as an escape from the trauma of war but also as an intensifier of the soldier’s suffering, only in this case it also frames the differences between what the tiralleurs sengalais lived prior to ending up in a European war and the lives of French soldiers.
As he goes over the ground of his first sexual experience again and again, I began to fear that something worse was being remembered—the protagonist keeps remembering that he could just tell that a woman his age in his community wanted him, despite never having said so, despite their families being rivalrous, and the descriptive language becomes more and more violent and disturbing. When the protagonist not long after finds himself in a hospital and imagines that a young white woman is looking at him with the same desire, that unfolds onto an interior narration of what seems like a rape. At least for me, the way gender and sexuality move through the book is in many ways more distressing and unsettling than way the violence of war is envisioned.
It’s a very dream-like work, with a feeling of echoing repetition. It has a sense of being trapped inside a mind that is either suffering from the specific trauma of war or more grandly from being trapped inside the suffocating fantasies of another place, another history, a doubly lethal kind of anti-blackness.
One odd thought that I had when I finished is that it might make an amazing reading alongside Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel.