This is a book club episode. In it, Travis and Amanda will discuss and analyze the first half of At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop. You should expect full “spoilers,” discussions of rhetorical elements, and celebrations / critiques of style and substance.
From the cover: “Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called ‘Chocolat’ soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice…Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.”