At night all Blood is Black, David Diop

Honestly I did not understand why this book won the booker prize in 2021. The story was fascinating in terms of themes of "otherness" and the upbringing in West Africa, Senegal I suppose but then the events of the severed arms did not make sense to me, I guess there was some hidden symbolism in it that made this book an award winner but it was not a homerun for me. The story is about two boys who are more than friends, they are almost brothers, they grow up and go to fight in the first world war together on the side of France, their colonizer and then one of them dies, shook by his friends death the other starts to sever the arms of enemy soldiers by cutting them off and hiding them as the other soldiers ostracize him and start to think that he is a "djinn" like a demon spirit of a kind. The surviving main character relates his life story but is not really a guy one has sympathy for, there's a strong streak of cultural Senegalese ingredients to the story. I criticize the way African literature has been idolized in a fake manner over the last ten years or more, I don't criticize the authors, most of them are great. Obiomas Fishermen and Gyasis Homegoing are two of my favorite novels (also West African both of them) but I criticize the white high brow culture lifting up works such as this shorter novel by Diop as something so amazing that they award it the booker prize, much like Margaret Atwood winning the Booker Prize in 2019 for The Testaments, honestly it was a shit of a book like trying to push out a baby only discovering not having been pregnant at all and just passing wind, that was what The Testaments was like. The problem wasn't really a case of poor judgement but the hypocrisy in rewarding Atwood so late, she'd been writing excellent novels since 1969 and the reason that they (the big boy's and girls with the money, chose to acknowledge her when HBO Handmaids Tale made a success was that now her critical voice had become relevant albeit there had been TV productions of the book before) my subtle guess is that "it was just her time" just like a multitude of African writers especially women in the chick-lit department have recently had their time to shine. Who is it that decides who's time it is to shine? What make's a classic is that there is a sustainable voice that carries through generations and translates beyond time, for instance as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Diop's story was not that bad but definitely not equivalent to deserving the Booker prize, so the enigma around why he won it fascinates me actually more than the book itself. 

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