Host
Ken Robinson
Podcast Content
As with so many of the best novels about combat action, like Joseph Hellers Catch-22 or the Czech novelist Jaroslav Haseks The Good Soldier Svejk, Diop punctuates tragedy with scathing irony. The novel begins on a battlefield, alongside narrator Alfas wounded best friend, Mademba Diop, whose gruesome death is described with factual precision. The insanity is either caused by, or precipitated by, the need Alfa Ndiaye has to witness the death, along with him, of Mademba Diop, his childhood friend, who is "my older brother," who is mutilated, who pleads with Ndiaye to murder Mademba Diop, his best friend. Alfa Ndiaye refused, and was later consumed with guilt, much like the guilt he felt about helping Diop to get in shape for a fight in the first place.
I can read that in his eyes, the same way that I can read that in the dark eyes of Mademba Diop, a desire I may ease his suffering. The enemys blue eyes on the other side burn off forever as soon as they see me reaching for my machete. They chuckle at me, thinking the enemy on the other side, who have been for a while, should have been really, really scared, envisioning that they have had their hands cut off. I thought, seeing me looking back at him, smiling, he was telling himself they had not lied to him, that with my teeth, white in night, moon or no moon, I would eat him alive, or worse.
Gods truth, had I become then what I am now, I would have butchered Mademba Diop as a sacrificed sheep, for the sake of a friendship. I offered him nothing but false thoughts, thoughts dictated by duty, thoughts tolerated out of a reverence for the laws of man, and they are not mans.
I am free now no more to listen, to no longer submit to a voice which commands that we should be non-human, if it should. It happened just that, suddenly, without warning, and hit me hard on the head, like the huge seeds of war falling from a metal sky, on the day that Mademba Diop died. I brought, in the aftermath of each fight, either into the black night, or into a moonlit, blood-soaked night, an enemy rifle, with the hands that went with it.
The boys were in love with the same girl, and the one who took a beautiful Alfa for his lover, on the last night before they left for France, was a squat Mademba.
Understanding their feelings, Mikuratana-no-Kami released them all and brought them back into the real world, where the other idol, Kanami Mashita, was getting ready to end the festival by performing his next song. Traumatized due to the suppressed memories, fellow idol Kanami Mashita is overcome by desperation and pulled to the Midnight Stage. The following day, while the rest of the Investigative Unit gathers in a dance studio, the mysterious voice attempts to pull fellow idol Kanami Mashita into the Midnight Stage, but ends up instead taking producer Kyoka Ochimizu.
Yu Narukami and the Persona of Yu Narukami, Rising Kujikawa, and Kanami engage in a dance battle together. Unable to use violence on Midnight Stage, the group discovered they could use song and dance to show their feelings to Shadow, releasing Shadow from the Voice Control.
After one night of lack of sleep, most feel an intense desire to return to normal sleep, often allowing them to recover previous sleeping patterns. Sleeping in for too long may make getting sleep difficult the next night, and can more severely disrupt sleep rhythms. An all-nighter is where you miss normal bedtime instead of staying up through the night.
Sleep is essential to proper body function, and skipping an entire nights worth of it could hurt your thoughts and cognitive abilities, your moods and emotions, and your physical wellbeing. In fact, however, staying up all night is detrimental to efficient thinking, mood, and physical well-being. Even people who get a few hours more sleep during the day before a full-nighter still display signs of cognitive deficiencies when staying awake all night.
In addition, sleeping less increases sensitivity to pain, which may cause acute pain or worsen chronic pain. The effects of a lack of sleep may also be personal, and research has pointed to the possibility that an individuals genetics might affect the severity of their effects from a sleep-deprived night. A sleepless night can diminish working memory, which is the temporary storage bank we use for short-term needs.
Readers enjoyment of At Night All Blood is Black is probably going to hinge on whether or not they buy into Shakespeares notion that, in a world of madness, mad people are the ones who are best equipped to diagnose--if not cure--our deeper malaises. By the time he won the International Booker Prize earlier this month, David Diops second novel, At Night All Blood Is Black , had already won awards in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States.