Reading David Diop
David Diop 2019
"AT NIGHT OUR BLOOD IS BLACK"
Reading and discussion with the Franco-Senegalese author DAVID DIOP
September 17, 2019, 7:30 pm
Institute français, Kreuzstraße 6, 01067 Dresden
Reading and discussion in German and French with translation.
"Nachts ist unser Blut schwarz", David Diop's second novel ("Frère d'âme", Seuil, German translation by Andreas Jandl, published by Aufbau Verlag in 2019) was celebrated as a literary sensation in France and quickly became a press and public favorite. David Diop received the prestigious Prix Goncourt des lycéens 2018, among other awards.
It tells the story of Alfa Ndiaye, a "chocolate soldier" as his comrades call him, who fights alongside the French against the Germans in the First World War. When Mademba Diop, Alfa's beloved childhood friend and "soul brother", bleeds to death in his arms, he is gripped by grief and rage to the point of unconsciousness and terrifies his comrades with his violent outbursts. When he is withdrawn from the front, his thoughts take him back to his African past.
David Diop questions humanity in inhuman times and shifts the horror of war to the depths of his inner self. Alfa Ndiaye's voice beguiles and disturbs. "This powerful, hypnotic text carries us away like a tornado," wrote the newspaper L'Humanité.
David Diop, born in Paris in 1966 and raised in Senegal, now teaches French-language African literature at the University of Pau.
Event organized in cooperation with the Institute français Sachsen, the literary prize "Hommage à la France" of the Brigitte Schubert-Oustry Foundation and the Centre France | Francophonie at the TU Dresden, with the kind support of the Dresden Municipal Libraries. Supported by the Bureau du livre of the French Embassy in Germany and the Landesamt für Kultur und Denkmalschutz der Landeshauptstadt Dresden.
