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Chapter 16
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in At Night All Blood Is Black, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Binaries
Social Norms vs. Independent Thought
Colonialism and Race
Friendship and Enmity
Inhumanity
Summary
Analysis
At the Rear, the narrator also draws Mademba, whom he judges externally unattractive (in part due to their long history of friendly mockery) but internally beautiful. In a flashback, after Penndo’s disappearance, Mademba asks his mother to act as the narrator’s mother too. And indeed, Mademba’s mother adopts the narrator and lets him live with Mademba’s family, a situation the narrator’s father accepts. When they turn 15, they are circumcised and initiated into manhood by a village elder who teaches them that no external occurrence is unique—but every internal, subjective experience is. To orient themselves in this subjective uniqueness, the boys need to obey social conventions.
This passage further emphasizes the deep friendship and history between the narrator and Mademba, revealing that Mademba wanted to adopt the narrator as a brother after the narrator lost his mother under traumatic circumstances. At the same time, the narrator’s memories of the village elder reveal how he was taught to think about social norms before Mademba’s death: norms and conventions give structure to subjective individual experiences, which can otherwise be disorienting. The village elder’s claims may shed light on the narrator’s disorientation, confusion, and difficulty interpreting reality in the aftermath of his rejection of all social norms.
Active
Themes
To avoid thoughts of Penndo, the narrator exhausts himself with athletics and physical labor. Mademba, by contrast, focuses on learning. After he memorizes the Koran, he enters the “white school.” It is only after Mademba dies that the narrator realizes he himself couldn’t learn because the loss of Penndo had filled his brain. Once he’d lost Mademba too, he could think about both losses together.
This passage implies that the narrator and Mademba, though close friends, also defined themselves in opposition to each other: the narrator was the “athletic one,” and Mademba was the “smart one.” (Due to France’s colonization of Senegal, Mademba’s pursuit of additional secular education after he had completed the Islamic religious education available to him in the village meant attending a “white school.”) Just as Mademba’s death allowed the narrator to see his relationship with Fary in a new light—the narrator realizes he defied social norms to pursue her sexually, though his full defiance didn’t come until Mademba’s death—so the trauma of Mademba’s loss helps him realize how affected he was by the loss of his mother earlier in life.
Active
Themes
At age 20, Mademba hatches a plan: he and the narrator will fight for France (which the White school has taught Mademba to consider “the motherland”) and thereby earn French citizenship. After the war, they’ll take their new status to Saint-Louis, become food merchants, and use their profits to find Penndo. Though the narrator endorses the plan, he secretly considers bringing his military training and weapons (rather than merchant profits) when he goes to find the Moors after the war.
At first, the army won’t take Mademba because he doesn’t look strong enough. Mademba asks the narrator to make him stronger, so the narrator oversees a two-month training regimen for Mademba: running, swimming, laboring on his family’s farm, and eating copiously. Once Mademba is strong and fat, the army accepts him.
Active
Themes
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