At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

Content Warning: The source material contains graphic depictions of rape and violence, including murder and torture.

Despite the all-male environment of the front lines, female genitalia is a frequent motif and allows for an early look at Alfa’s misogynistic tendencies, even in the absence of female characters upon whom to vent them. The trenches are repeatedly compared to female genitalia, beginning when Alfa carries Mademba’s body back and observes, “Seen from a distance, our trench looked to me like the slightly parted lips of an immense woman’s sex. A woman, open, offering herself to war, to the bombshells, and to us, the soldiers” (13). To Alfa, even thinking this thought is allowing himself to break with social and moral conventions and think something “unmentionable” (13). A vulva, even one constructed from dirt and only in the imagination, is “unmentionable.” Later, this motif allows the men’s emergence from the trenches to attack the enemy to be compared to birth into a cruel and dangerous world: “[T]he trench birthed me and I began to scream” or “I leap, shrieking, from the earth’s womb” (17, 19).

It’s not only trenches that have female bodies and promiscuous tendencies in At Night All Blood Is Black: rumors do, too.