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

“I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have done it. I, Alfa Ndiaye, son of the old, old man, I understand, I shouldn’t have.”

In the novel’s opening lines, Alfa Ndiaye confesses to a shameful crime. The repetition of “I understand” and “I shouldn’t have” emphasizes Ndiaye’s regret and torment. His refusal to specify what “it” is that he has done sets the crime up as a mystery to be unraveled.

“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.”

Alfa Ndiaye’s simile comparing the trench to a woman’s vulva symbolizes his new, unchaste freethinking following Mademba’s death. He rejects the propriety of strict social laws and sees himself making sexual conquest of the Earth by entering the trench. This language also reveals a misogynist strain in Alfa’s character, as he reduces women to their genitalia and associates female genitalia and sexual willingness with the wrongness of war.

“The captain’s France needs for us to play the savage when it suits them. They need for us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes.”

Alfa Ndiaye unmasks the racist nature of French colonial expectations for the Senegalese soldiers and provides an additional layer of complexity by showing how the soldiers are asked to be complicit in a performance of their stereotyping as “brutal savages.”