by Anna Badkhen
* * *
Watch the sea.
Arms by their sides, arms folded, hands in pockets, they watch. The tide is coming in. The Sakhari Souaré casts net again at two-thirty-two, three-thirty, four-oh-eight. She hauls snakelike halfbeak, Spanish mackerel with razorlike gills, a phallic mangrove fruit. Catfish, seaweed, more shad, nothing. The horizon glows golden, a thin unreal slash across the storms. Thunder; younger boys duck their heads in reflex. A pelican flaps with determination westward. Vieux tears off a piece of mackerel fish tail, sticks it in his ear, twirls, removes some earwax, then scampers over to port and relieves himself into the pirogue’s bubbly wake.
The tide turns again. A thick gray column of rain stands over Joal. The sea is the same faded green as the net, and the crew are barely awake, sprawled or hunched all over the boat. Time to go back. At the bow Maguette the elder washes his face and arms and feet with seawater, sits down sideways on the forward thwart facing tentatively toward Mecca, and prays.
With a dramatic sigh Ousmane falls backward into the wet net, shuts his eyes. But Ndongo rouses him—what a lazy-ass kid!—calls him over to the stern, explains how to steer to harbor. Past the shipwreck at two-thirds of a throttle. Past two sea turtles and a large pelican pod—a hundred or more in flight, a few dozen in a baobab tree, pale pink in the queer light of a stormed-over afternoon. Past the Seven Baobabs, a salt flat just north of Palmarin where five centenarian baobabs grow in a circle, sheltering more pelicans; no one seems to recall when there were seven. A rainbow now arcs above the spot. Careful after the baobabs, the tide’s going out, don’t get stuck on the shoals.
Ndongo retrieves a cellphone from the mayonnaise bucket and calls a shrimper.
Hey, man, it’s Ndongo. Hey, you going out tonight? Good, my mother wants thirty kilos of shrimp. Thanks, man. God bless.
The Sakhari Souaré chugs northward with five boxes of fish onboard: double the catch of the day before, double the pay for the crew.
Ndongo says to me:
In Senegal, when you go to sea with someone new and get a lot of fish, we say that person is good luck. You’re good luck!
The horizon is a black line, drawn with kohl. The world may end there. The world is ending. Two pirogues crawl along that line. Under their prehistoric keels, our sustenance, our inchoate first memories, our last hopes. Aboard their mahogany hulls, fishermen. Tightrope artists. Desperados. Dreamers.
Two
High tide heaves over thick rollers of seaweed, reaches for the refuse that Joal’s housewives dump daily at the wrack in an uneven putrid line. Onion peels, fish bones, lamb bones, plastic bags, rain-soaked baby diapers, yesterday’s rice. Wrackline, tideline, the line of domesticity. Streams of effluent streak black into charcoal surf. Ringed plovers pick through the trash on the brim of the gray sea, invisible in the gray-brown light of predawn but for an emerging sense of movement, a kind of limbic rapidity that is ungraspable the way a dream the moment you wake up is ungraspable, just out of reach.
* * *
Ndongo squats by the lip of the sea. With the heel of his right palm he clears of garbage a narrow window of wet sand. There, with a forefinger, he writes seven times, left to right, the Arabic letter waw, the initial letter of one of the ninety-nine names of God, Wahabou: the Bestower, the Grantor of Bounties without measure, the conferrer of wishes. Ndongo calls it the Prayer of Seven Waws. It is the fishermen’s go-to spell. Thousands of pirogue captains scribble it in the sand and write it in the air daily before hauling anchor. They paint it inside the hulls of thousands of pirogues whose crews go to sea along the West African seaboard, go to sea wanting.
Wanting. A habit born during the Cambrian explosion, when the Earth’s oceans, advancing over her young continents and withdrawing again enriched by mineral plunder, brought forth the first animals, creatures that could move independently and of their own volition and that needed to eat other organisms to survive. Some of these animals would become fish; much later, hominids. They wanted food. An urge half a billion years old. All of us have it. To satisfy it, some of us still return to the sea.
Ndongo traces the waws in the tideline to count them, then gathers the wet sand into his right hand. Blows on it, closes his fist over it. Holds the fist high as he wades out to the Sakhari Souaré through swash of fishrot and torn plastic bags and foil cookie wrappers, climbs aboard astern, and hops so very lightly from thwart to thwart to the net hold. He lets the sand fall into the billowing green nest. This will ensure that the pirogue’s motor won’t break, that she will return to port safely, and that even if she does not catch a lot of fish at least her crew will not go hungry.
Amadou Souaré, Ndongo’s father, says that a better spell than the Prayer of Seven Waws is this one:
You draw in the sand a pentagonal star. Look, I’m showing you. You say a prayer for each of the triangles—here, and here, and here, and here, and here—and then you say a prayer for the center—here—and then you take a little bit of sand from each part, and then you blow on it, and then you take it aboard the boat with you. It’s the same prayer that the Prophet Muhammad said, and that the Wolof, and Serer, and Bambara, and white people say. It goes: “There is no God but God and I pray to God and I pray to the Prophet. If there are a lot of fish, we will share it. If there are no fish, I will still get my part. Let me not return with an empty boat.” This way you get God’s blessing for your trip. You have to have God’s blessing for everything.
For example. Many years ago there was a prophet named Younis. He went to sea without God’s blessing. But there were too many men in the boat and they drew a lottery, and Younis pulled out the ticket that said he had to go overboard. So he went overboard and a giant fish, a whale, swallowed him.
Because he traveled without God’s blessing.
Correct. In the belly of the fish Younis realized his mistake and he said, La illaha illa Allah, and the fish came close to shore and opened its mouth and vomited him out.
That’s why we must do everything with the blessing of God.
Amen.
Ndongo whispers a different prayer to evict Kuus Kondrong, a small-time genie, a hunchbacked dwarf who sleeps in berthed pirogues. Kuus Kondrong must leave the boat before she sets out. If he remains onboard he might make mischief. He might make the boat capsize for no reason. He might make you drop your cellphone in the water. But if you touch his hump you will immediately become a billionaire.
* * *
Once I watched from a distance as a fishing crew set out from a thicket of mangroves and Sodom’s apples at Joal’s southernmost point, where mudcrabs burrow in the boggy sand that uncovers only at low tide. Five men and two women had gathered by a beached pirogue. Then four of the men climbed aboard and the fifth pushed them off and walked away with the women. By the time I reached the launch site everyone had gone. In the pockmarked sand, a pentagonal star pointed toward the water. Thrusting out of the pentagram’s heart, almost as tall as me, black and curving slightly, was a zebu horn.
* * *
They say Serer farmers settled Joal a thousand years ago. A West African people whose polytheistic pantheon dated back to the Neolithic, they may have been fleeing south from the Almoravid Berber jihad that would impose fundamentalist Islam from Spain to Ghana. They were not mariners, though they occasionally waded into the silty tidal pools to clam among the mangroves.
Change arrived by sea, as it often does. In the fifteenth century Portuguese missionaries and slave traders disembarked near Joal. A trading post for gum and slaves opened and shut and opened again. A Portuguese Catholic mission gave way to a Portuguese synagogue, then to a French Catholic mission. Sufi Islam, its mysticism harmonious with Serer pre-Islamic practices, finally took root—first the conservative Qadri, founded in twelfth-century Baghdad by the Persian Cheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani; then Tijaan, whose adherents believe that honorable intentions and good deeds and regular recitations of liturgy lead to God;
and later Mouride, which espouses the sanctity of hard work; and Layenne, practiced almost exclusively by Lebou fishermen; today most Senegalese are Sufi Muslims, though in Joal several hundred people still go to Mass, raise pigs, and name their children after Christian saints. It is said that in the middle of the nineteenth century, on his way to launch the Toucouleur jihad and establish a shortlived empire in present-day Mali, the Tijaan Sufi scholar el Hadj Oumar Tall prayed in a tiny mosque by the Mama Nguedj, the tidal marsh at the eastern edge of town. It is also said that he prayed by the marsh and the mosque was erected later, in commemoration. Its bleak adobe cube slumps by rotting water at the lip of Tann Ba, the sweeping acrid field where women dry and hotsmoke shad and sardinella on long rickety tables. Dry season winds blow from the east: most of the year the fish smoke that rises above the mosque blows seaward, choking the town. Folks here call the fumes the incense of Joal.
By the time Senegal gained sovereignty from France, Joal was a village of about five thousand millet farmers. There was one fishing pirogue. It belonged to Ngo Dioh, a fisherman, a son and grandson of fishermen. Ngo is dead now. His son Djiby Dioh, an unhealthy man in his sixties, lives on the main street in a three-story house of tiled floors and tall mirrored windows tinted blue to keep out the sun. You can see the ocean from the top floors, you can smell low tide from the balcony. Djiby was fourteen when he first went to sea, right after independence. The trips were short then; you would leave after sunup and by midday the pirogue was full of fish. No foreign ships then in these seas, and hardly any local competition. Owning a pirogue, he says, was like owning a chunk of gold.
Then a terrible drought struck the Sahel. Crops shriveled, skeletal people laid their dead in roadside mass graves. In Senegal’s starved bush, farmers and cowherds loaded onto donkey carts and caravanned seaward. Some were Serer; some Fulani, whose forebears had domesticated cow in the Horn of Africa ten thousand years earlier; many were Wolof, whose language is Senegal’s lingua franca. This had happened before: Disgorged by the ocean onto dry land, a cumbersome and plodding prevertebrate evolved in forests and savannah grasslands and grew hungry and returned a hundred and sixty thousand years ago from the depths of eastern Africa to the shore of the Indian Ocean as Homo sapiens.
When the twentieth-century refugees reached the Petite Côte they learned that all the farmland was already taken. They had nowhere to turn but the sea. Like their distant ancestors, these landless people became fishermen.
Around the same time, the world’s appetite for fish began to grow. Global fish consumption would almost double over the next half century; some of the fish for Western tables would be hauled by pirogues like the Sakhari Souaré. The worst of the droughts ended in the seventies but fishing remained lucrative. Outboard motors appeared in Senegal, Johnsons and Evinrudes, eight horsepower at first, soon forty. Shops began to stock mass-produced nets as long as two hundred yards. Unlike the water at ports farther north, where the southwestward gyre of the Canary Current pummels the shore with towering breakers, the ocean in Joal is tranquil, subdued by the west-flowing North Equatorial Countercurrent and a continental shelf almost eighty miles wide. Wolof and Lebou fishermen from the north who had once migrated up and down the coast were relocating to Joal for good, joining erstwhile farmers at the wharves. Among these fishermen was Amadou Souaré.
Amadou came to Joal from Dakar in 1978 with his young bride, Fatou Diop Diagne, his first. They were in their mid-twenties. By then Joal had a population of around twelve thousand people and two or three dozen fishing pirogues.
A couple of years before Amadou Souaré moved to town, ocean surface temperatures had begun to climb, and the first big mechanized trawlers had come to fish offshore. Most fished illegally, without license and with impunity, scooping up first a fifth of Senegal’s catch, then a third, then half, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Fishermen who had been here awhile noticed changes in the sea. Entire species of fish would vanish almost completely that decade and the next—among them the totem sawfish, whose stylized image graces West African francs. The year Amadou arrived, Djiby Dioh stopped fishing off Joal altogether and began to go to Guinea-Bissau. Djiby has since retired; now his grown sons pilot his fleet of half a dozen seventy-foot gillnetters from Joal, their port of registry, into Guinean waters, going on trips that last two or three weeks. There is still some fish down that way.
Ndongo was born a few months after Amadou and Fatou moved to town. His sister Siny came a year later. Then Amadou took a second wife, the mother of Maguette the elder and Saliou and several other children. Then a third wife. A fourth. Recently he divorced that fourth wife, the youngest. He said it was because she would bathe in the evening and come to bed with wet hair. But his friends say he divorced her because he had fallen in love with a woman in Kaolak, a large town two hours away, and wanted to marry her, and Islam allows a man to have only four wives.
After Siny was born, Fatou had no more children.
* * *
Amadou Souaré is sixty-three years old, with thick, arthritic bones. He never smiles for long. Like Djiby Dioh, he no longer goes to sea. Old men rarely do. They sit at the mbaar all day like seagulls, their gray heads turned to the ocean, and wait for younger fishermen to return to port and offer them deference, perhaps some stories, always some fish. Sharing the catch with grounded fishermen, young or old, is the protocol all along the West African coast. Misfortune can happen to anyone—a pirogue will capsize, a motor will break, or an arm. A lazy crew won’t show up on time. Or you will need a day off. Or the rest of your life. But because fishers share, you can always count on having fish to bring home for your wives to cook. Or you can sell it at a markup and pay your electric bill. By the waterline no one goes hungry. Spent as it is, the sea still provides leftovers, bycatch, handouts, quick jobs.
That is how it hooks you: it always delivers, at least a little bit, at least for now. Its tug is relentless, like its tide. Even to be in its presence, its briny air. To lift your eyes and behold the spirit levels of its many onrushing lines, its attenuated seascape of inception.
When Ndongo is not at sea, he, too, spends his days at the mbaar. There is a kind of a similarity between fish and fishermen, he says. Fish are unable to leave the water. And fishermen are unable to leave the shore.
Year after year more pirogues flag to this harbor. Year after year more fathers pull their sons out of primary school to turn them into deckies. Ndongo’s children—Amadou Souaré’s grandchildren—are growing up in a town of almost fifty thousand people, mostly fishermen or future fishermen. Year after year there are fewer fish. When I ask my friends why they keep fishing they repeat a tired mantra: My grandfather’s grandfather was a fisherman, my father was a fisherman, I am a fisherman, this is all I know. But I think that something other than family tradition is also pulling them to sea: an ancient desire, a genetic memory, a congenital curse.
Or maybe it is because we habitually cling to coasts. Ever since Homo sapiens returned to the sea we have been hugging the Earth’s saltwater ecotones, traversing her kelp highways. A species of the edge. When we strayed inland it was never for long. Think of our relationship to the coast as an ebb-and-flow dance, a millennial pantomimic waltz of tides.
* * *
Before Serer farmers settled in Joal, someone else had lived here. Who? Unclear: the ocean’s oscillations have wiped out much of the human record along this shore. Whoever they were, these marine foragers left more than two hundred mounds of clam and oyster shells among the brackish channels that vein the mangrove mudflats between the Petite Côte and the mouth of the Gambia River. Some of the mounds are thousands of feet long.
Two such mounds rise out of the Mama Nguedj, the tidal marsh that empties into the ocean just south of Joal. Both are made primarily of the hinged ark shells of the Senilia senilis clam: a tiny seawater bivalve that coastal fisher-farmers from Mauritania to Angola have harvested forever and scientists hope to use t
o reconstruct past climate fluctuations and human movements in West Africa over the course of history. One midden is now a thirty-acre heart-shaped village of tabby concrete homes, mosques, churches, bars, a nunnery, some pigsties. This is the Isle of Fadiouth, home to the Sacred Baobab, which never drops its leaves even in the dry season, and to King of the Sea, who never sleeps off the island. The Sacred Baobab is a totem responsible for rain and harvest; King of the Sea is a matrilineal sorcerer who negotiates with the local protector genii for calm seas and fish. Two wooden bridges link Fadiouth to the mainland, like veins, like arteries. One leads northwest to Joal. The second, spanning northeastward, connects the island to the other shell mound. This midden has no name. It is an active burial site where the Muslims and Christians of Fadiouth inter their dead under six feet of shell.
How old are these middens? Also hard to say. Maybe eleven hundred years, just a hundred years older than Joal. Maybe twenty-four hundred years, as old as the Hippocratic oath, Plato’s Republic, the kite. Scientists presume that the largest shell midden in the United States, Turtle Mound, in Florida, is three thousand years old. But dating seashells is tricky. The sea alters the content of the carbon isotope used in radiocarbon dating, makes marine organisms appear much older. Yet it safeguards entire marine mountain ranges from erosion—indeed, from the complete demolition they would have faced on dry land. And what about objects that were underwater, then exposed, then underwater again? The sea corrodes some things instantly to naught, preserves others for eternity, challenges conventional perception of time, challenges time itself.
The middens gleam in the sun: prehistoric trash heaps, warped and washed-out memories, bleached by age and salt.