by Anna Badkhen
* * *
Mbaar Kanené has other regulars. Malal Diallo, a gillnetter captain whose Fulani parents and grandparents and ancestors uncountable for thousands of years herded cattle upon the oceanic tracts of the Sahel, and who doesn’t talk much. Daouda Sarr, who spends more time prattling at the mbaar than at sea. Daouda has beached his thirty-foot gillnetter, the Stacko Mbacké, a few yards away from the gazebo. A breach in the hull has kept her aground for weeks. Daouda is vague about the origin of the breach. One day he will get around to fixing it, but for now he relies on donations from other fishermen and on selling giant prize sheep from the small flock he keeps in a manger behind his house around the corner from the Souarés. He names his sheep biblically, for the most part—Shem, Samuel—though one is named Phil Collins.
The Cheikh Sadbou, at a twisted port tilt in the sand next to the Stacko Mbacké, belongs to Ndongo’s best friend Vieux Sene, the namesake of Ndongo’s second-oldest son. Vieux has a gray goatee and always wears a bluegreen tartan flat cap. He is always on the phone with someone; he hardly ever removes his white earbuds. He has to replace both gunwales on his pirogue and recaulk it, work that has been taking him months because he never has enough money to pay for materials. He has two wives, a handful of children. He resells the fish donated by the men who do go to sea and hires himself out to fix their nets. He sits in Mbaar Kanené for hours at a time enmeshed in someone’s gillnet, which he stretches between his left hand and the big toe of his right foot, his right hand always working a shuttle, a knife, a line, his eyes always drifting from the net to the sea.
The men at the mbaar watch waves lift and lower the anchored pirogues and talk fishermen talk:
Compared with thirty years ago, today the ocean isn’t scanty—it is empty. The young folk today have no idea what real fishing is. When I was fishing back then, I could sit at this mbaar and watch schools of fish run in the sea. That’s how close the fish would come to shore.
The sea was much farther out back then. Where those boats are over there, that was still the beach.
It’s because of the Western boats. The government allows them to fish here, or maybe they come illegally. They come every night, even during the months when we are not allowed to fish at night. The fish run away from them.
Their big boats have sonars to find the biggest fish schools. They have GPS pagers to mark the spot in the sea. They have so much horsepower.
I heard they dynamite the fish to stun it and take it to their countries.
Yes. And then there are the purse seiners—there used to be twenty of them in Joal, now there are two hundred. They catch all the fish that run away from the big boats. And when they don’t catch the big fish, they go after the small fish, the juveniles.
Yes. They deplete everything along the food chain.
Yes. There aren’t any fish left.
Men click their tongues: hear, hear. Downcoast a gaggle of naked preteen boys and one girl in a short printed dress bob in the low breakers, cast mosquito nets for shrimp.
* * *
Artisanal fishing is Senegal’s main resource and main earner of foreign exchange. In Joal it is the source of life entire. Street vendors sell bananas and rubberized slickers from the same stalls; fishnet roofs chicken coops and fences saplings against goats. Everyone eats ceebu jën—rice and fish—for lunch every day: ceebu jën with grilled fish, ceebu jën with stewed fish, gumbo, fish in maafe peanut sauce. When mothers drop off children at daycare in the morning they discuss their husbands’ latest haul. The catch is down to a tenth of what it was a decade ago.
I pay a visit to Lamine Ndong, Joal’s chef du village, a position that is elected and largely advisory. We sit in metal lawn chairs in a quiet unpaved square by his house. Cordia trees in vermillion bloom line the square. Its sand is swept clean. There is a monument to Léopold Sédar Senghor, Joal’s most famous son, one of the founders of the Négritude movement and the first president of Senegal. Three women are selling dried fish and fresh eggplant and limes from a folding table. It is just before lunchtime and no one else is about.
Lamine Ngong is an old man. His ancestors, millet farmers all, have lived here forever. I ask him about the connection between Joal and the ocean, about the shortage of fish.
People who have roots in Joal, like me—we are not fishing families, he says. Most people you see at the harbor, they may be living in Joal now, but they are not from here.
He falls silent. Wind rustles the trees. Perhaps he has misunderstood the question. I try again.
Not many real Joaliens go to sea. Most fishermen are from elsewhere. I’m just telling you. So that you know that there are a lot of migrants in town now.
There is a gust and fire-red blossoms fall on our shoulders, in our laps.
Perhaps another reason why fishermen spend their days in mbaars looking out to sea is that the sea does not question their origins or their journeys, does not discriminate, bestows and conceals its wealth in equal measure.
* * *
Anyway, says Amadou Souaré, Ndongo knows the sea as it is today better than I do. I knew the sea thirty years ago.
Never the owners of knowledge but the custodians, the temporary stewards. You learn the sea the way you learn the spells—from your father, your uncles, your older brothers, other fishermen who hire you on their pirogues, the sea itself. You pass it on to your children, your crewmen, your friends at the mbaar. The knowledge is divided into the manifest and the hidden, and belongs only to God, and is collected only in the Koran. You can access it if you know where to look, if you are humble, and if you ask God’s blessing.
What kind of knowledge does it take to depend on a resource so seemingly bottomless yet so palpably expended, to exacerbate its decimation each day you honor family tradition? And what is the protection against the crushing void of the ever-encroaching tide? Or against mostly illegal foreign ships that come in so close that on a clear night you can see from the beach their searchlights: eerie winks of a modern, mechanized organism that employs half a million people worldwide, vacuums the ocean empty, drowns out the ancient shanties of men who stubbornly chase fish in wooden boats?
The fisherman Daouda Sarr says there is a gris-gris so powerful it makes your skin impregnable like armor. If you are using this gris-gris and someone tries to stab you with a knife, the knife does not even scratch you. You make this gris-gris with the root of a certain plant, which you cook a certain way, then eat it or wear it in a special leather pouch.
What amulet is there for fish on the verge of extirpation—or for its hunters, who steer along the rim of rapid planetary-scale reordering in which entire cultures get subsumed, languages lost, songs forgotten?
* * *
The last rains of the season squall in, squall out. Night’s thunderstorm is blowing slowly out to a wine-dark, Homeric sea. The Sakhari Souaré follows. The crew breakfast on po’boys with boiled eggs and french fries, with yassa. Maguette and Vieux share a small bag of cookies. Pink cumuli rise above Joal, blossom in reflection. The last glance at the town before it disappears abaft: men washing horses in that blushing surf. The pirogue heads west-southwest toward her usual fishing grounds. For a minute or two, the discarded newspaper that held the po’boys and the brightly colored cookie wrapper follow in her wake. The water darkens then pales, becomes a chalky blue. The sky is asphalt gray. Done with breakfast, the fishermen stand up. Watch the sea.
Do they have an ocean like this in America?
Yes. They have three.
Then I don’t get it. Why do they send foreign ships to fish in our ocean if they have three of their own?
The foreign ships are spacewarps. You can sail right up to them, their floodlights can blind you, their hightech trawls can take your fish. Yet they are also out of bounds, fortressed behind the same impassable line as the rest of the West, which once forced millions of Africans over that dark boundary and now forcibly
holds millions of Africans from crossing it. Some fishers turn their pirogues into smuggling vessels to take migrants to Europe. They become traffickers of men, latter-day Noahs. But lately, security at sea has been too tight. Coastguard cutters confiscate boats and motors, throw smuggler-fishermen in jail.
Besides, Europe is broke. Many of the men who crew pirogues in Joal have tried to make a living there but returned because in Europe there is no work.
Some of these men have worked on fishing ships. Trawlers flagged to Spain, to Portugal, to China. The conditions are hard, they say: shifts that go thirty-six hours at a time, fo’c’sles so cramped men must take turns sleeping, barely enough provisions, no shore leave; some men had their passports confiscated, were essentially placed in bondage aboard. The money is great. I once fished with a man who had worked on Spanish boats for twenty-five years, mostly out of Barcelona. His Spanish was flawless. He said he had made some good friends over there. Other than that he did not talk about the experience much. What would you say? How would you talk about a quarter century of living on the moon?
Secondhand stories are easier. Ndongo has one:
I know this one fisherman, he worked on a big ship for many months—for more than a year. He earned a lot of money and the captain knew he couldn’t afford to pay it. So this captain, he decided to ditch this guy. One night this guy was in his bunk and he overheard the captain and the first mate talk about throwing him overboard. So he took a piece of paper, wrote down everything he’d heard, wrapped the paper in plastic, and hid it in the band of his underwear.
Aboard the Sakhari Souaré the crew are no longer watching for fish. Everyone has turned to Ndongo, listening. Weighing their options perhaps. Assessing the risks versus the benefits of joining the powerful fleet that harvests all the fish they cannot catch.
Ndongo continues:
A few days later the crew jumped him and threw him overboard. He was afloat for hours! Finally another ship picked him up—he was so tired by then he couldn’t even swim anymore. When he recovered he told the people on this ship what had happened and showed them the proof, the piece of paper he had sewn into his underwear. The ship caught up with that first boat and got everyone arrested—oh, I’m so sorry about this, hold on!
A seagull has splattered my shoulder. Ndongo reaches over to wash off the mess with seawater. So, so sorry. Don’t worry about it, I say. It’s good luck where I come from.
Eww! Good luck? Saying that’s good luck is like saying it’s good luck if they throw you overboard!
The other fishers laugh. A relief, a distraction from the Odyssean urge to seek their fortunes across the waters, from the fear of what kind of prize may lie beyond.
I’d like to meet the underwear man, I say.
Well. I don’t really know him. It’s my friends who know him.
Once Ndongo was at sea on a pirogue that ran out of drinking water. There was a foreign fishing trawler on the horizon and the captain steered toward her. On the deck of that ship was a white swabbie. Ndongo’s crewmates gestured for water and the man laughed and trained his hosepipe at the pirogue. For years Ndongo had a burn scar where the scalding water hit his arm.
* * *
Oily seas, steep seas. Some spray, some drizzle, sticky curls of fog. No shore in sight. Sardinella schools too fast for the Sakhari Souaré’s underpowered motor. She casts three times, like men, like men, catches barely anything. A smooth-hound shark the color of a dove’s wing, with vertical pupils, vulnerable to extinction. A halfbeak. A school of cassava croakers flies right over the net’s headrope. If you kill the engine you can hear them beat their abdominal muscles against the swim bladder: ngok ngok ngok ngok. Ousmane curls up in the net between each haul, eyes shut, silently lip-synchs a Wolof rap song. Maguette the elder says:
Last year one of my cousins was fishing near here and caught ninety-five boxes of barracuda.
We wouldn’t even be able to fit ninety-five boxes in this pirogue.
Yeah, he had to call other boats to help him take it to harbor.
The Sakhari Souaré’s own net is empty again except for three fanged cutlassfish, their pliant blue scaleless bodies long and predatory; the Senegalese do not eat them but white people mill them into flour to bake bread. Ndongo says it’s really delicious.
Have you tried it?
No, but I’ve heard about it. Have you?
I’ve never even heard of it. Let me ask you something, though. What’s it like to catch fish to feed someone halfway across the world?
He thinks about it.
Makes me feel useful.
A few years ago one of Ndongo’s cousins, a trafficker, invited him to pilot a pirogue smuggling people to Spain from Casamance, in southern Senegal. A free ride to Europe, some cash on top.
That boat, she was all outfitted and ready to go. A lot of my friends were on that boat. Then my father called me and said, you have to come back. So I came back. My only dream at the time was to go to Spain. Oh-oh-oh I really wanted to go to Spain. That was the only thing I could think about back then!
And now? You still want to go?
Wallahi, yes, yes! That’s my dream, really. I know some men who went to Spain, they come back with money, build shops here or start a business, leave it with their brothers, and then go back to Spain to make more money. If I can go there, get a work permit, and find a job, I would work really hard, then come back a few years later. I’d send money to my father so he can build me a boat of my own.
A boat of his own. Ndongo has been working on his father’s boats since he was eleven years old. When he has his own pirogue he will take his net, first wife Alassane, second wife Sokhna, and the nine living children he has sired with them and reunite with third wife Khady, whom Amadou kicked out of the house two months ago, for willfulness, even though Ndongo was at sea that day and Khady was already visibly pregnant with their second child. Amadou Souaré is headstrong that way. Then, after everyone is settled and happy, maybe Ndongo will take a fourth wife.
A boat of his own, to take out to test and tempt the sea, so exhausted of fish and so full of stories, dreamy and unattainable, like a tide forever going out, sucking you away with it, rocking, rocking.
* * *
By eleven o’clock the Sakhari Souaré has been out for four hours and has caught practically nothing. Ndongo sucks his teeth. What the hell? There were fish here just yesterday.
Hey, what day of the month is it?
October first.
No, what day of the Wolof month is it?
The eighteenth of Tabaski.
Ah. Perhaps that’s why. Fish like spring tide, at full moon, that would be the middle of the month, after that they go hiding. We’re just past it.
Then, for the first time since leaving the shore, Ndongo notices Maguette, his twelve-year-old.
Eh! What in God’s name are you wearing?
The boy came aboard this morning in a huge orange life jacket. Who knows where he dug it up. He gives his father an impish grin. Ndongo says:
You’ve got to take that thing off, man. You look like a child!
* * *
The Sakhari Souaré is almost to the port in late afternoon when a pursenetter twice her size sails up to starboard. Homemade canvas tents and huge styrofoam boxes aboard, painted blue, yellow, green, red. The El Hadji Amar Dieye is off to sea for a week with a crew of twelve. Would the Sakhari Souaré spare some fish for their dinner?
Ndongo nods to Ousmane. The boy scoops some halfbeaks and shad into a bucket, maybe a third of the day’s catch. He leans over the water, passes the bucket. No words are exchanged. No money. One day it will be Ndongo’s turn to ask.
* * *
Do you know this fish?
A sweltering noon at the mbaar. Beached pirogues squat over shriveled ultramarine shadows. A bit to the south fishers are unloading cuttlefish traps tied to white and b
lue flags from a horsecart. On the sideboards of the cart its owner has written the Shahada in Arabic script the colors of the rainbow to declare in motion his belief in the oneness of God in the spectrum of God’s own creation. I have seen this cart deliver outboards to pirogues at dawn; now the bay horse stands unmoving, stupefied by the heat. Ndongo has taken a day off and is sitting under the tin roof with some old men: his father’s friends, his friends’ fathers. He pulls up a picture on his cellphone screen, passes the phone around.
A friend sent me this photo. I wonder if you can catch one of those here. It’s a real fish! But I’ve never seen a fish like this before.
A fading seascape. Orange beach in the foreground. At the tideline, a voluptuous horizontal figure: the head and torso of a fish from which grows a pair of woman’s legs, pale and sensuously curved. A modest blur over the creature’s woolly pubis. The old men bring the screen close to their opaque eyes, suck their toothless gums in wonder.
Says Pa Yagmar Kane:
Such fish don’t live in these seas. These things only live very far from here, maybe in Asia or Europe, where the sea is deeper. I used to watch documentaries about Europe, but I’ve never seen such a fish.
Says Pa Ousmane Sall:
There are fish in other places that are different from the fish we have here. It depends on the weather, on the air temperature, on the temperature of the sea. I saw animals in the north that have so much fur, if they came here they would die of heatstroke.
The phone returns to Ndongo. He plays with the screen, makes the sexy womanfish grow larger, closer.
I know a fish called Mami Wata, he says. The bottom is fish, the top is woman. Mami Wata, they catch it here sometimes. I’ve seen it. It looks like a young woman on the top: she has silky hair—like yours, Anna—and breasts, but the bottom is fish and at the end of her tail there are scales. Mami Wata, I’ve never seen anyone eat it. But there’s another big fish, called manatee—we eat that, but it looks like fish, not like a woman.