by Anna Badkhen
Mami Wata is the protector genie of Guinea, says Pa Ousmane Sall.
No, of Côte d’Ivoire! says Pa Bara Diop.
Yes, Côte d’Ivoire, you’re right.
But she is also the genie of all the ocean, says Pa Yagmar Kane.
A mischievous and demanding protectress of the seas, the symbol of lust and fertility, often cradling between her bare breasts a large snake that has represented divinity and wisdom and the occult since Eden, she governs the ocean as Watermama in Suriname and Maman Dlo in Guadalupe, Lasirèn in the Caribbean, Yemanya in Cuba and Brazil, the mermaid or siren in Europe. In Australia, she is Yawkyawk, and the serpent that keeps her company is a water spirit that may be her father, her spouse, or Yawkyawk herself.
I ask Ndongo to draw Mami Wata in my sketchbook. He explains as he draws:
Mami Wata has webbed hands. She has another web between her elbow and armpit, right here, so she cannot extend her arm fully. Only like this. Her skin is light, like yours.
I pretend not to hear that the sea goddess of Ndongo’s fantasies is a long-haired white woman, force it to slip my mind. If I want to keep the company of men at sea I must always evade the confines and expectations of gender and race. For the most part, Ndongo and my other crewmates and neighbors play along, cross boundaries of convention by taking me aboard, treat me as a kind of a liminal creature. They let me haul and pick and bail as if I were another man, though all politely look away while I relieve myself into the bailing can.
I watch Ndongo draw. His strokes are so tentative I think at first my pen has run out of ink. Decades since the last time he drew on paper. The breasts of his Mami Wata are sad deflated triangles, like mine.
As for the thing on my phone, Ndongo says, usually they come from other countries.
One day a few years ago some fishermen from Mbour, a fishing port between here and Dakar, caught Mami Wata in their net. She spoke to them in a human voice and asked them to release her. They refused. They brought her to Mbour, where people at the harbor looked at her and touched her. Finally they killed her. The next day the pirogue whose crew had caught her capsized, and everyone onboard died. I heard some people in Mbour ate the meat. Anyway, your sketchbook is too small. Look, the tail is much longer. And the whole fish Mami Wata is really the size of a normal woman.
Ndongo hands the sketchbook back to me. The mermaid takes up the entire four-by-six-inch sheet. Broad face, a pyramid of wavy hair almost to the shoulders, those spent breasts. Her massive tail splashes off the pad somewhere. What did she taste like, I wonder, fish or flesh? Ndongo says:
I don’t know exactly how they killed her. I never saw her, only a photo.
And Pa Bara Diop adds:
In this life, people shouldn’t say, This thing doesn’t exist. They should say, I haven’t seen it yet.
* * *
All the ancestral genii and saints gather at the Point of Sangomar, a sand spit at the reticulated mouth of the Saloum River Delta south of Joal. Few people have ever seen them up close or know their shape, though it is said that the most terrible of all, Mariama Sangomar, has three heads, six arms, and one leg. Genii usually appear to fishermen as moving lights that have no sound and leave no wake. The lights blink or shine continuously, yellow or white.
Daouda Sarr tells this story: One night he went fishing around Sangomar. A friend also came, in a pirogue of his own. At some point, in the dark, the friend saw a blinking light, assumed it was Daouda beckoning him, and followed the light into the labyrinth of mangroves. He was lost till sunup.
Spirits live in the sea because water transforms. To impregnate Danaë, Zeus penetrated her in the form of golden rain; their infant son, Perseus, bobbed in the waves in a wooden chest before washing ashore, where a fisherman adopted him. The Holy Spirit of Christians descends upon the baptized through water. The historian Martin Klein writes that in August of 1848, when the colonial administration of French West Africa posted notices that indenture had been abolished, the freed slaves in Saint-Louis, the colonial capital, rushed to the sea “for what seemed to have been a spontaneous ritual cleansing.”
Genii cross over into the world of humans for all the reasons we venture into the unknown: to entertain and challenge themselves, to assert their power. In the name of love. For example, Vieux Sene’s grandfather on his father’s side had a genie wife. She lived in the ocean, off the coast of Saint-Louis. Whenever Vieux’s grandfather wanted to visit that wife he would get into his pirogue, alone, and sail westward until no one could see him from the shore. When he would return he would say things like, My other wife sends her greetings, or, My other wife just gave birth to a new baby.
Ndongo’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side also had a genie wife. But after his death the family neglected her, and in punishment she plagued its women with spells of aphasia and anorexia. Ndongo’s grandmother, the mother of Fatou Diop Diagne, was so afflicted. At last, with the help of a healer, Fatou figured it out and began to take care of the genie by giving her offerings of sweet millet porridge called lakh, and by giving alms of sugar cubes to talibé, young students from Koranic schools whose praxis mandates begging. Since then, women in her bloodline seem to have been doing fine.
The genie placed another curse on the family, one Fatou cannot oblate away: If a newborn baby resembles a parent, one of them does not stay very long. Either the parent or the baby dies. That’s why, Fatou says, we put a bracelet on the baby’s wrist, for protection. One day I was walking with my two sisters, and someone saw us and said, “You must have the same father!” because we look so alike. Now one of my sisters is dead.
Romance between humans and genii is common and commonly tragic. A besotted genie will use magic to make the beloved inaccessible to other people. Daouda has experienced this himself. He was engaged to a girl who one day started acting very strange. In the middle of their rendezvous she would suddenly zone out, become nonresponsive, fall absolutely silent. When Daouda would confront her about it the next day she would say, I really don’t know why that happened, I don’t remember it. These were clear signs that a genie had taken her as a lover, Daouda says. Special healers will hold exorcism ceremonies to break the link between the lover genie and its human victim; the healers are usually women from the Lebou fishing people, like Fatou Diop Diagne, and live mostly in Dakar. But Daouda’s betrothed did not want to be healed. Perhaps that was because of the genie, too. Daouda had to break off their engagement.
Sometimes a genie will keep the human lover in the genie world. Vieux’s oldest brother went fishing ten years ago and his pirogue vanished at sea. A marabout told the family that the young man was alive but a sea genie kept him for herself. Since then, on religious holidays, the family has been setting aside some of the sacrificial lamb for the genie, putting it in the sea, asking her to treat the young man well. Vieux’s father used to make the offering on the ancestral shores of Saint-Louis—a two-day roundtrip by shared taxi from Joal. Now Vieux’s father is dead and Vieux’s mother continues to honor the genie, though she makes the sacrifice here in Joal.
How did the marabout know that Vieux’s brother did not simply die at sea? Many fishermen do. I have gone to their funerals, I have seen their graves. The distinction remains impenetrable to me.
The men talk, hush, talk again. The clink and rasp of knives sharpening on the cement gillnet sinkers. The dull thunk of a knife notching a line. The exhale of Vieux’s nylon thread tightening around itself. He is repairing a comrade’s gillnet: a shaggy floatline has snagged the top. He removes it, notches a new half-inch headrope, and is weaving the blue nylon mesh onto it with a shuttle threaded with a dark blue fishline. He stretches the net between his left hand and his right big toe and his hands move so fast I cannot follow the pattern. An arachnid. A sorcerer.
Daouda looks at me.
Do you believe it, Anna? Do you believe that genii exist?
Why do you ask?
Because. In Senegal, if it has a name, then it exists.
Poïesis, creation, the making be. An unceasing initiatory song that enacts its magic again and again in countless individual instances of becoming: When a mother names everything to her infant. When new lovers point out to each other a moonrise, a sunset, a freckle, as if no one had ever seen these before. Look! Look! The command of complex language gave our forebears the cohesion to strike out of Africa, and they named to one another new coasts and landscapes as they narrated their way, stanza by millennial stanza, to Tierra del Fuego. Each story is foundational, each makes the universe afresh. Each is a trespasser: from nonbeing into being.
In stories, as at sea, boundaries are malleable, begetters and destroyers both. The genii who marry humans cross a permeable membrane between the sacred and the everyday. Like storytellers. I think: We hold the power of making magic real by how we engage it, by which stories we choose to tell. Or maybe the stories choose us.
* * *
I also often think that Daouda is testing me, pushing my boundaries. That maybe he himself is a trickster genie from the sea.
* * *
On the third night of October, the twenty-first night of Tabaski, a savage squall rips through Joal. Broken tree limbs scythe power lines. Torn roofs hurtle like discuses. A child electrocutes on a live wire. Electricity and cellphone networks will remain down for two days. Early the next morning the alley where I rent a room from a retired fisherman is a murky ankle-deep puddle, but in seaside mosques disciples of Tijaan Sufi brotherhood, Senegal’s most widespread, are already chanting their morning wird, the melancholy choral blessing and plea for forgiveness they recite twice daily. The roof in my quarters springs leaks and all night warm raindrops nag on the pillow and the floor by my head; the room is a tiny afterthought tucked between a pit toilet, a washroom, and a cinderblock manger, and by morning every surface inside is wet.
In the dark I leave the compound, wade through the puddle, and walk past the mosques two miles up the rainpacked shore to the Sakhari Souaré. It is six-thirty, low tide. Wet laundry sags from lines strung between beached pursenetters.
The east reddens. Branches and entire trees and tattered sheets of roof metal score the beach; dawn smells like rotting fish and eucalyptus. Mbaar Kanené is aslump: two of the bearing posts are broken. Aboard the Sakhari Souaré the twisted net is heaped all over the boat and full of seaweed, and in the holds two dead fish float belly-up in a mix of rainwater and bilge.
Maguette?
It wasn’t me!
Boys bail center hold, make the boat shipshape again. The bilge pours black into the greening sea. Ndongo maneuvers through the marina. The Maimouna Lo, which belongs to his third wife’s landlord, is shorthanded today, only four men, so Ndongo drops off Ousmane to be the oupa. The boy jumps from his father’s gunwale onto the other pirogue, bellyflops into the net hold, stretches out on the net. Ndongo watches him, clicks his tongue. That boy.
Like a man, remember? he calls. And speeds off.
Mangroves float above the horizon. Green net, green waves. Ndongo sucks his teeth. The storm has changed the color of the sea, he says. It probably has dispersed the fish, too. They get scared into the sea when it gets windy like this. This is never easy: we bought fuel, my crew are investing effort, and the Sakhari Souaré probably won’t catch much today. But she must try.
Because of greed. Because of curiosity or penitence. Because of inertia, even, maybe. The wooden pirogue slips away from Africa.
Mamadou Faye, new onboard, winks at his captain from the bow. Mamadou is twenty-eight, an affable tall ironsmith who usually works for his mason father. But because there have not been many fish in the sea, fishermen have not been building new homes, which means there has been no construction work ashore lately, and so here he is, crewing Ndongo’s pirogue, even though last month his own younger brother, Abdoul Ahad, went fishing for the first time and never returned. The family waited a few days, then held a memorial service. No genii meddling there. A death at sea, simple and stark and irreparable.
Ndongo? says Mamadou. Wouldn’t it be nice if we got ten boxes of large mullet today?
I personally am hoping for some sardinella, says Ndongo.
Mamadou laments in singsong:
So hard for young people to find work nowadays that you have to know how to do everything. You have to be a jack-of-all-trades, have at least two professions, better three or four—
At night sardinella schools glow in the sea, you can see them, Ndongo interrupts. He stares and stares at the waves, his gaze distant, full of something that looks like lust.
—so if one doesn’t work out you can fall back on something. All I want is fancy digs, a fat SUV, and an import-export permit.
The wishes of the era, no more lasting than a trace in the waves. No more shallow than hunger, hunt, survival.
At ten in the morning Ndongo commands:
Cast net.
The gillnet sinks into a black black sea. An hour later the crew begin to haul. Mamadou starts a shanty:
Don’t talk but work—don’t talk but work—and catch it—quickly—and catch it—quickly—like men, like men—quickly—like men!—And all together now—and don’t hold back—and all together now—and don’t hold back—
Hand over hand, the crew pull yards of empty green mesh out of the sea—and then.
Suddenly.
Two, three, four fish in every square foot of net, jerking and twisting, rubbery, hard, all tight muscle like coiled springs. Sardinella! Sardinella! So many fish that Ndongo whoops and dances from the stern to midships and joins the picking. Round sardinella, Sardinella aurita, silver with a faint golden midlateral line from the gill opening to the tail like a drizzle of oil, like the trace of a sunray. Mamadou grins, switches the rhythm:
Sardinella, sardinella—it is here—sardinella!—If you don’t go out for fishing—you can’t eat no—sardinella!—Let’s all eat our—sardinella!—come on, let’s eat—sardinella!—Tout le monde eats—sardinella!
The sun slants and the ocean is black and silver like fish scales and the crew pick a full net and laugh and sing:
My father I’m crying—why are you crying—excuse me, why you crying—oh, child, why are you crying?—Work like a motherfucker—I work like a motherfucker—work like a motherfucker—oh, child, why you crying?
Rounds made up on the spot. Worksongs as old as fishing.
The holds are full and blood sloshes in the bilge. You can tell sardinella by the bail: no other fish bleed this much. Ndongo looks up, squints sternly, points to the east. On the horizon another boat is hauling net. In his quiet captain voice he says:
They got more fish than us. Because they didn’t miss a school like we did.
For man at sea is unquenchable. The vicious adrenaline rush that accompanies the hunt for fish is like nothing I ever have encountered anywhere else. Not even in war zones, where for many years I watched reckless boys chase death, have I seen men so monomaniacal. Fishermen: the most rapacious people I know. In their avarice, merciless. Mamadou lets the jibe pass, winks at his crewmates, picks net, sings on:
If you want to be strong—eat couscous!—If you want to be strong—eat couscous!
After midday Ndongo pilots the Sakhari Souaré south toward the shipwreck of Palmarin.
* * *
Daouda Sarr, who grew up in Palmarin, was a teenager when white foremen brought black crews and tractors and bulldozers to build an asphalt road between his village and Joal. Every night the crews would hammer wooden stakes into the clay to mark the future route, and every morning they would return to find the stakes torn out and tossed roadside.
The foremen blamed the locals. Palmarin elders said genii were pulling up the stakes because the white people were building the road on sacred land. One time, the foremen decided to spend the night on the site, hoping to catch the
saboteurs. After darkness fell, a disembodied voice appeared to the contractors as if in a dream and ordered them to build the road elsewhere. Only then did the contractors reroute the road to a land not claimed by spirits, where it lies today in potholed disrepair, barely passable during the four rainiest months of the year.
Sakou Sarr, a Palmarin village elder, tells the story of the road differently:
Our village has been here since the twelfth century, though older middens exist. After the local population adopted Christianity and Islam, polytheistic beliefs remained. There are local totems. Write their names: Balfany, Fatou Ngous, Nanai, Tioupan. He dictates the names slowly, waits for me to take them down. The totems require offerings of milk and beer, some prayers to secure good crops and a safe rainy season. When villagers have troubles they appeal directly to the totems.
In 1978 when white people were trying to build a road they faced two complications. One, this is an area of extreme salinity. And two, when they began the construction they ignored the totems and failed to offer a sacrifice to the spirits. That’s why they had problems. For example, some of their equipment that worked just fine yesterday wouldn’t work today. Or their cars would run today but tomorrow would stall for no explicable reason. But after they made an offering all such nuisance stopped and they were allowed to build the road.
As for rerouting the road to appease the genii, Sarr has never heard such a story. Some people exaggerate, he says.
Sakou Sarr’s big house is decorated with images of Pope John Paul II, of Pope Francis shaking hands with Senegal’s president, Macky Sall. There are plastic Santa dolls and fake plants. In the hallway, his teenage children—a beautiful girl in a long black skirt and a black bra, who studies geography in Dakar; and her younger brother, a high school student, in shorts—are watching a concert of traditional music on TV. I can smell someone cooking ceebu jën for lunch in an indoor kitchen behind a closed door.