by Anna Badkhen
A block from the house the jinxed tarmac road runs past skyblue mirror of estuaries that sparkle with an astonishment of egrets, pelicans, yellow weavers. Tiny red passerines hover like suspended droplets of blood. The other village streets are clean deep sand. The seaside is all villas that belong to seasonal Europeans, cheap seaside lodges, former homes half eaten by the encroaching sea, palm groves, the Seven Baobabs at the northern tip. The beach is paradisiacal. From here, the rusted hull of the shipwreck is a random theater backdrop, a misplaced decoration, like Sakou Sarr’s Christmas ornaments in October. I ask him about it.
It shipwrecked near here in 1978. Same year as the road.
Same kind of problem?
Perhaps.
* * *
The shipwreck of Palmarin is not marked on the geodetic datum chart of the Atlantic coast between Saint-Louis and the Saloum River, which shows one hundred and twenty-nine other wrecks. Nor is the wreckage of the slave ships that sank during the four centuries of transatlantic slave trade carrying Africans to the Americas. Tens of thousands of people stolen from these shores carpet the ocean floor with their bones.
* * *
Next to the Seven Baobabs, two or three hundred pelicans rise from the turquoise surf in elaborate and lordly synchronicity at the Sakhari Souaré’s approach. They head straight for the pirogue, the whole tremendous mass of them, low and menacing like bombers on a sortie—then suddenly swivel across her bow and back inland and settle in the tree crowns. A lone bird remains bobbing in the surf.
It can’t fly!
Fly! Fly, bird, fly!
The giddy crew stand up in the boat. Naked from the waist up or in torn secondhand tee shirts; little Maguette’s says LET’S KISS. Their arms and faces shine with sweat and fish scales. Fish blood streaks their rubberized overalls, elbows, necks. A ghastly circus troupe temporarily distracted from some grotesque ungodly act. They turn to the bird as one and begin to flap their arms in a freakish and profane simulation of flight, and Ndongo grins and comes about so roughly that the crew nearly topple and steers toward the pelican.
The bird spreads its wings, tipping backward to lift a white abdomen out of the water. A display; we watch. Its long lower mandible is yellow, its upper mandible gray, its breast a brownish gray; its primaries are black, and its secondaries and throat and tail and mantle and back are white. Then, in slow motion at once exquisite and scornful, it pushes itself off the water with large pink webbed feet two, three, four times and flies away.
Wow, says Mamadou.
Only young Vieux remains seated on the stern thwart. He has stuffed a piece of yellow styrofoam float into the mouth of a palm-size sardine, bound it in fishing line. Now he is threading the line with fishhooks. A torture victim, bound and gagged; a piscine Saint Sebastian.
What’s this for? I ask. The boy looks up from his handiwork. He is beautiful, his eyes wide, inspired, deep as the sea. He says:
I want to catch a pelican.
* * *
Less than a mile from Joal’s harbor Ndongo spots a school running southwestward. He careens hard aport, then remembers he is inside a marine protected area designed to replenish fish stocks. All fishing is prohibited within five miles of the shore. Most crews fish here anyway. The enforcement of the sanctuary is lax, corrupt, and arbitrary. Fishermen take their chances: fishing is like gambling. Ndongo sets course again for the harbor, then suddenly drops the throttle, reaches into the sea to starboard with both hands, and pulls out a grouper the size of my thigh.
* * *
With her bilges full of sardines and bloody water, the Sakhari Souaré slices into the harbor stubble of large and small pirogues unloading their catch. Ndongo runs her hard aground bowfirst between the dainty spindle of a clam boat and an enormous purse seiner. Immediately little Maguette jumps off the bow and splashes ashore to wedge the anchor in the sand.
Already fishwives in bright multilayered headwraps and embroidered velvet bonnets are rushing down in a determined stream from the bulky concrete façade of the harbor building a hundred yards or so inland. Their feet are bare upon warm sand slimy with fishrot and gasoil and effluent, and they wear long sleeves under torn, stained décolleté frocks that are soaked through from the armpits down. Skipping to the water with empty basins and buckets on their heads and under their arms, and some with babies and toddlers strapped to their backs, and some with lips busy around miswak toothpick twigs cut from a mustard tree, and some with mouths bright orange and grainy with kola nut. They negotiate the row of a dozen wheeled kiosks where hefty middlemen in large silver rings and heavy gris-gris bracelets drink instant coffee with milk or café Touba spiced with grains of selim and cloves. And then another row of kiosks that sell gloves, cellphone recharge cards, memory cards with bootleg music downloads, waterproof cellphone pouches. They push through a row of twenty or thirty carts waiting to take fish to the ice-packing factories out back, where eighteen-wheelers dripping diesel and bloody slush load for Dakar, and skip around the freaked-out horses that stomp and back up in their harnesses, hides plastered with seaweed and fish scales. Around other fishwives squatting next to heaps of mullet, catfish, octopus, shrimp, grouper, sardines, and the obscene protrusions of cymbium snails, and the elegant tracery of purple-tinged murex. They wedge past itinerants selling baby clothes and imported secondhand skirts and blouses, and boys carrying the portable storefronts of wooden glass-topped cases with costume jewelry, and other boys carrying garlands of dry dates and peanuts and cashews in small plastic bags. They exchange some brief jokes with young girls in tight denim and tanktops who sell coconut candy and beignets. Lastly, they excuse themselves past the modestly dressed restaurant owners, all women, who keep patient rank right by the water in anticipation of a wholesale deal for their evening kitchens. They wade toward Ndongo’s pirogue.
Immediately other fishwives peel off from other boats where they have been bargaining unsuccessfully and join the cluster, up to their chests or armpits in the sickly yellowgreen muck that is more harbor refuse than seawater, the women with children careful not to wade in too far, ducking occasionally face-first to freshen up. They begin a singsong that is part mockery, part sweet talk. They call Ndongo their cousin, their brother, their lover, their father, their friend—their best friend. Male porters join in, in rubberized overalls and slickers and rubber boots that go up to their thighs and rubber cushions they affix to their heads with chinstraps made of boatline or torn from discarded women’s dresses. Cart drivers, all men, whip their horses into this waterlogged crowd, spraying water. All of them bargain hard and loud against one another and against Ndongo for the catch, salty-tongued and cajoling, firing insults and praise and coquetry at the captain and crew and one another in Wolof and Serer and French.
Ndongo considers all of them regally and calmly, smiling at the women occasionally but in silence, until the porters who work for his regular middleman swim up. He orders his crew to help them load the sardines, keeps careful watch that no box be piled above the brim. Fishermen are paid per box.
The porters take turns balancing the boxes of fish on their head cushions and swimming them to shore. Little Vieux bails. A gillnetter anchors next to the Sakhari Souaré and the gaggle of fishwives and porters migrates there. Little Maguette, wearing only wet drawers, returns aboard with plastic baggies full of hot café Touba for the crew and some beignets wrapped in newspaper for his dad. Ndongo sells the bycatch—the grouper he noodled out of the sea, a couple of halfbeaks, some mullet—to two fishwives. They will wade back ashore and resell this fish: to the restaurant owners at a fifty-percent markup; to the middlemen, twofold; threefold markup to the more squeamish buyers on the other side of the harbor building, beyond the fetid pools of fish guts and horse piss and truck fuel and melting ice.
Ndongo calculates the day’s earnings: two shares for the motor, two shares for the boat, one share for the food for the house, where most of the crew sup, the res
t divided equally between the fishermen aboard. He hands a banknote to Ibrahima, his nephew, and sends him with an empty plastic jerrycan to fill for tomorrow’s trip. He is done here.
Maguette. Haul away on that line.
The sun rolls behind the sea and for a spell the clouded west blooms in a peony sunset. The salty horizon line powders and fades. Hugging the coast, the Sakhari Souaré sails southward to her berth near Mbaar Kanené at half throttle. Far away, southward also, an unending scarf of migratory birds flows down the East Atlantic Flyway. I imagine them girdling the Earth, pole to pole. It is autumn in Europe.
* * *
When Ndongo returns to shore he learns that last night’s storm felled a filao tree onto the Souarés’ second gillnetter, the fifty-two-foot Ndaye Adja Kane, named after Amadou Souaré’s mother. She had been beached a hundred yards north of Mbaar Kanené, waiting for a paint job and some caulking. Now her hull is smashed flat by a tree white people brought to colonial Senegal to keep it from sliding into the sea.
In the dusk girls on skinny legs are rushing about the broken pirogue like plovers, picking up painted redwood splinters for firewood.
Three
Pirogue fragments are splayed out in an impromptu dry dock, a patch of beach sand littered with strips of net, swatches of tar-blackened cloth, splinters of broken boats, sheep droppings. The thick log of her keel points out to sea. Fanning slightly outward from either side of the keel lie maroon boards of fresh wood and scuffed painted boards of the pirogue that was, that will be again.
On the sand next to this once and future boat, a disassembled gull skeleton. A tipped translucent keel bone, broad and smooth and concave; around it the radii, the ulnae, the heavy curved beak. Somehow this fragile assortment of ossifications and tunneling pores was made to lift up and stand motionless in wind currents hundreds of feet in the air and from such balanced height to see past the dazzle of the waves, to identify fish underwater, calculate vectors—then plummet vertiginously, impossibly, and impossibly rise back up.
Somehow, too, this heap of mismatched wood will be made to sail and hunt fish. The new pirogue will fit two gillnets, even three, of different caliber. She will fit a lot of fish in her holds. What master shipwright Ousmane Ndoye is building: a possibility, a promise, a hope.
* * *
Master Ndoye is a large man, with large hands. He has three teeth. He is sixty-three years old. He learned boatbuilding from his father and uncles as a child, and he has been a shipwright for more than half a century. He speaks Wolof and English and French, but he speaks little: Anna, hammer. Anna, nails. It’s a hot day, bad for circulation.
He lives in Mbour, half an hour north of Joal by shared taxi, but he is charging less for his work than Joal carpenters because he and Amadou Souaré go way back, to the time before Ndongo was born.
We get the same age, Master Ndoye says, in English, rubs his thick grooved forefingers together to indicate closeness. I mishear: We get marriage.
Master Ndoye built Amadou’s first pirogue. He will rebuild the Ndaye Adja Kane.
His tools are two hammers, a pair of pliers, a mallet, an ax, a small handsaw, a ratchet strap. His drill is a loaner from a hardware store a hundred yards inland, on Joal’s single asphalt street—the longest one, the only one with a name, Boulevard Jean Baptiste Collin, after the town’s first post-independence mayor, a white Frenchman; the street parallels the shoreline all the way to the bridge to Fadiouth. The selfsame shop rents Master Ndoye a socket into which to plug the drill, and the three extension cords that connect it to power. From time to time horses and small livestock uncouple the extension cords.
Sometimes one of his carpenter sons comes by to help, but assistance mostly comes from whoever happens to be around: Ndongo; fishermen who are not at sea that day; children who come to gawk after school; me. He is patient with ineptitude: he has taught more than fifty shipwrights all over West Africa’s coast north of the equator. His apprentices have taught apprentices of their own. Master Ndoye is the grandfather of an untold fleet of boats that catch your seafood from Nouakchott to Conakry. You can tell their multitudes by his stamp: a slender semioval cutout at the bottom of the bowsprit.
A West African fishing pirogue is carvel-built, constructed without a frame. Clammers and cuttlefish jiggers, narrow and light, are usually built with abachi, cheap white wood that does not last very long in seawater; luthiers use it to give electric guitars a bright, flinty sound, and a tincture made from its bark is said to reduce edema in pregnant women. Larger pirogues are built with Senegal mahogany, Khaya senegalensis, a redwood that grows in Casamance. The Dufana pirogue, an eight-thousand-year-old dugout boat discovered in Nigeria, was built with such redwood.
Senegal mahogany’s bitter bark is said to cure leprosy and insanity and smallpox, its glabrous leaves malaria, its small white pedicellate flowers syphilis, its flat-winged seeds fever. It is being logged mercilessly for illegal export to China, where factories build fancy furniture with it. It is not reforested. They say it may vanish from Senegal completely before the end of the decade: overexploited wood to hunt overexploited fish. And then what? Will the pirogues be rethought? Will fishing?
The carpenter says, in English:
I want Ndongo to have a very nice boat. A very nice boat. Ndongo is a very fine man.
He rabbets the keel with an ax. Beneath the weathered surface the wood is the color of tuna flesh. He paces its length, traces the bearding line with a forefinger, chews his bare gums, marks something with a scrap of pink tailor’s chalk.
Anna, drill.
He drills holes in the bearding lines; here he will attach the garboards, which form the bottom level of a boat’s hull. Tars the ends of metal dowels, each two feet long, and hammers them into the holes obliquely upward. Precision-chisels a plank of new redwood to make a mortis, drills holes in that. This will be the port garboard. The angle of the holes determines the gradient at which the planking will project upward from the keel. He calculates it by feel.
Anna, hold.
He beads the garboard at a bevel onto the keel. Pounds it flush to the keel with a mallet. My shoulders lurch with each strike.
Old fishermen circle the boat. Toothless, in long pale boubous and sunglasses. They place their palms on the keel, caress it, give it a slap.
A thick keel is good, says Pa Bara Diop.
This is good, a good thickness, but if it were thicker it would have made a better pirogue, says Pa Yagmar Kane.
Yes. It would have been able to carry more fish, says Pa Ousmane Sall.
Master Ndoye says nothing, his lips tight around a half dozen nails. The job should take two weeks, maybe three. Just in time for the night-fishing season, which opens on the first of December. Fishermen swear that once the night-fishing season begins, life will be good. There will be much more fish in the sea, more money in fishermen’s pockets to buy even more powerful motors and bigger nets with which to catch more and more and more. How can they be so sure? Because fish are always about to arrive, and wealth, like the sea, is always imminent.
But Amadou Souaré wants to reuse as much as possible the broken old wood from the shattered pirogue. He borrows from banks and begs middlemen for advances that always are too small. He scrimps. He scavenges for wood along the tideline. He buys cheap nails, which bend and break. He waits for a bigger catch, a better deal on wood. The construction will take two months.
* * *
Ndongo quit school and became a fisherman in sixth grade, when he was eleven. Listening to the teachers’ incomprehensible French was boring, listening to the jingle of coins in his pocket was not. By the time he was fifteen, Ousmane’s age, he was fed up with the sea, the fishing, with his father’s constant dictatorial nagging aboard. He asked Amadou’s permission to return to school.
My dad said, No way. You are my firstborn son; if I don’t have you, I don’t have anyone to fall back on. You are
a fisherman now. So I am a fisherman now.
That year Ndongo captained his father’s pirogue for the first time. He had to remember which fish prefer the sunless bottom bed at low tide and which disappear entirely for the two weeks bracketing a full moon to burrow into the gooey silt at the roots of the mangroves. He had to remember that a full moon always brings strong winds and confused seas; that wind also picks up just before the new moon, during the last three days of each Wolof month; that if cuttlefish fishermen find pomfret in their traps it means a storm is coming. That in hot weather fish rise to the surface and in cold weather fish cluster around something underwater: seagrass, shipwrecks. He had to learn the Prayer of Seven Waws and remember and repeat the words his father used to encourage the crew to cast and haul. Like men. Like men. Married by his father to his forefathers’ sea that ebbs and flows of its own heartrending accord. Like many unions on these shores an arranged marriage, indentured and indisputable. Each year following he would thread some new knowledge onto the old, the way he would thread new protective amulets onto his gris-gris belt: which caliber gillnet to buy in October for the petite yellowtail and round sardinella and which in February, when the larger, oilier Madeiran sardinella start running; how big fishing ships change the patterns of fish migration; how to use a GPS—though he has not used his in months; it is broken.