Fisherman's Blues

by Anna Badkhen

  Eh! Sometimes I want to leave the sea. It’s such hard work for so little pay. In the winter, when we start going to fish at night, we will leave before noon, cast net around five, and return by six in the morning. There will be only time to buy provisions and fuel for the next tour and head back out. Six months of night fishing, six months of that! Sometimes our eyes feel funny. But what would I do if I’m not a fisherman? All I know is this.

  A family hex, a genetic predilection.

  Ndongo is eating a po’boy with boiled potatoes and fried onions at a breakfast cabana halfway between Mbaar Kanené and Master Ndoye’s improvised shipyard. The vendor is the beautiful Mariama Boye. Twenty-five years ago Ndongo and Mariama’s husband, Gora Sall, the son of Pa Ousmane Sall, were oupas together; now each of them captains pirogues. From before sunrise until eleven or until the food runs out Mariama sells breakfast to fishermen here at Mbaar Atelier Taïf, named after Taïf the outboard motor mechanic who takes over the gazebo in the afternoon. Sailors swagger in to buy a sandwich or a cup of milky café Touba, to flirt with Mariama, make small talk, watch the sea.

  Hot today.

  Yes. But I feel like it’s cooling down.

  Well, it’s the end of October.

  Yes.

  Well.

  In November it will be cooler.

  Yes.

  Yes. When it gets cold I get asthma. I hear that the inhaler is addictive, so I try to stick with traditional medicine, some tinctures.

  I hear fish oil is good for asthma.

  Yes. Fish oil is good for everything, especially memory.

  Yes.

  The Souaré children come by. Moustapha, twelve years old, Ndongo’s nephew, likes history and is a diligent student. But his hair is natty and yesterday his teacher told him that he must cut it before he returns to school. When he came home, his father flew into a rage and said this was bullshit, no one is cutting Moustapha’s hair, ever, and if that means the kid is not going back to school, then so be it. Moustapha’s father is trouble. He drinks cheap fortified wine and smokes weed. He harasses Ndongo’s wives, especially Alassane, his first; now whenever Ndongo spends a night with one of his other wives, Alassane sleeps with a wooden club by her bed. Moustapha’s father spouts obscenities in the house. Once he was so foulmouthed the family had him arrested; the gendarmerie called Amadou Souaré to post bail. Moustapha wants to be a gendarme. Little Maguette wants to be a soldier. He has been back in school for a week now, in fourth grade. His older halfbrother Vieux will not go back to class: he wants to be a fisherman.

  Ousmane wants anything but the sea. He got good grades until, three years ago, the pirogue was shorthanded for a month and he had to go fishing with Ndongo. He had money for the first time in his life, and that was that. But now he is making inquiries. Could he return to public school after dropping out in sixth grade? How much would a private school cost? When do classes begin? Around his father he is listless and monosyllabic. He listens to Senegalese rap and picks his lip into a discolored bulging misery of new infected cracks. His grandmother Fatou Diop Diagne takes him to a marabout who prescribes an aloe vera salve and some prayers. Nothing helps.

  It’s a good thing if among the brothers there is one who is not a fisherman, Fatou says during one of her evening walks, a daily thirty-minute promenade along the shore her doctor has recommended for hypertension. A clean shot to the sea from the house where she lives with Amadou, his second wife, their many children and grandchildren and inlaws, and hired crew, which traditionally bunk and sup with their captain. When I ask her how many people live in the house she takes a minute to add numbers on the calculator of her cellphone, then announces the tally: thirty-eight.

  Fatou can see the ocean and some pirogues from the threshold of her compound. Four blocks to the sea down an alley of red soil studded with shells and caverned with deep green puddles many months old. There Fatou turns northward, walks briskly to the harbor along the tideline, surveys with barely a turn of her head the pandemonium of horsecarts, of rushing porters dripping wet with boxes of fish on their heads, of fishwives squatting on tarps beside piles of fish, of women selling charred corn on the cob and peanuts, and declares that there isn’t enough fish.

  You see? Fishing is too unreliable. You need to have an alternative. I would pick Ousmane to be that brother who does something else because he is the most intelligent of them all.

  Ndongo shrugs at the efforts to cure Ousmane’s lip. He says the boy’s real affliction is indolence. He’s not a hard worker, he says. Maguette and Vieux—they are hard workers. If they want to study I will be happy to pay for their education. But Ousmane, he is just lazy. I can’t even send him to other boats in good conscience because I need to teach him first to work harder.

  I think of my son, a boy on the cusp of adulthood struggling to adjust to university life on the other side of the Atlantic. Of my single-parent joys and heartaches during the years we did live together, of my regrets and pride now that we are apart. When is what we want for our children truly for their own good and for it alone—and when it is also for us, to reassure us that we have raised them properly, that we were good enough parents, to satisfy our vanity? Is there such a thing as selfless parental love? Do we take ownership of their successes and failures out of empathy and unalloyed affection, or do we see them as reflections of our own? Is it ever possible to know? Ndongo says:

  Maguette here—he gets really good grades. He is always among the top five of his class. In composition, for example: that boy’s a writer, like you! But Ousmane? He was so-so. All I ask of Ousmane is that he be serious—whether at work or at school. I believe in making an effort. Even if he isn’t good I want to see effort. I think he’ll go back to school, he’ll like it, then in two or three months he will lose interest. So we will discuss tonight.

  And Master Ndoye, who is waiting for Mariama Boye to pour him café Touba to go, adds: Children nowadays, they watch movies and want to live like they do in the West. But this is not the West. This is Senegal.

  * * *

  The next morning is Tamkharit, the day that commemorates the anniversary of the murder of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein ibn Ali during the Battle of Karbala. Arabs call it Ashura, the Tenth: the tenth day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic New Year. Fishermen consider this day a year’s beginning. First guest of the day: a toad. He appears on the narrow patch of floor of my rental room and sings happy songs of wet kingdoms.

  The rainy season should have been over a month ago. But this year it arrived two months late and now it refuses to end. Silver rain pours on the Petite Côte, on pirogues beached and anchored, darkens shell middens, drenches crews at sea. Farmers who already have harvested their crops and store them traditionally, unsheltered in the open, are in trouble.

  By midmorning the blood of sheep slaughtered in holiday sacrifice coagulates in deep browngreen puddles of rainwater, and in Joal’s two outdoor markets housewives tiptoe around soggy refuse to buy millet, onions, tomato paste, margarine, and milk for the holiday feast: oily homemade millet couscous soaked in milk and served on gigantic communal tin platters with a sauce of meat or onions. Evening alleys fill with trick-or-treating children. Oupas, blacksmiths, market porters, students, servant girls. Crossdressed, in whiteface and makeup. In the tentative light of sparse streetlamps they bang on plastic buckets and tin plates and dance on wet sand demanding millet and coins, beautiful pagan dances much older than Imam Ali or Islam. Adults watch from thresholds, from plastic armchairs and low wooden stools pulled into alleyways, clap, laugh. Later, the entire Muslim coast all the way to Cameroon bends over traditional Tamkharit dinners.

  The thirty-eight members of the Souaré household eat together under a waxing three-quarter moon cottonwooled in orange cloud. Ousmane is there, grimy and disgruntled after a day at sea. He never got up the nerve the night before to speak to his dad about returning to school. A
nd in the morning, when it rained and the whole world was a gray cloud, Ndongo roused him and ordered him to go fishing. And that was that.

  * * *

  The day after Tamkharit the fishermen stay home, digest last night’s meal, pick at leftovers. All morning the boats nuzzle the shore: the tide is going out. A black sea, an iron sea. The horizon is emerald against the dark gray sky. The world is motionless. A white heron stands on the stern of an anchored pirogue. Then it lifts off, rises against the green and the gray. Its flight is the only movement for miles, for latitudes.

  Only at night do clouds part, let the moon roll in.

  * * *

  Oh, Ndongo says. When I don’t go to sea my body feels weird. It feels restless.

  He is ashore again to monitor the work on the new pirogue. Master Ndoye may be the expert, but it is Ndongo who will pilot the boat, so he sticks around while his halfbrother Maguette takes the Sakhari Souaré fishing. He watches the shipwright butt planks that are not long enough with pieces he chops closely to fit. Helps him feather smaller cracks with splines, with wood chips, with flotsam. Ndongo and I vise ends of long mahogany boards between our shins as Master Ndoye saws or axes through the middle.

  Often, though, Ndongo will just stand there, turn that faraway gaze to the sea as it becomes turquoise then green then black then golden. Ndongo. Ndongo! He is gone. I think he lifts out of his body like a genie and goes off to skim the surface, watch for the whispered evanescence of change as fish schools pass just below, the miniature serial explosions of mullet jumping, mermaids and sea spirits driving sardinella back and forth.

  I understand the addiction. Within a month of arrival in Joal I find myself making daily rounds of calls to the pirogue captains I know, and to ones I don’t but whose phone numbers I have procured from friends. I ask when they are going to sea next. I set up rotating schedules: fourteen hours on a gillnetter, rest, sixteen hours on a purse seiner, rest, a day on a murex boat, repeat. My eyes adjust to the immensity of the ocean’s volume, my hips and knees to its multifaceted angularity. Onboard I forget to care about decimated fisheries, about my contribution to broken ecosystems, about pirogues skimming the rim of catastrophe. Everything screams to a point at the single insatiable fixation: to cast and haul, again and again. The ocean bewitches, reveals the ancient predator in me.

  The ocean, an old fisherman tells me, lays bare the avarice of man.

  * * *

  A dozen times, while Ndongo pines for open sea, I plead myself aboard a purse seiner that belongs to my next-door neighbor, Captain Mamour Ndiaye. He lives in a small house right on the beach in the very center of Joal. When his pirogue is at anchor he can see her through the front door. Six dark bedrooms fan out from a long and narrow roofless hallway like the pinnate leaves of the benzoil tree that gives the house afternoon shade. The house and the hallway are painted electric blue, cobalt, indigo; being inside makes you feel comfortably submerged. The structure is concrete mixed with clamshells and where the paint is chipped it exposes the shells, the same Senilia senilis that make up the Isle of Fadiouth. The hallway dead-ends at an apse stenciled with larger-than-life portraits of Serigne Mouhamadou Fallou Mbacké and Serigne Abdou Khadre Mbacké, caliphs of the Mouride Sufi brotherhood. When Mamour is home he usually sits in a molded plastic chair at the end of the hallway, beneath the apse, his back to the stern caliphs, his eyes on the sea, a small towel tied around his waist. A narrow stripe of graying hair runs up his muscular belly. He is forty-five.

  Mamour lives in the house with his second wife, Yacine Diop, their two children, his two teenage sons from his first marriage, and his perpetually rotating crew. Before they move on, deckies write their phone numbers in chalk on the indigo hallway walls. They sign the phone numbers with misspelled names. One has signed with an X. That is fine: the captain remembers who it was. The first time I ask to go to sea aboard his purse seiner he just shrugs and smiles. Anyone can come as long as they work and don’t get in the way. Besides, he is stoned. Shrugging and smiling come easiest.

  Mamour’s pirogue is the Mansor Sakho: sixty-nine feet, twenty crew, a sixty-horsepower outboard. Except for the gunwales, which were once painted red, she is turquoise inside and out. Turquoise is the color of all Mamour’s previous pirogues, and the pirogues his father and uncles once sailed in Mbour. The color sometimes of the sea and of the sky above the sea. The color to ward off evil spirits. One of the crew, Fily Sylla, says the color guarantees that the pirogue returns home safely and full of fish. Fily goes fishing in a blue and turquoise checkered tee shirt and blue swimming trunks for the same reason. He also wears a gris-gris belt around his waist. Everyone aboard wears gris-gris, including the pirogue. A ram’s horn wrapped in cloth hangs inside her bow. From the footrope of her black multifilament net dangle leather and plastic pouches with sanctified Koranic verses. The net is more than a mile long, sequined with fish scales from catches past. Its vertical wall is ten fathoms deep. The crew say it can wrap ten tons of fish at a haul. They have never hauled that much fish at once.

  The fishermen wade to the pirogue single file through the green surf of dawn holding plastic bags with their mess high above their heads. They shinny up the boomkin and into the stern, run up the gunwales to the net hold amidships, and instantly settle upon the folded net to scarf down their breakfasts. Entire baguettes split lengthwise and smeared with chocolate spread. Tiny plastic bags with runny peanut butter: chew off a corner and suck the contents out. Po’boys with murex or shrimp drowned in palm oil, with beans and spaghetti, with stewed onions, with fish and french fries and hardboiled eggs. Fily, who is nineteen and is training to become a professional wrestler, arranges his thunderous body on the net and methodically devours two po’boys with shrimp, beans, spaghetti, onions, boiled potatoes, and eggs all mixed together and topped with mayonnaise. My son is also nineteen, also voracious. It occurs to me that I miss cooking for him. Fily notices my breakfast—a hardboiled egg, a small green apple, a piece of baguette—and my stare.

  Anna! Have some of my breakfast!

  Oh no. I just want to watch. Thank you, though.

  The food is gone before Mamour has finished rigging the fuel line to the outboard. An oupa ducks into a hold and comes up with a brazier made of a steel car wheel filled with concrete. He douses two handfuls of charcoal in motor fuel and sets them ablaze to start a pot of strong sweet tea. In the morning twilight the flame aboard a sailing boat looks ceremonial, sacred. Mamour steers westward to a fishing ground twenty miles offshore. This will take a while. Men sprawl on the net, daydream, talk.

  Of all the places I’ve been I like Saint-Louis the best.

  Why?

  They have nice girls.

  Eh? Come on now, spill it out!

  Do you have a girl in Saint-Louis?

  He has a girl in every port!

  I don’t! But one time we went fishing to Mauritania and we stopped in Saint-Louis to refuel and pick up provisions and I really liked it there.

  But the sea is rough there.

  Oh, man, that’s man’s sea up there. You have to have a really good captain to sail to Mauritania from Saint-Louis.

  Amen amen amen.

  Beam sea. The scarlet crust of sunup over twelve-foot swells. Backlit, men bob atop the water, fall in and out of sleep, refill and pass around shot glasses of foamy tea. A largeheaded fisherman everyone calls Hôpital is passed out facedown on the net. In the purpling sky above, four black egrets and one white.

  Lie down on the net. Prop your shoulders against the pirogue’s blue ceiling to squint at the rising sun. With your upper back feel the swells beat against the hull. That soft ceaseless knocking, a metronome that pulses upon three-quarters of the world. Or maybe a countdown, begun four billion years back, after a rainy season that had lasted millions of years and that had rained an ocean covering the whole of Hadean Earth. What was it like after that cloud cover thinned, lifted, and the sun shon
e upon the water for the very first time?

  Done with the tea, the men fish out two handfuls of spiny murex shells from the bilge. Ancient Phoenicians—a coastal people who rarely ventured inland beyond ports and who created the world’s first phonemic alphabet that eventually evolved into most modern scripts—made dye from its slimy mauve mucus; the dye, Tyrian or royal purple, was used for ceremonial and regal garments. The biblical blue of the robes the high priest of the Temple of Jerusalem wore may have come from murex snails. Hellenic snails: Aristotle gave the predatory mollusk its name in the fourth century B.C. The ones in the bilge are yesterday’s bycatch, today’s tabnabs. The fishermen balance them on the smoldering coals of the brazier.

  The shells blacken. The men pick them off the coals, smash them against the gunwales, thumb out the rubbery flesh, lean overboard to rinse it in seawater. Fily hands me one. Onshore you buy fresh murex at the harbor already shelled, and the women who clean it pile the broken exoskeletons in two reeking heaps considerately downwind from the port trade. Murex sauce is a bistro staple; on the afternoons when I help my landlady with kitchen prep for the bistro she runs on Boulevard Jean Baptiste Collin, I chop several pounds of the boiled gristly mollusk into tiny cubes that stain my fingers lavender and violet before she boils them again in oily turmeric sauce until the meat is bright yellow and tastes like oil-soaked rubber. Fishermen put this in their po’boys; my landlady packs murex sauce po’boys for my tabnabs and asks me to bring back fish for lunch, as she would her husband if he were still a fisherman. The grilled gastropod Fily gives me is entirely different: tubular, tender, pale pink, slightly charred on one side. It tastes sweet, salty, smoky all at once, like the mother sea.