by Anna Badkhen
The Mansor Sakho casts four times. The net slips overboard to port and the pirogue circles counterclockwise until the yellow floats of the seine line up in a broad hoop. Then the men grab the cinchline strung through the rusted steel rings at the bottom of the net and begin to haul.
A purse seine’s cinchline is three inches thick. It tightens the bottom of the net like a drawstring, trapping the catch inside. You haul this line against the pull of the net, the drag of the current, the line’s own waterlogged weight. This work is so hard the fishermen fall backward after each pull. Their hands are more calloused then the soles of my feet. I bail bilgefuls of seawater mixed with their sweat.
The fishermen ululate and knock into one another and swear and sing up the fish:
Haul like a madman!—Yeah!—Work like a donkey!—Yeah!—Work like a lion!—Hey!—Work, motherfucker!—Hey!—Don’t be lazy!—And haul it haul it haul it yeah!
Their favorite rounds. In the stern, Mamour empties two sandbags into the sea to muddle the water and disorient the fish, stomps on the burden boards. The men’s shrieking shanty is no longer workmanlike but ecstatic, orgasmic almost, dissolving into a shouted barrage of encouragements and nonsensical oaths—
Come on, baby!
Last night I fucked my girlfriend, I was hard all night!
Eh, ¿que paso?
Eh, take no pity on that net!
Heave-ho!
—then gathering once more into rhythmic song until the net is cinched at last and someone ties the cinchline to the turquoise shapeless figurehead axed out of a redwood log and the men fall back into the holds, collapse onto one another, breathe.
After a few minutes the crew slowly disentangle, stand up, take long drinks of water from one of the two large jerrycans the Mansor Sakho carries aboard. Then they strip down to their skivvies and douse themselves with seawater from the bailing cans made out of containers that once held cooking oil, and some jump overboard squealing with pleasure and some stand on the starboard gunwale pissing downwind, away from the swimmers and the net. Eventually all return to midships, grab their mess bags from the stern. They are hungry again. They mix drinking water with the homemade millet couscous women sell along the shore before sunrise. The couscous is soursmelling and gritty like wet cement. Some add powdered milk and sugar. Hôpital mixes his with seawater. When he began to fish twenty-three years ago he would give unsolicited medical advice, earning his nickname; now he talks little, and when he is not hauling net he smokes pot or eats or sleeps. The crew roll joints. Mamour is on his fifth. He does not pass them, smokes alone. Aphasic by now, he tosses his chin to signal the crew, and they get up and haul net. Ten fathoms of mystery twinkle below.
Men sing.
I know Muhammad—work like a donkey—there’s a woman at the mbaar—there’s a white woman in the boat—there’s a white woman in the net—a girl can’t refuse a man—I’ve got many mouths to feed . . .
A sole sardine, no larger than a palm, floats white belly-up to the surface. Men stop singing, just haul, exhale loudly as they pull on the floatline. It takes a crew of twenty men half an hour to haul a mile-long seine.
Wait for it.
When the black mass of the seine emerges in full it holds no sardines. A few halfbeaks. Several murex shells, pink like tongue. Either the Mansor Sakho missed the school entirely or else the fish were so small they twisted right through the fine mesh. The crew fall back down on the net. More joints. More snacks. The swells have turned into fast chop and the oupa, a thirteen-year-old named Adama, is sick over the starboard gunwale. Adama is a village boy, a farmboy. This is his third day at sea.
When I first went to sea I was also seasick, says Mamour.
In some seas even the most experienced fishermen are seasick, says Hôpital.
It’s the fish smell, says Pa Pape Ndiaye, Mamour’s tiny and toothless first mate.
What fish smell, old man? There’s no fish.
This kind of chop brings fish, Mamour says.
On her third cast of the day the Mansor Sakho hauls a few boxes of round sardinella. In her wake the pearly plumes of broken fish scales swirl like nail polish and the bail is dark with fish blood. A brick-red seahorse, a rescue from the seine, wraps around my wrist and fingers needily, forcefully, like an infant.
* * *
The sun falls toward a white western sea. The desperate boat pivots and casts her net two miles inside the sanctuary off Joal’s coast.
Make it fast, boys, we’re not supposed to be here! Mamour tells the crew.
They sing under their breath now. After they have cinched the seine they gather to port and lean over the gunwale and silently watch. Divining the haul.
Nothing.
The pirogue speeds to her anchorage. The subdued crew eat leftover couscous, drink more tea, roll more joints.
If we see a sea turtle we will catch it and sell it, says Hôpital.
No, man. It’s illegal to catch sea turtles.
* * *
At the harbor the bedlam of fishwives and porters briefly encircles the Mansor Sakho. While the captain negotiates the fish price a horsecart driver whips Pa Pape Ndiaye in the nuts with a riding crop. The old man doubles over, hissing promises of revenge, but no one pays much attention to the altercation, and when I ask him what had brought it on he just smiles. The sun sets and the sea pales to a yellowish mother-of-pearl, and the wind suddenly blows cold. In the dying sky, the first swallows of the season somersault in hunt.
* * *
Noon at the Souarés’ dry dock. Ever the bargain hunter, Amadou has procured some cheap mahogany from a friend. The boards have been sitting on the beach in the sun for months. They are narrow and dry, infested with ants. The carpenter kerfs one anyway, dowels it onto the port garboard, slings a ratchet strap over it and the starboard, cranks the ratchet. The dry board snaps. Master Ndoye sucks his gums and retreats to the mbaar to pray the Zuhr. Amadou does not show he has noticed, leads the prayer.
Cheap old fart, Ndongo mutters.
He orders Ousmane inside the boat, tells him to collect loose nails and dowels and sort them by size. The boat is propped up on three palm trunks, a sandbag, and, at the bow, two old boards from some other broken pirogue, dug into the beach at an angle and nailed at their vertex to the keel as a support.
With his right pinkie Ndongo stirs a pinch of yellow powder into a shot glass of tepid water. Ground mimosa bark, against stomachache and Satan. Also against tetanus: there are many rusty nails about, and no one is wearing shoes. You never do inside a boat, just as you never wear shoes inside a house or a mosque. If you apply a mimosa bark poultice to a cut, the wound will leave no scar. If you keep mimosa bark in your room, no vampires will enter. I take a sip.
* * *
At six o’clock, three boys wearing bluejeans and blue tee shirts scramble into the Mama Woly Thior, a hundred-and-thirty-foot beached pirogue awaiting a paint job between the tideline and Mbaar Kanené. They are brothers; the oldest is ten. They tie two lengths of line three inches thick to the purse seiner’s center thwarts, chuck the loose ends over to port, rappel down. They knot thick figure eights at the bottom of the lines, for seats. Then two of them straddle the knots and, coordinating their start times with the focus and seriousness of children at play, they begin to swing.
I watch.
Then I can no longer watch.
May I?
Of course!
I hike up my skirt and mount one of the lines. That sweet delay in the diaphragm, the nag of the ribcage rushing ahead of the heart. That pelagic rocking, that imitated flight, that odd momentary deafness that comes with each forward thrust: sensations that seem remembered, recovered almost, from way before the swings of my childhood. Like the recollection of Atlantis—the mysterious sunken continent that, had it ever been real, would have been what we now know as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, underwater for at
least sixty million years and so able to exist only in our pre-memory, cellular memory. The impression of being rocked by the ocean.
I swing. The world ebbs and flows, flips, the pink glow of sunset flashes on a seagull’s wing above, below. The Souarés’ unfinished pirogue swings in her dry dock upon the oscillating sand. Out of the corner of my eye I see Daouda Sarr’s beached boat, the Stacko Mbacké: it is full of kids and they jostle for the bowsprit, play king of the boat, yell: My boat my boat my boat my boat! The shore is ravenously, outrageously alive. The kings of the boat laugh. The boys on the rope swing laugh. I laugh. I am a child: on the ocean we all are, forever suspended on its timeless, placeless swing.
* * *
The storm that destroyed the Souarés’ pirogue also broke two of the four flagpoles that displayed coastal warning flags in Joal. Now one advisory flag flies from the veranda of the little green seaside mosque in the center of town. The mosque has no name, but people call it Joalis Mosque, after the nearest landmark, the nightclub Joalis, just down the block. Our Lady of the Disco. Inside the veranda there are benches, and from the ceiling hangs a small section of a purse seine stuffed with teapots, tea glasses, prayer rugs. Outside, near the painted pirogue boards stuck into the sand to support neighborhood laundry lines, is a small smithy where two teenage boys forge kedges and cuttlefish traps out of rebar. Joal’s harbormaster, Ibrahima Samb, who lives nearby, passes the blacksmiths twice daily to hoist the Joalis Mosque flag himself after receiving marine forecasts from the state meteorological service in Dakar. Green, yellow, red. Harbormaster Samb’s younger brother, a fisherman, perished at sea two years ago. That was before the flags.
The other flag flies on the beach behind the town hospital, by the southernmost town mbaar, the one called Mbaar Sarrené, where few pirogues are moored and where family homes give way to the sprawling walled villas of white vacationers from Europe. It is hitched to an electric pole. Harbormaster Samb is not sure who flies that flag; he forwards the weather advisory, by text message, to a few fishermen who live around there, but the flags are rarely in sync. Anyway, most fishermen rely on the knowledge of weather patterns and lunar cycles they have inherited from their fathers and mentors. They say such knowledge is more precise, and much more useful. Also, those who have television can get the official weather advisory after the evening news.
Neither the marine forecast nor the traditional knowledge predict the freak wave that one early November night hoists Vieux Sene’s gillnetter, the Cheikh Sadbou, and slams her upside down into the hardpacked sand at low tide. Vieux arrives at the shore in midmorning to find her bow broken. He only just has repaired the pirogue after saving up for months. He put her in the water a few days before. He has not even taken her out to sea yet. It is a beautiful day, the sea is calm and mirrorlike, soft like a lover’s belly. The world shimmers, rises and falls, gives and takes, turns.
Four
The housegirl Fatou, harelipped, highstrung, and disliked, cleans mounds of sardinella and bonga shad for my landlady’s bistro. The bistro stays open past midnight, is busiest late. Night after night on a low wooden stool in the outdoor kitchen outside my rental room she cleans. Fish blood runs down her knees and between her toes and sluices down the groutwork where the yard tilts toward the exterior wall of the compound painted with flamingos and sea turtles. The mural is invisible in the night, but even after dark clouds of blowflies swarm to Fatou’s housework. The single fluorescent light tints the fish blue, the blood black. The girl wipes fish scales on her cornrows, croons an old folksong: A Serer goes to sea / goodbye, my love, I will be a fisherman / a Serer goes to sea / goodbye, my love, I will miss you.
Two blocks away great white egrets fold themselves for the night into the tallest branches of an old baobab tree.
* * *
Morning rushes in with a sheen of birds. At the northwest tip of the Isle of Fadiouth a horsecart squishes through a slurry of pig shit and seashell and lumbers up a wooden bridge. It carries one passenger.
The cart rattles past the white shell mound of the cemetery and down a muddy laterite road that runs through the mangroves. They say hyenas live in the mangroves now that the bush is ravaged by systemic drought and man. No hyenas come out to greet the horsecart, but at its approach a hundred weavers explode out of the sole acacia tree that grows among the mangroves.
The cart’s passenger is eighty-four years old, wilted and small, in a white skullcap, a soiled white boubou down to his knees, white loose cotton trousers, and black foam flipflops with white stripes. The stubble on his face, too, is white. He is Simon Ndiaré Ndiaye, King of the Sea. He is headed away from the coast, to the bush, to the house of termites. He is carrying a plastic bag full of millet.
The road splits and curves and after an hour or so the cart is out of the mudflats. The land here is very dry and red. There are thick baobab trees, tall doum palms, soggy bales of millet straw, termite mounds. At a spot only he knows, a spot his maternal grandfather taught him when he was a child, King of the Sea dismounts and shuffles toward the mounds. There, he pours the millet on the ground and speaks to the termites.
Termites, he says. His voice is a croak, a rasp. Termites. You have to travel far to find millet. But today I got you this millet and brought it close to your home. In return I want you to bring fish close to the fishermen. I leave you this millet here and I want you to send fish to the sea. I am buying your service. It is a fair exchange.
Termites are like humans. They populate every continent except Antarctica. They often occupy the same mounds for centuries, though termite queens rarely live longer than fifty years. Even after the insects leave, their cemented structures remain, outlandish sandcastles with minarets and spires, some as tall as granaries, some shaped like tombstones and mysteriously oriented north to south. One mound, in the Congo, has been carbon-dated to two thousand and two hundred years. As old as Paris and Bratislava, as old as Eratosthenes’s calculation of the circumference of the Earth. People in Southeast Asia come to termite mounds to pray for health and luck, Aboriginal Australians use them for witchcraft, Hindus bedeck them into shrines. They are expiatory temples for generations of humans all over the world, Sagrada Famílias of the bush.
After making his plea, King of the Sea collects some soil from the termite mounds, puts it in his plastic bag, shambles back to the horsecart, returns to Fadiouth. At the small island market he buys catfish, sardine, ray, shark, monkfish, any other kind of fish on sale, one of each, and takes them to the small adobe house that he shares with his only wife and that he has decorated with a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. He cuts off the tail fins and divides the soil from the termite mounds into two parts. He mixes the fish tails with one part of the soil and waits for low tide. Then he walks to the ocean. He walks slowly because he can barely unbend.
He puts the soil he has mixed with the fish tails in the water. He puts the rest of the soil at the wrackline so the sea can take it when high tide comes: seconds, dessert. Then he wades into the water himself.
King of the Sea must always wear white and never spend a night outside Fadiouth. He is elected for life by a congress of elders of the Diakhanora, a vast matrilineal clan of keepers of the sea who choose the king from among Diakhanora men. Centuries ago the Diakhanora may have been fishermen; now they are farmers, engineers, civil servants, bus drivers, teachers. After the death of the previous King of the Sea, a Diakhanora delegation came from Dakar and told Simon it was his turn.
Simon Ndiaré Ndiaye said no. He is Christian. One of his sons is a Catholic priest in Joal. King of the Sea is a pagan tradition, it goes against his faith. For three years, the sea had no king.
It was his priest son who changed the old man’s mind. He said this:
If you become King of the Sea and say a special prayer and fish come, they won’t be just for you, not just for Joal and Fadiouth, but for all of the sea, all the fishermen, and all the people in the world w
ho depend on these fish. It is not a sin.
So Simon agreed. Now he must ask the termites to calm the sea when it is rowdy, make it plentiful when it is empty. In exchange for donations of fish, money, and fortified red wine he gives fishermen soil from the termite mounds, to sprinkle in their nets, stash inside their sinkers, hide inside their pirogues, attract fish. He is passing on his magical knowledge to his matrilineal cousins. If there is another King of the Sea in the world he has never heard of him.
After his bath in the ocean Simon prays again. He asks Jesus Christ to help all the fishermen. He reminds Christ that He Himself has been a fisherman and that He once helped fishermen fill their nets in the Sea of Galilee. Simon reasons that He can help fishermen fill their nets again. Amen.
* * *
Around the same time, in a large house on the northeast edge of Joal, where pale sand dunes grow out of an iridescent sludge of rotting rainwater, the sorcerer Adama Sidy begins to have visions. Of a sea troubled, an angry sea. Of sacrifices of sweet millet lakh and ceebu jën, performed by the town’s fishermen under his supervision. The visions persist daily.
The sorcerer receives me in his bedroom. Its furniture is outsize. A huge wardrobe, a massive matrimonial bed, stacks and stacks of enameled steel cooking pots. He directs me to one of the two big ugly upholstered armchairs, then lies down on the floor to talk. He is wearing only green polyester gym pants. A tall man in his middle age. His torso looks soft, puffy almost: he is not a fisherman. He is worrying something in his mouth, a piece of kola nut, or a rock. A fish bone maybe. His room smells like fish. Everything in Joal smells like fish, even my pillow.
What he tells me is vague, abstract. Visions of troubles. Visions of sacrifice. Making peace with the sea. God willing. After some time he stops talking and recedes into a smile. His tongue works around that thing in his mouth. As if there is no language yet for what he knows.