Fisherman's Blues

by Anna Badkhen

  After the feast of Tamkharit, when Harbormaster Samb crosses Boulevard Jean Baptiste Collin and arrives at Adama’s house, the sorcerer is expecting him.

  * * *

  Anna. We are cooking the food. At seaside of the harbor. Come.

  The harbormaster speaks choppy, assertive English. He is large with large hands, most fingernails rotten. The ones that are not are very long and elegantly manicured. He favors gray robes and white leather babouche slippers. He keeps track of things: weather forecasts and boating accidents, pirogues flagged to Joal and their catch, sacrifices to the sea.

  At nine-thirty in the morning the harbor is a mild hum, a slow carousel of vendors selling peanuts and café Touba, of middlemen on their cellphones. A few boats roll in shoreline slop, moored to makeshift bollards of palm trunks, of driftwood, of beached pirogues. On the sand dark with fish blood and boat fuel and manure, boys unload a cartful of blue and white molded plastic chairs that have numbers handpainted on their backs, to keep track of the loaners. Some of these chairs come from my landlord’s house. The calm ocean is black to slate gray to pale green where it meets the sand, and there now Adama Sidy stands in a striped brown boubou and a baseball cap, with a shaggy miswak stick between his teeth. He is holding a calabash in his right hand and a bottle of fortified red wine in his left. He stares at the variegated sea. Calculating something. Or remembering. Having another vision maybe. Then he turns his back on the water and strides to the harbor building. There, on a terrace under the northern half of the seafacing tin awning, two dozen fishwives are preparing the sacrificial feast.

  A hundred pounds of millet to boil into runny lakh porridge, with almost as much sweet sauce of peanut butter and yogurt. A hundred pounds of onions to stew into a relish. Several hundred bonga shad: the fish will return to the sea deepfried to a lacy crisp. A hundred pounds of rice. The sea must be hungry. All the provisions are courtesy of the harbor, purchased by Harbormaster Samb with the money from the harbor’s treasury.

  The women work in circles: a peanut sauce mixing circle, a fish cleaning circle, an onion peeling circle, a rice sifting circle. In mermaid dresses and matching headwraps printed with fish, with butterflies, with politicians and saints and caliphs and birds and shrimp. Arranged on woven plastic mats like huge flower corolla. They whisk, peel, cut, gossip, joke, swat at flies. From time to time, one or two of the older fishwives rise slowly and shuffle over to check on the lakh that is boiling in two enormous cast-iron cauldrons balanced on log fires lit right on the concrete floor. Names are etched into the lids and bellies of the cauldrons: MATY-KANE. MAIMOUNA DIOKH. They are so large you can cook a whole calf in each. They have personalities; they deserve names. The lakh thickens, spits hot amber bubbles. The women stir it with blackened shovels they hold with both hands. Witches backlit by the sea, half submerged in steam, performing the oldest alchemy. When their husbands are angry and withholding, do they cook for them as well?

  The day grows hotter and the ocean turns bluegray, minutely speckled with barely perceptible wind. A pelican sits on it. Old men arrive, file onto the terrace through the doors of the harbor building tracing dark puddles of fishrot. More men walk up the stairs from the beach. They sit in the shade of the awning at the southern end of the terrace, separate from the women. The harbormaster shuttles between the men and the women, checks his wristwatch, consults with the sorcerer in whispers. He switches to French-inflected English to explain:

  We wanted to kill cow. But this year Adama Sidy—the fetish man—said cow is not good sacrifice. This year we do lakh, white rice, and fish. It is une prayer. Really God decides. But we hope for positive results.

  By half past ten, two hundred or more men have gathered, mostly old fishermen, and two or three dozen talibé boys. They turn their backs on the sea and face the wall of the harbor building. The wall is chipped blue, smeared with months-old fish blood. An altar. They intone the Koran, kneel in communal invocation. Someone passes around a tin platter with hard Mauritian dates. The women just keep working. Their cooking is their prayer.

  It was a woman’s cooking that tricked Ndiadian Ndiaye into becoming the first ruler of the Wolof. After the death of his father, the Almoravid chieftain Abou Bakr ibn Umar ibn Ibrahim ibn Turgut, who had come south from the Sahara and settled at the headwaters of the Senegal River in the eleventh century, Ndiadian Ndiaye’s widowed mother, the Fulani princess Fatoumata Sall, followed her late husband’s will and married their servant. Prissy and indignant at his mother’s remarriage, Ndiadian Ndiaye threw himself into the river and remained stubbornly afloat for seven years until he overheard a group of child fishers quarrelling over their catch and stepped in. Hearing of Ndiadian Ndiaye’s wise counsel, local adults caught him with fishnets, hauled him ashore, and begged him, this African Perseus, to become their ruler. Reluctant to put down roots, Ndiadian Ndiaye decided to outwit the villagers by feigning muteness. Until an astute young woman came out with a cooking pot and two stones, set up this lopsided kitchen in front of the prisoner, and pretended to try to cook.

  The bipod did not work, of course: it was not supposed to. The pot kept slipping off into the fire. Ndiadian Ndiaye watched until at last his patience grew so thin he could no longer hold his tongue. Wallahi, woman, use three stones! he said. And, realizing he had spoken, gave up and agreed to become the village king, the first king of the Jolof in the land of the Wolof.

  And it remains so: Water transports and converts; women hoodwink men into settling down by feigning weakness; when women work, men sit around and give advice unbidden; and, since even settled men are rarely home long enough, it falls to women to tend to domestic magic.

  * * *

  The ocean has Mami Wata and hundreds of lesser spirits, but anyone can have a protector genie. To procure one, you find a wooden post in your house, or plant one in the dirt, or select a particular tree, and every morning you pour some beer or milk at its base. After a few years you begin to feel a presence. Your genie has arrived. Now you have to take care of it, offer it sweets, whisper it prayers.

  Genii repay in kind. When Vieux Sene’s mother was younger, each time she would give birth a snake would appear in the rafters of the house and watch. It was the family protector genie. Vieux has not seen the genie snake in years, not since his mother became too old to have children. Ndongo’s mother, Fatou Diop Diagne, offers the genie widow of her great-grandfather lakh and milk whenever a girl child is born in the family, and in return the genie protects the girl from illness. Though protector genii prefer to liaise through women, on occasion a genie may choose a man to take care of it. Daouda Sarr says that in Palmarin there is a man whose grandmother was a caretaker for several protector genii. After the woman died the genii decided that her grandson would take her place, even though he was working in a different town and had no intention to return to Palmarin. So the genii made him very sick, forcing him to come to Palmarin to recuperate among family. When he arrived, his arms suddenly became very weak, so he could not go back to work, could not leave the village, had to stay and take care of the genii. Now he has gone a little bit mad.

  On the day of the sacrifice at the harbor Fatou Diop Diagne is in Dakar selling shrimp. She does not attend the ceremony; none of my fishermen friends do. Daouda Sarr tends to his sheep. Ndongo spends the day helping Master Ndoye and mending, with Vieux Sene’s help, a thirty-millimeter net, in anticipation of larger sardines, while Amadou Souaré, Pa Yagmar Kane, Pa Bara Diop, and Pa Ousmane Sall keep an eye on the working men, kvetch at the mbaar. Mamour Ndiaye goes to sea aboard the Mansor Sakho; he catches little.

  I cannot spot Lamine Ndong, the chef du village, at the harbor. When I ask him about it later he says:

  Perhaps I was there, perhaps I was not. I am eighty-four. I have troubles of memory.

  * * *

  The prayer is over at quarter past eleven. The supplicants turn their hands palm upward in request of a blessing. A gift, a bit of magic. Fis
h. They draw their fingers down their faces, seal their covenant with the merciful and omnipotent God.

  With plastic pitchers the women ladle the lakh into fifty aluminum basins, each large enough to bathe in, pour the peanut sauce on top. The offering of lakh comes before the ceebu jën because it is sugary and the sea has a sweet tooth. If you sacrifice the lakh and the rice and fish at the same time the sea will reject the savory oblation.

  They serve the sea first. Two talibé boys and a fishwife pick up a basin each and walk slowly and solemnly down the steps. They wade waist-deep into the water, their clothes now billowed, now plastered skintight by waves, tilt the basins into the limegreen surf, and dip the platters in the water to rinse them. Instantly there comes a rush, a shouting of directions and orders, and the townfolk on the terrace cluster around the remaining platters, the leftovers of the genii feast. They stand and squat and sit in mingled and fluid groups of five or six and dip their fingers in the runny cereal and with these stained fingers and palms wave at one another, beckon: Come eat with us! Eat with us! Eat here!

  Come eat! I squat next to four fishwives. The lakh is visceral on my fingers, like the insides of something holy or alive. It is delicious. The millet is silky sweet, and there is the gentle smoky tang of the peanut sauce and the sour creaminess of yogurt.

  After the adults finish eating, the talibé lick the basins clean. Forever hungry growing boys. They spend their days running in the streets in prankish packs, and they will be ravenous again by the time rice and fish are served, after the Zuhr.

  * * *

  At noon exactly Adama Sidy leads a procession to the tideline. He wades ankle-deep into the surf and turns the uncorked wine bottle upside down. The dark red pours into the green. He tosses underhand into the sea the bottle, then the cork. Bends down and scoops a calabash full of sanctified harbor water.

  All of a sudden the crowd behind him begins to clap. Stomp. Ululate. Then a fishwife rips off her headdress and blouse and runs into the water topless and whooping. Another. Ten, twenty, fifty men and women and boys run and wade into the sea, some stripping and some not, staggering and falling down like drunks, like lunatics, diving, clapping, laughing, lifting their palms to the sky, singing and speaking in tongues, clomping through the water in euphoria. They come out and dip their fingers in the calabash the sorcerer holds out to them, run the fingers across their faces, and proffer to the fetish man plastic bags and cupped palms and bonnets and baseball caps and fedoras: pour more please, more, more holy water to take home to lave themselves and their children and their relatives and neighbors. They run once more into the hallowed surf, fall in again, again.

  I recognize this rapture. I have read about it in a book. Martin Klein’s description of that spontaneous cleansing of the freed slaves in Saint-Louis almost two hundred years earlier: This is what that looked like. This is what that was. A baptism. A ritual as old as man’s life by the sea.

  I think: If I were the ocean I would barf up some sardines.

  * * *

  In the net hold of the Mansor Sakho fishermen chow down on their po’boys while Captain Mamour Ndiaye, in rolled-up gym pants and a black tanktop printed with neon-green marijuana leaves, prepares the pirogue for a day at sea. He wets a branch of sabara tree in seawater and whips the boat with it. He whips the gunwales and the bow. Inside the chain locker. Inside the net hold. The net itself. He grins and makes as if to whip Hôpital, who is asleep upon the net. Spotted, glaucous leaves fly.

  Sabara, Guiera senegalensis, is a panacea. You use its bitter leaves to treat malaria, leprosy, cancer, venereal diseases, epilepsy and impotence, to fatten cows and to increase lactation among young mothers. You crush its leaves with tamarind pulp to serve as a condiment, and you smoke the dry leaves to treat respiratory ailments. An infusion of sabara leaves treats Guinea worm, protects newborn babies against black magic, and brings wealth. Its galls treat fowlpox and hypertension and its roots treat insomnia and dysentery. It prevents vomiting in small doses and induces it in large. In large doses it is hallucinogenic.

  Mamour is giving the pirogue a no-holds-barred blessing because he is taking a day off today and is dispatching the Mansor Sakho with his younger brothers, Baye Djiby and Moustapha, as captain and first mate. He wants to make sure the boat is maximally protected for the trip.

  Moustapha appreciates his eldest brother’s thoughtfulness.

  Makes us feel luckier, he says.

  Moustapha is a melancholy man in his late thirties. He has lived in Spain for two years and speaks fluent Spanish and English in addition to the French and Wolof of the Petite Côte. For the first three months abroad he worked at a Nissan factory in Barcelona, on an assembly line. Then his contract ended and an economic crisis in Spain began, and there was no work. So he returned: there is always work on his brother’s boat. His wife and toddler daughter live with his parents in Mbour, and he gets to see them only once a week. That is hard. Life is so.

  * * *

  Cast off. Baye Djiby orders an oupa to helm, setting course for the pirogue’s usual fishing grounds, twenty or thirty miles east-southeast of Joal, then puts on headphones, pushes his baseball cap over his face, and lies down on the net. Violent smears of orange and red vein the dawn horizon.

  Men smoke joints, drink tea, chitchat. There was a match last night, and the conversation turns to traditional wrestling, laamb, a centuries-old pastime of fishers and farmers, Senegal’s national sport.

  Laamb’s objective is to lift the opponent off the ground and toss him outside the sandy ring, or at least to hold his head or back or both hands and knees to the sand. It allows strikes and punches to the head and face. Televised matches pack stadiums and are hours-long sideshow extravaganzas with bush doctors, marabouts, musicians, sponsors, multicolored protective baths, and eldritch rituals and dances of intimidation and swank. Most fights last less than a minute. Often, a fight looks like two gargantuan men crocheted in amulets slapping at each other like cats for many long beats—then suddenly one is on the ground getting his face pulped. Top-tier wrestlers train in Europe or North America and make hundreds of thousands of dollars per fight. The most opulent seaside villas in Joal and all along the Petite Côte belong to laamb wrestlers. The most powerful marabouts are the ones in wrestlers’ employ.

  The Museum of African Arts, in Dakar, dedicates half of its exhibition space to laamb. There are some portraits of famous fighters. Serigne Ousmane Dia, known as Bombardier. Mamadou Sakho, known as Balla Gaye the Second or Double Less or the Lion of Guédiawaye. Mohammed Ndao, known as Tyson. Joal’s own Yakhya Diop, known as Yékini, he of the famous uppercut. But mostly, it is an exhibit of gris-gris.

  A knotted yarn rosary Alioune Ndour used in 1982 “to blow upon while reciting incantations to paralyze the adversary” and a white cotton rope dipped at measured intervals in something brown—blood?—Ndour wore that same year. Mamadou Ndong’s armband of rope and driftwood, from 1977, which he wore “before going to fight or to ward off bad luck.” Thick cotton belts basted together roughly with contrasting thread stuffed with something; anything. Rams’ horns wrapped in red cloth. Scores of leather bracelets, anklets, knotted belts of homespun wool, coils of leather gris-gris twisted into cords many yards long. Cowrie shells sewn onto cotton, onto leather belts. A desiccated head of a rooster, its beak half-open, which Baye Gueye used in 1973 to discern his opponent’s plan of attack.

  I know this for a fact, Balla Gaye uses very strong magic to win, says young Issa Sow, who left his cattle in the heartland to become a fisherman, and whom everyone onboard calls Fulani.

  Yeah. He uses bones of babies, says Fily Sylla, the aspiring wrestler.

  Bullshit! says Modou Fall, the brother of Captain Mamour Ndiaye’s wife. Where would he get bones of babies?

  It’s easy to get them here. You go to the cemetery, find the little graves, dig them up.

  Yeah, I hear that’s why after a match Balla
Gaye gets on a pirogue to change so that no one sees him taking off his gris-gris.

  Fily says:

  I apprenticed with Eumeu Sène once. One time before a match he had us catch nine live dogs. Then he had them laid out in a row and stepped over each of them, to win.

  Laamb, man.

  Yeah, nasty stuff.

  It’s not the wrestlers competing; it’s their marabouts’ magic competing.

  The Mansor Sakho herself is named after a marabout who once worked for Yékini. They say he betrayed Yékini and helped Balla Gaye the Second win the fabled Dakar match in 2012 that ended Yékini’s two-decade reign as Senegal’s champion. After Balla Gaye’s stunning upset the marabout Mansor Sakho fell out of favor with Yékini. He remains Captain Mamour’s friend.

  For two years after that upset Balla Gaye the Second was the King of Arenas. He would strut into sportsplex rings trussed in amulets and wrapped in Koranic suras inscribed on homespun cloth in magic-spiked ink. Around him coaches would dance and marabouts would pour over his head potions that, it is said, contained lion hair and gazelle milk. He would stare his opponents in the face and mouth spells. Still, his title was shortlived: two years later, Bombardier pinned the champion to the same Dakar sand in thirty seconds; and the year following, in that very stadium, Eumeu Sène pulped his face less than a minute into the match people now call the Shock. Who knows if the winners had better form or stronger magic?

  Do you believe in magic?