Fisherman's Blues

by Anna Badkhen

  Sometimes. Do you?

  No, man. I don’t.

  Bullshit! What about that time you had a bottle of holy water and sprayed it all over the boat?

  That was for protection from the evil eye! It wasn’t magic, it was real, because my parents gave it to me.

  Magic, says Issa Fulani. He leans back on the net, closes his eyes, lets the ocean rock him. He keeps a sewing needle, for protection, next to a pack of cigarettes inside the sweatband of his faux suede hat. He misses to tears his cows and his young wife, who is not yet pregnant because he married her right before he headed off to sea. He is here because the Sahel has been in drought for years and cattle in the hinterlands no longer give enough milk to support a family.

  They say if a pregnant woman sees someone eating something she cannot afford, and craves it, and at that moment of craving touches herself somewhere—on the belly, on a forearm—then when the baby is born the corresponding spot on the baby’s body—the belly, the forearm—will have a spot, a birthmark. Issa’s wife must want for nothing, especially when she is with his child.

  * * *

  At eleven in the morning the Mansor Sakho approaches her fishing grounds. Other purse seiners are already about. Baye Djiby, the captain, who has been listening to the radio on his headphones since castoff, stands up. The crew rise also and stand on gunwales, on thwarts. Watch the sea.

  Left arm tentatively up. Right arm. The surface puckers and streams, and my arms, too, involuntarily fly up—not so much an indication of fish or an alert as a greeting, an acknowledgment that we are passing one another in this ocean. Baye Djiby lies back down, adjusts his headphones. Too many other pirogues here. Hauling net is too exhausting to try and fail. He would rather cast once and haul a full seine, this way his men will be less tired. So he tells the helmsman full speed ahead, for now.

  On the horizon, broad on the port bow, a large foreign trawler, flat and two-dimensional, like a shadow, a stage prop. A portent. We steer toward it, then north of it. It disappears. So do the pirogues and the fish schools.

  The Mansor Sakho has used up a five-gallon jerrycan of fuel to get this far offshore. Baye Djiby whistles and an oupa, a new kid in his late teens, runs astern with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He unscrews the top off a full jerrycan, thumbs the piece of plastic bag that seals it, tosses it in the sea to starboard. Paisley plumes bloom on the green surface; my legs are splashed with gasoil mixture. He pulls the fuel line from the spent jerrycan and sinks it into the one he has just opened, tightens the lid, prances back amidships, puffing on his cigarette all the while.

  Then, at one o’clock, the hands fly up: A school! A school! The captain whistles again and the crew cast the seine and cinch the purse line.

  * * *

  Men haul net.

  Get ’er—get ’er—get ’er—get ’er!

  Haul it!

  Kill the fish!

  Go in pairs, go in pairs!

  Work like lions!

  Work like a donkey!

  Haul the motherfucking net, motherfucker, by the holy Koran!

  The net is white with fish!

  They haul and blaspheme and jeer and sing the hortatory chants they have heard on the many boats they crewed before up and down the coast, and they haul harder and whack the gunwales with burden boards, and three or four men dive into the water and beat it fiendishly, take out on the sea all the savage violence it does to them, mete out a merciless ceremonial punishment that at this very moment is replicated by the crews of thousands of other pirogues all along the seaboard.

  Then you hear it.

  Over the yelling and the whistling of the fishermen, over the idling of the motor, over the knocking and the splashing, you hear: fish pelting inside the surfacing net like rain.

  When you haul a full seine of sardines out of the water the fish thrash so hard they spray the entire pirogue with water and seaweed and scales. When you tip the seine into the pirogue the fish sluice down into the holds with a deafening rustle like an enormous flock of birds awing. Passenger pigeons must have sounded like this as they passed over the American Midwest, before man shot them all out of the sky. In the boat the fish continue to throb for minutes.

  On the way back to shore, Moustapha and I lie on the wet net side by side. Such a cloudless sky above us. Such a fickle sea below.

  Do you think, I ask, that the sacrifice the old fishermen performed at the harbor the other day had anything to do with the haul?

  I don’t know. Maybe there were less fish before the sacrifice. It seems to me that after the sacrifice there have been more. But I don’t know if it’s because of the sacrifice. What I think is, Anna, it’s because we believe in the sacrifice that we are getting more fish now.

  But the sea is a picky eater. It chooses its sacrifice. Four days after the ceremony, it swallows Mansour “Action” Ndoye, a young fisherman who lives with his mother three blocks from my house. He drowns off the coast of Djifer, a port village by the Point of Sangomar, the genii gathering place, where fishermen from Joal occasionally spend the night and offload their catch, and where crazy rip currents tongue and suck the Saloum River’s anabranches, assail the delta in an unbroken French kiss.

  Five

  Action was an oupa on a pursenet pirogue that slipped her mooring during the night and drifted to sea. In the morning he swam out to fetch her.

  They look for him all day. In gillnetters, in purse seiners, in trapsetters unsuited to the vigor of the outgoing riptide, the wooden boats daubed in primary colors like some maritime adaptation of clowns’ wagons, the desperate crews lean overboard to stare at a sea that is all surface. Maybe suddenly the sun slants just so and in a boat’s shadow the seabed shines up from ten fathoms below, clear and pale, speckled with colonies of mussels and clams and rocks. I have seen this happen. Then the boat turns, the ocean surface curtains, and the vision is gone.

  They have no net large enough to dredge the sea.

  * * *

  The day Action drowns near Djifer the tide in Joal casts ashore a man so decomposed that the only certain thing about him is that he was a fisherman: the corpse is wearing a green slicker and beige rubberized overalls. They bury him as soon as they find him, right on the beach.

  This often happens when men die at sea, say fishermen who play cards in the eucalyptus shade between the hospital and the weather advisory flagpole by Mbaar Sarrené. Been in the water too long, too rotten to take to the cemetery. Such graves line the coast, they say. There was one right there, under that flagpole, see? I look: the flag flops yellow, warns of troubled seas.

  But that grave is gone now.

  Where we buried that man, the sea took it. Now he’s in the ocean.

  Between here and the filao grove we probably buried ten people.

  More than that.

  Maybe more than that.

  I don’t remember his name.

  I don’t think we ever knew his name.

  Life is so.

  Come on, it’s your turn now.

  The men resume their card game: belote, a game of tricks. The wind smells of eucalyptus and raw fish. Bougainvillea branches droop over the stucco walls of white people’s vacation homes.

  “The sea is never pregnant,” a Wolof proverb goes: You can never predict when it will deliver. You can never predict what it will take, either. To live off the sea is to submit to its vagaries, to endure constantly the tension between desire and defeat.

  * * *

  I go looking for the grave of the man who washed up in the morning. I walk toward the weather flag and then turn south along the tideline.

  Spring tide under a roiling sky, black black surf. I study the shoreline. The shipwreck of it. A collage of windblown jacaranda blossoms, fishnet tangles, turtle excrement, brown plastic cups, fishheads, styrofoam floats studded with barnacles, fishhooks, and birdbones caught in bales of
maroon seaweed that is used to make an additive that clarifies your beer and stabilizes your toothpaste.

  Watch this elastic line erode. The onshore winds of the rainy season—warm, humid, oily with salt—abrade the adobes of Joal, winnow bricks out of their sockets. After a few years houses begin to look cellular, like honeycombs. Pause by the wall of my rental room: you can see minuscule white granules weather out in faint diaphanous streams, sand seeping back into sand. You can hear them. Or, much louder, in Palmarin, in Joal, in Saint-Louis, where entire walls crash down onto the beach. Then the offshore winds of the dry season come, push Africa into the ocean grain by grain.

  I pass a pack of dogs gnawing a dead goat. There is something terribly wrong with all the dogs here, the mangy, shorthaired yellow mutts that roam the town’s tideline and sleep in pirogues’ shade. They are broken, ripped up, maggoty around the ears and snouts. They skulk; when they lie in the road they barely raise their heads at passers-by. I am told they are mongrel descendants of the dogs the Portuguese slave traders brought along. A friend corrects me: the strays are probably laobé, an indigenous West African breed. Does it make any difference? The story is out; one way or another, the curs have become mnemonics for an unforgivable iniquity.

  A skinny man follows me from the belote game. His name is Serigne Fallou, like the second Mouride caliph.

  Serigne Fallou, are you a fisherman?

  One hundred percent! By the way, the nearest grave is between here and that mbaar. I helped bury the man in that grave. But the sea took it.

  At Mbaar Sarrené men mend net under a roof thatched with palm fronds. We salaam them, explain our quest. They respond by joking that a man who has only one wife will go to hell after death. Ha ha ha. And a man who dies a bachelor will burn in eternal fire. Ha ha ha! Many things on the shore seem non sequiturs to me.

  Serigne Fallou continues his guided tour of the mariners’ purgatory:

  There was another one here. We didn’t know him. We found him in the sea. I helped bury him, too. But the grave is no longer here. The sea took it.

  The sand is crusty above the tideline, striated with scrapings of crabs. Under our footfalls it collapses, implodes. I think of drowning, its irrevocable and crushing loneliness.

  How many fishermen have you helped bury?

  Maybe ten.

  Does that make it hard for you to go fishing?

  Not really. I’ve seen so many dead fishermen by now, it doesn’t really bother me.

  Serigne Fallou did not see this morning’s corpse. His neighbor found it. We telephone the neighbor, but he does not want to come to the shore to show us the spot. No, that would feel ghastly. It was ghastly in the morning already. The body was completely decomposed. It was lying facedown in the sand. All the hair was gone from its skull.

  Serigne Fallou peels off. I go on looking. Suddenly before me is a geyser: thousands of creamy white butterflies are hatching out of a nopal grove. The butterflies are the banded goldtip, Colotis eris eris. They are native to Senegal. Nopal is an American transplant, another relic of the slave trade. I recall a poem, say the lines out loud: “So, in the undergrowth, they came together, / butterflies and the bones of the dead.” It is okay to recite Neruda on the beach. On the tideline a few dozen yards away, a young athlete in a white singlet and blue gym shorts is singing, too, in English: “Wanna make up right now na na.”

  The fruit is ripe; I pick one, roll it in the sand with a broken cymbium shell to shuck the spines. On both sides of the ocean, prickly pear stains fingertips with juice that runs bloodred.

  I eat, I watch the butterflies, I continue down the shore.

  Then I see a grave in the filao grove, an elliptical shape topped with broken murex shells and trimmed with broken bricks. And then an unmarked bump in the sand cinched by dune creepers that reach their tendrils toward the ocean. And another, trussed to the shore by weathered brambles. And another unmarked rise, behind a young grove of Sodom’s apples, whose leaves offer protection against the genii that snatch the souls of newborn babies. And this, a bleached boneyard of long conch shells and two cracked brown plastic coffee cups—who lies here? Another, and another. Are these burial mounds? Accidental sand drifts? It does not matter. The fishermen’s grave is right here. Remorseless, greedy, eternally lapping against the shore.

  “Great mother of life, the sea,” wrote Rachel Carson. “The beginning and the end.” I shudder: Somewhere in the sea there is the man’s hair. And the hair and the bones of all the dead whose graves the sea has taken, whom it has taken to the grave. Things on Earth forever carry seaward. More than nine thousand cubic miles of water may flow into the sea each year, and with it billions of tons of salts, and millions of tons of plastic garbage, and bones mixed in the currents of riverwater and groundwater, migrating under our feet and paths and homes and kitchens. We are always walking on bones.

  * * *

  Our ancestors buried one another aboard ships, or buried ships alongside. More than four thousand years ago someone sealed into the ground at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza a carvel-planked solar barge one hundred and forty-three feet long: a funereal vessel that was never meant to sail in this world. We know it as the Khufu ship. Anglo-Saxons in the sixth and seventh centuries buried noblemen inside boats that appear seaworthy. Ahmad ibn Fadhlân, a tenth-century traveling merchant from Baghdad, wrote of a Viking cremation aboard the boat of a wealthy dead man in Russia. Also in the flames aboard this ark: his horses, cows, chickens, weapons, food, and a slave woman; before setting her on fire the mourners gang-raped, stabbed, and strangled her. They marked the site of the pyre with a birch post on which they wrote the man’s name, not the woman’s. For two millennia between the Nordic Bronze Age and the Viking Age, a thousand years before the Common Era and a thousand after, Scandinavians arranged stone slabs around some burial sites in the lanceolate shape of boats. Archaeologists call those stone ships.

  In Saint-Louis—the first capital of French West Africa, the colonial slaving center, the Venice of Senegal—a narrow cemetery stretches nearly a mile in the dunes of the western peninsula of Langue de Barbarie between fish smokers’ tarnished stands and the asphalt road of the harbor. One grave is bordered by pirogue planks, blues and reds and yellows yet unfaded. Maybe the pirogue’s owner is interred here. Or maybe this, too, was a wash-up, the ocean’s gruesome gift. The grave bears no name.

  I hold to my ear the shell I used to clean the prickly pear. I imagine I will hear some old maritime memories that have swirled into its spiral, curlicued there. But the conch only amplifies the immeasurable sound of emptiness: the indifferent sea that has shaped its curves, that has shaped our continents’ curves, that shapes our short unremembered lives and unmemorable deaths.

  * * *

  After lunch I visit my neighbor, Mamour’s second wife, Yacine. She is twenty-eight, a mother of four. Her body is long, flowing. She moves as if she is not serious about moving, as if every step is a joke, a tease she tosses at you. When she smiles it is as if she knows a secret for which you are too young.

  Yacine greets me with that smile. Her hair is straightened, with a blond highlight. Her mermaid skirt is a pattern of large pink shrimp on a green field. She takes me by the hand and walks me through her submarine blue hallway and offers me a plastic chair to sit in. She takes one for herself. She leaves the front door open. Mamour is not home from fishing yet. She moves my chair so that I, too, can watch the door.

  While we drink sweet tea with mint the western sea in the doorframe turns green then purple then the palest yellowish blue, then black. Mamour is very late today. Have you called him? Ha, he doesn’t have a phone. She has called the harbor, where boats unload their catch of the day. They said the Mansor Sakho has not yet arrived. Actually, let me call again. No, not there yet.

  Finally it is so dark the sea is just a vastness beyond the compound walls, a thick indigo void. Yacine straps her nine-month-old
girl, her youngest, to her back and moves her chair. In its place, at the farthest end of the hallway, under the portraits of the Mouride caliphs, she lays a plastic mat and covers it with a polyester blanket. She shucks off her sandals, steps onto the blanket, and begins to dance.

  Step step. Step step. It is for the baby, she explains. To quiet her down. But the girl, who is often whiny, has not made a sound this evening, not even a pout. Yacine dances facing the sea. Long-limbed, slow-bodied, like a queen. Step step. Step step. She looks at the door.

  My god, I think, she watches that door every day.

  It is past dinnertime when a teenage boy walks in, one of her husband’s crew. He took a taxi from the harbor. Thirteen boxes of sardine today, he reports, a good day. The pirogue is on her way home. Yacine just keeps on dancing. Step step. Step step. She does not change pace, does not take her eyes off the door.

  I have begun, on evening walks, to scan the moorings for familiar boats.

  * * *

  A waitress in a small fishing village upcoast takes my order—grilled shrimp, she recommends, delicious—then tells me her husband died at sea. What do you do with such knowledge? Lying there on the table before you: the salt and pepper shakers, the place mat, the plate of peanuts, and this. Idiotically, self-servingly you try to undo it, force it impossible: she’s much too young to have had a husband! No no, madame, she laughs, gracious, firm, rejecting your insensitive offer to erase her loss. No, it is true, I have two children, one is already in first grade, I’ll go tell the kitchen to get started on your order now—and you are left to fold and refold this new story of heartbreak like a napkin.

  * * *

  That day a purse seiner clips the Sakhari Souaré at sea. An accident, nothing major. She is in dry dock between Mbaar Kanené and Mbaar Atelier Taïf with a large gash in her port bow. In her chain locker a ramhorn gris-gris dangles on a length of red twine. Did it protect her from foundering altogether? Did it do anything at all? Ndongo finds a loaner, a twenty-six-foot pirogue. But when the crew arrive at the tideline the following morning before the sun they cannot spot her at first. Then they see in the surf the gleam of her gunwales. She is awash.