by Anna Badkhen
Did you see me sleep? I never sleep!
He begins to roll a joint, then changes his mind, puts the vial with dope back into the plastic bag he stashes under a thwart, lies down again, closes his eyes.
Hôpital trained as a carpenter but switched to fishing twenty-three years ago. He was about twenty then. He likes fishing better. Life is simpler. You smoke and work and eat and sleep and smoke and sleep again. You rock in the crib of the net hold.
* * *
At quarter to noon the pirogue sails again. Twenty-five miles off the coast of Sangomar a cricket starts in the stern, starts and stops, starts and stops. A stowaway. Cricket season began after the two funerals; the insects slam into my tiled floor at night and in the morning ants disassemble them and carry their parts toward the manger in dutiful funerary processions. Their bustle makes my tiny room feel crowded.
A small pirogue sails by, a trapsetter with a lone man aboard. He points: Fish that way.
Aboard the Mansor Sakho, arms wide apart: A school?
The man nods, points again: Yes, that way.
Mamour steers that way.
At two-thirty the men cast and the unfurling net, unused for a day, releases a stench of ammonia and fish oil and a swarm of blowflies and a butterfly or two. Black blowfly larvae fall to the bottom of the boat. The net sinks; an orange praying mantis bobs up, struggles on slender legs toward the boat in a fine slick of boat fuel.
Work, men, work!
Thank you, men! Thank you!
When you get paid the cash is yours to use!
If you keep it up we’ll be done quickly!
Work-work-work-work-work!
Men pass around a jerrycan of water—Don’t drink your fill! Have a sip then pass it on or we’ll run out!—then one, two, three men jump overboard and Mamour grabs the hammer and begins to whack the port gunwhale. Men knock with burden boards, the cinchrope rings clang, the motor smokes and rumbles. Under the black sea the trapped fish begin to glint. It takes fifteen minutes for all of them to pour into the hold. More than a ton of sardines. They slap, slap, calm. Men rinse off, roll joints, smoke, eat, smoke again. I bail. I have been sitting downwind of their pot smoke for so long that I am stoned.
* * *
Quarter to five, twelve nautical miles offshore, territorial waters boundary unmarked. The pirogue rocks lightly on following seas. Suddenly a swarm of creamy butterflies pours over her, fore to aft. A milky runnel of banded goldtips streams away from shore southward except for one, which turns at the stern and continues back toward Joal alongside the pirogue—a winged escort, an airborne protector genie, now sitting down on a gunwale, now lifting off again until it, too, breaks off and vanishes in the blue afternoon.
At half past five the sun is less than a palm above western sea, the harbor close, the fishermen quiet. Pa Pape Ndiaye stands up on a thwart to pray. He stands over the fish in the bilges, over the turquoise hull and the darkening ocean that buoys it. A shirtless old man, small and creased and very black in oversize rubber trousers and kneehigh rubber boots. He raises his palms to his ears, mouths his devotion, bows. Bows again. Then he lifts his hands to his face, palms downward, and whispers something onto his knuckles and in the grooves between them, and then blows his whispers away, down the thin misshapen fingers that have hauled net almost daily for almost fifty years, and blows them all the way into the sea. The gesture is so vulnerable and his face so delicately soft he is unbearable to watch.
Six
Nearly four billion years ago, the first life-forms appeared in Earth’s young seas. They could process inorganic materials into glucose, turn nonlife into life; scientists call such magic biopoiesis. Their molecules had accumulated enough chemical knowledge to make decisions based on their environment, which means life and free will originated in synchrony, possibly in gassy plumes of hydrothermal vents that conveyed heat from the planet’s molten innards to the water’s surface. “Barely over the intangible line that separates the non-living from the living,” Rachel Carson wrote of these initial organisms. Borderline beings, each an ecotone of its own.
Eons removed from those transitional creatures, we, too, contain our own borderlands, which we endlessly discover, establish, revise. A lifelong task: we shift them to accommodate a lover, guard them when they keep us whole, blot them out to remain open to wonderment. Such continuous impermanence informs our humanness; to probe it is introspection sublime. Maybe this is why I come aboard pirogues that belong both to our future and our past, ancient vessels that sail on the latest twostroke engines; why I help build one.
* * *
That weekend Joal falls quiet. Shorthanded boats rest at anchor. Half the town has left on an annual pilgrimage that commemorates the first arrest and exile of the founder of the Mouride Sufi brotherhood, Cheikh Amadou Bamba Mbacké, and takes his devotees to the holy city of Touba. The pilgrimage is called Magal Touba.
Magal: to celebrate, to praise, to grace. Magal Touba takes place on the eighteenth day of Diggi-gàmmu, which this year falls on the first of December, the opening day of the night-fishing season. The Mourides consider the journey equal to the hajj. Millions of people come. Sufis from other orders—the Tijaan, the Qadri, the Layenne—join the rite because all agree that Bamba was a visionary.
Cheikh Amadou Bamba—Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Habib Allah, Servant of the Messenger, Caliph of Touba—was a son of a Toucouleur marabout and an indirect descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He was an ascetic pacifist preacher; French colonists imprisoned and exiled him twice on the charges of fomenting rebellion, then knighted him as a Legionnaire of Honor. In 1887, Bamba designed and created from scratch in the barren scrublands of the Sahel the city of Touba as the model of a perfect Islamic society, a Muslim utopia where all sin was forbidden and where rigorous earthly labor coexisted with religious scholarship. Indeed, in Bamba’s vision, hard work represents spiritual devotion. He authored twenty thousand mystical verses in Arabic on pacifism, hard work, and good manners. It is said he was the original maker of café Touba.
Only one photograph of Bamba exists. It is overexposed, his shadow is short: a midmorning or midafternoon. He stands facing the camera in leather sandals and a white boubou that ends at the shin. The sleeves cover his hands entirely. Underfoot, beach sand; behind him, a shingled wooden wall and a simple wooden door. A white headscarf obscures most of his face, but you can see his wrinkled forehead and narrowed eyes: he is squinting against the sun. Despite the scarf his face seems open, candid. Maybe it is his posture. Bamba wrote: “I performed my repentance to Allah. He forgave me for everything and veiled my imperfection by the Elected One.”
* * *
Christian faith centers on the fear of the everlasting punishment of hell. “I can fancy the tortures of the damned,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in her journal, “but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.” But in Islam, heaven is specific, with gardens of perpetual bliss and plentiful feasts and infinite scented valleys, an eternity spent conversing with rejuvenated loved ones by misty waterfalls. When I point out the difference to a Senegalese writer, my friend laughs: Hell is already here, he says. We are in it.
In a world filled with suffering, suffering has little value, wretchedness repels. Hagiography of Bamba’s life chooses his miracles over his martyrdom.
When his French captors locked him up in a cage with a hungry lion Bamba prayed the beast to sleep. When they threw him in a furnace he used the fire to make tea and the Prophet joined him for a cup. When they sent a mad bull to charge him in a narrow street in Dakar the bull jumped over him “as if it had wings:” Lamassu, the Assyrian protector deity, momentarily summoned.
Bamba’s most fabled miracle took place at sea. This makes sense. The ocean’s salt vapor diffracts, magnifies everything—even magic.
Shackled aboard the ship deporting him from Saint-Louis to his seven-year exile in t
he rainforest of Gabon in 1895, Bamba was forbidden to pray. But not praying would have meant offending God, and this contradicted Bamba’s own teachings: he preached religious submission and respect. So he broke free of his manacles, tossed his prayer mat into the ocean, jumped overboard, alighted on the floating rug, and made his devotions. Then he folded the rug and, carrying it under one arm, walked upon the waves back to his prison ship. To honor this miracle, at one point during the daylong sacrament of Magal Touba the pilgrims in the city’s streets turn their backs on Mecca and pray seaward. Just one prayer out of the day’s five. Just one prayer out of a life’s multitudes.
Many of the pilgrims are fishermen. They rely on miracles for a living. They know that a good catch, like heaven, is specific and attainable if you follow the guidelines. The guidelines are the same for both—sacrifice, prayer, wise marabouts, strong gris-gris—though God has the last word in either case. Neither abides by laws of science because faith requires no proof.
But look. The proof is written: a promise of plenty, by Bamba himself. “Make my right hand and my heart provide generosity and abundance,” he wrote, “like the ocean.” And so they hush, and pray directly at the Atlantic, whose waters carry their fortunes and their sorrows and their dead.
Bamba died in 1927 under house arrest in the town of Diourbel, between Dakar and Touba. He is buried in Touba, inside the rose marble of the Grande Mosquée, which he had designed. “My writings,” he wrote, “are my true miracles.”
* * *
After Magal the pilgrims hurry back to their chores, families, the sea. There is a stampede. Thirteen people die and four hundred and sixty-six are injured in nearly one hundred traffic accidents on the way out of Bamba’s holy city.
* * *
Just before dawn a wispy pink flag of cloud lights up vermilion in the southeast. Through its fraying edge, from a sky lavender and blue, Venus winks at another star, in the water: a bowlight. Between these two beacons my neighbor, a fisherman named Mico Sene, is preparing to send out his beached abachi trapsetter with a crew of three to hunt for cuttlefish. It is small-crafts-warning weather; morning reports forecast a gale. The trapsetter will sail twelve miles offshore.
The pirogue is named the Sope Naby: the Prophet’s Disciples. She is thirty feet long, with a beam of less than three feet. Her slender hull is painted port and starboard with American flags shaped like hearts that are flanked by the ensigns of Senegal and France. Mico’s three favorite countries. Why? I just like them, they are good countries. It’s for beauty, like the flowers on your dress. Up and down the coast boat hulls and the caving façades of houses are painted with foreign flags. American. Spanish. Italian. German. French. Flags of desire, crumbling to the sea.
Mico checks the jigging lines, the hooks, the harpoons. He has heard the forecast so he brings five orange life jackets to the shore and throws them in the forward hold bilge. Then he piles on top of them the fourteen heavy traps made of rebar and wide-caliber net that he has baited with dead skates, fills the traps with filao branches. Cuttlefish will enter the traps for a bite of skate flesh, or to attach to the brushy filao the ink-dyed capsules of eggs that Aristotle likened to bunches of grapes. Cuttlefish mate for death: The males will die after mating, though some will live long enough to guard the female until she lays her clutch. The females will die after the eggs hatch. The Senegalese have no taste for cuttlefish, which they consider inferior to most other seafood, so this mollusk is for export only, which means that at the harbor cuttlefish pays much better than sardines do. The buoyant ellipsoid cuttlebones will become jewelers’ casting molds or ground calcium supplements for pet reptiles and caged birds. The flesh will become an entrée, an appetizer, a beer snack. The thick dark ink will dye pastas and rice: it is from the mollusk genus, Sepia, that the brown pigment and the coloration of early monochrome photographs derive their shared name. Juveniles and the smaller African cuttlefish, S. bertheloti, fetch more per pound because their flesh is more tender, but large fifteen-pounders, S. hierredda or S. officinalis, fill the holds quicker.
The crew arrive: Moussa Sene, twenty-four and saving up for a farm inland; Elhadj Dieye, twenty-two and saving up for computer mechanic college in Dakar; and the captain, Djiby Diop, who is nineteen years old and is not saving up for anything: he is just fishing. Djiby has been fishing since he was seven. He is the only married man on the crew and his wife is very pregnant with their second child. Their first, a boy, was stillborn.
It is dark when we push the Sope Naby into frigid winter whitecaps, but by the time the crew have prayed, the sun, not yet visible, flushes the foaming sea a hammered lustrous yellow. Along the ocean’s thin black rim purse seiners return to harbor from a night of fishing. In the bow Elhadj boils water on a brazier, mixes powdered milk with sugar for his crewmates. The morning is cold enough for windbreakers, for sweaters under the rubberized overalls and slickers. Djiby and Elhadj pull their wool skullcaps down low. Djiby shivers against the wind, washes down his pain au chocolat breakfast with sweet hot milk, steers northward.
By eight o’clock the fresh gale turns severe. The waves are nine feet tall. Ten. Twelve. Striped green and blue and white seas throw the Sope Naby this way and that. The little boat lurches about, now awash in the high chop of the following seas, now groaning up and over nearly vertical head billows. She pounds. She nearly turtles as she heaves. Her fifteen-horsepower outboard floods, recovers. Djiby uses the motor to drogue her carefully but she plunges nonetheless. We are soaked in spindrift, in bilgewater, in ocean water. The shore is gone behind the horizon and the horizon is gone behind the heaped-up sea and the sun is gone in blowing foam. You know it is still there only by the rainbows that come and go, come and go, puff by on crests shredded over and over to spray.
Once upon a time mollusk grounds were like sardine fisheries: first come, first served. Now so many jiggers and trappers and dredgers flag to the Petite Côte that mollusk fishermen divvy up the sea, mark their territory with buoy flags they construct out of plastic, fabric, bamboo sticks, styrofoam floats, cans. On your way to the fishing grounds you pass through forests of flags. You can tell by their spacing if they attach to murex or cymbium nets, shadefish trammels, octopus or cuttlefish traps. If you have been fishing in the same waters long enough you can tell their ownership by their coloration. Mico’s murex flags are red and black, cut from plastic tarp, and his cuttlefish flags are dirty white styrofoam orbs overgrown with seaweed and barnacle, spaced a hundred feet or so apart. In calm waters you see a flag field approach from a mile away or more. In a gale you are upon it suddenly and piecemeal: individual flags thrust up out of waves, appear on crests like desperate hands reaching from below. Their unseen lines snag your outboard.
A little after nine in the morning Djiby yells over the storm and the motor:
Should be here somewhere!
Where’s your GPS?
Eh, I left it at home!
I think a little thataway!
Yeah, I think you’re right!
Head seas, beam seas, overhanging waves topple. Madness to be out in this. Impossibly, Elhadj and Moussa stand up amidships. Elhadj wields an eight-foot bamboo harpoon with a metal hook the length of an index finger, Moussa a jigger in an outthrust hand. Funambulists, holding on to this tackle for balance in quartering waves. Performing for no audience but the tumbling sea.
Djiby stands up jackknifed in the stern and yells again.
Shit! Look at this storm! You see what the sea is like nowadays! This is bullshit! I need to do something else! Maybe I should take up farming!
Ah ha ha! You, Djiby—you will grow old on the sea!
Djiby, you will die a fisherman!
Okay, focus, boys, focus! These winds will die by noon! We got work to do!
The boat bounces and slams against the waves. For the next three hours the Sope Naby crawls over surges and plunges into troughs from one buoy to the next. The men seem to fin
d them by instinct. Elhadj harpoons traps out of the water. Some empty. Some full of sea urchins, of cymbium snails seeping out of their plaited whorled shells. Some traps rattled apart by months of waves and tides. Some still neatly wrapped in their inch-wide netting. In this gale it takes twenty minutes to locate and haul and check one trap. There are cuttlefish in two out of the first ten.
Each time Elhadj harpoons a trap, Djiby idles the pirogue and he and Moussa wrap jigger line around their index fingers, dangle orange and blue sinkers corollaed with hooks like daisies of death. Moussa jerks at the line with his entire forearm; Djiby moves only his forefinger in tiny circular motions, as if caressing between a woman’s legs. Two times out of three Djiby catches a cuttlefish, tosses it in the center hold. Moussa catches nothing at all.
Eh, Farmboy! says Djiby.
It’s because of the waves! says Moussa.
Look, the traps are empty, too! In stormy seas the cuttlefish lay low, says Elhadj.
Yeah, but for Farmboy here all days are created equally fishless! says Djiby.
The three men laugh.
Farmboy is such a good gardener, Elhadj says to appease his crewmate, that he works at the villas owned by French people and can prune Arabic calligraphy into a shrubbery.
Farmboy is such a good laamb wrestler, says Djiby, that once he even won four Zebu cows, though one of them died. Besides, Farmboy gets all the girls! Wallahi, I swear one day I’ll cut off his dick and hide it so he can never find it again.