Fisherman's Blues

by Anna Badkhen

  The men laugh some more. Djiby lets the pirogue heave, steadies her.

  Seriously though, when I started fishing, as a kid, I’d go with my dad, there was much more fish. And so much cuttlefish! I know I’ve been giving Farmboy shit about his jiggering, but the problem is that, really, none of us is catching anything today.

  What are they doing out here, then, in these heaped waves? And what I am doing on their tumbledown pirogue? On any pirogue at all?

  Psst, Anna, look!

  Djiby interrupts my wallowing. He has harpooned a four-pounder with a bamboo pole and now flicks it to midships. The thing rotates into the hold like a tentacled frisbee and, in flight, jets an inksac full of mucus-bound melanin: a sprinkler from Hades, a marine Jackson Pollock. My right ear and my mouth are full of cold, salty viscousness. A christening, I think, a blessing with hallowed ink.

  I smile—and notice then that my fingers have been gripping the gunwales so tightly for so long and in such bitter seas that I cannot unbend them to wipe my face. Stuck this way, I start to giggle, and ink dribbles out of my mouth and down my chin and now I cannot stop laughing: What poetic justice, what poetry indeed that the oceanborn free will in my chromosomal memory has guided me through wars and deserts and back to the sea to surrender so absolutely that I cannot even clean my face of cuttlefish ink.

  * * *

  One day an oupa on a gillnetter hands me a cuttlefish no larger than a plum. We are bailing together; he finds the cuttlefish in the bilgewater. The little mollusk squirts ink, crawls down my palm, leaking black. When it runs out of water to replenish the inksac it begins to suckle. Or so it seems at first—a familiar strangeness, that dependent burrowing roundness of a mouth. Then it bites. A perfect oval cuttlefish bitemark, nine teeth, remains on my right index finger for months.

  * * *

  By one in the afternoon at last the wind calms, the waves flatten, stretch out into a splendid gilded snakeskin. The sun burns at once. In the bow crickets sing in the traps, in the crushed and forgotten life jackets. In the distance a seagull sits on the water, pecking at something afloat. Djiby steers toward it: a large cuttlefish, dead. At the pirogue’s approach the seagull flies off, drips white shit into cat’s-paw seas. Djiby lifts the cuttlefish out of the water, inspects it. A seven-pounder. He tosses it into the bilge. Cuttlefish hauled dead sell at the harbor as long as they are not disfigured too badly by seabirds and fish, do not reek too obviously of rot.

  Two hours later Elhadj, astoundingly, fishes half a dozen onions out of a red plastic grub bucket and begins to peel them. For lunch, he says. Soon Djiby kills the motor and in the white and low winter sun we share the most amazing ceebu jën I have ever had: rice boiled in a spicy broth of onion and bycatch; sliced murex, crabs, another dead cuttlefish too severely pecked to sell steaming in the center. At four cardinal points around the seafood, small mounds of diced raw onion with piri-piri pepper and vinegar bloom like a piquant compass rose.

  * * *

  Ma Diayi Seck, the mother of Daouda Sarr—pirogue captain, sheep breeder, teller of genii lore—says that when she was a little girl in Palmarin eighty years ago cuttlefish were considered so filthy that parents would not allow their children to eat from the common plate if they had touched one that day. Also back then women would not cook with cymbium and murex. Nor would anyone eat a spooky monkfish, with its toothy hydrocephalic frogface. Fishermen then only fished for tuna or giant African threadfin, sawfish sometimes.

  You rarely had to buy fish for everyday lunch. You went to the beach and picked whatever you wanted out of the sea with your hands, like this: you waded into the water and threw an empty rice sack over a school. If you caught too much, you shared it. Sometimes entire schools of sardinella would jump ashore to flee their predators, and then you didn’t even have to go into the water. At the time no one thought that one day there would not be enough fish.

  Now Ma Diayi’s son Daouda is a fisherman. She lives in a yellow room in the clean and spacious house he built two blocks away from the Souarés’, helps his two wives take care of the children. Her other son, Mahdi, Daouda’s older brother, a soldier, was killed several years ago in a car accident on the road from Mbour. A refrigerator truck owned by a South Korean company that exports frozen mollusk rammed the taxi that was driving him home.

  A truck that works for a company owned by white people, Ma Diayi says. A white man’s truck.

  Ma Diayi unfolds photographs of Mahdi out of carefully creased plastic bags she tucks for safekeeping between bolts of wax print fabric in her cupboard. Her bony hands, hands that never touched cuttlefish, are soft with the shea butter she has been massaging all her life into the skin of her siblings, husband, children, grandchildren. There are other family pictures, color and black and white and sepia. Of her stern-looking late husband with an animal skin draped across one shoulder. Of herself before the children: the pretty, whimsical daughter of a Palmarin chef du village who lived to be ninety-six years old. She kneels on the floor of her yellow room, the pictures laid out on the tiled floor before her delicate age-hollowed bones. She is more beautiful now.

  She narrates the photographs. Here are Daouda and Mahdi when they were still little. Here is Ma Diayi’s mother, the village chief’s wife, in an elegant patterned wrap dress, and some of her siblings, monochrome and spunky. Why not all the siblings? Eh, you didn’t keep any proof. Proof? Yes. Proof of what? Of the number. Back then white people were in charge and villagers would lie about the number of children in our homes because we were worried that they were looking for soldiers, tirailleurs. White people were always looking for soldiers.

  One day, Ma Diayi says, a plane flew and crashed in the bush near the village. It was before the telephone, people used the telegraph then. So the whites in the plane telegraphed for rescue. Villagers cleared the bush with machetes to help them get out. But when the white rescuers arrived, the villagers who cleared the bush became scared. What if the rescuers took them away to be soldiers? But the village priest came and told the villagers not to be afraid of the whites. They called him the Priest of Bees, because he had an apiary.

  Ma Diayi giggles, and I see that little girl, doing cartwheels on the beach, picking sardines out of the wrackline with her bare hands, avoiding cuttlefish, learning to read from nuns. The princess of Palmarin.

  She says that when she was little, boats transported peanuts from the Saloum River port of Foundiougne to Dakar past Palmarin. Sometimes the peanut boats would run aground in the shoals off the Petite Côte, and the crews would toss the legumes overboard, like ballast. On such days village kids would fish a bounty of peanuts out of the swash.

  Portuguese colonists brought peanuts to West Africa from South America in the sixteenth century; after France abolished slavery, when Ma Diayi’s great-grandfather was young, peanuts and gum arabic replaced the slave trade as Senegambia’s most important export. For the first few years of peanut trade and until it imposed a peanut import tax to protect its own farmers, the crop’s premier buyer was the United States.

  Now Senegal’s chief exports are gold and frozen seafood. Yet peanut remains the main harvest that farmers, by not allowing the crop to rotate, have turned into a parasitic monoculture, accelerating the degradation of the country’s fragile and droughtstricken cultivated land.

  I crossed the Saloum River at Foundiougne once, upstream from Palmarin, in the heart of the Peanut Basin. My shared taxi from the border with the Gambia waited for an hour or two to board the northbound ferry. I walked around a bit, stretched my legs. By the crossing women sold dried shrimp in plastic baggies, whole coconut, peanuts: sugared, salted, roasted, raw. A Mouride procession—small boys in front, then men, then women, all young—sang and half-danced past the line of waiting cars to the water and there prayed loudly. The dance was catchy; some travelers joined in. One of my fellow passengers, an imam from Thiès with a hennaed beard, broke a kola nut into asymmetrical lobes and
shared it around the battered Peugeot: a eucharist. His wife, a Fulani woman as birdboned and old as Ma Diayi, slid out of the car, took off her green flipflops one by one, knelt by the passenger door, and performed gingerly ablutions with roadside dust. Dipped her dainty fingers in it, touched them to her nose, her forehead, her earlobes. Riverwater rolled softly past a few feet below. On the north side of the river frantic seagulls rose and fell and danced and swarmed over unseen prey.

  Seven

  Fatou, my landlady’s housegirl, has collected her pay and returned to her village inland. Now a neighbor’s overzealous daughter, Alima, takes out the slop to dump it in the surf, helps clean fish for the landlady’s bistro, wipes the bottoms of the youngest children in the house, carts them around the alley. She may be twelve years old. When Ma Diayi was her age she, too, carried slop to the seashore, carried other women’s babies on her back.

  One day, slop bucket in hand, Alima spots me at the beach, calls my name, shines upon me her enthusiastic smile. She points: a small child with her skirts hiked is squatting to shit at the wrackline next to a bloated dead she-lamb with an umbilical cord paling about it like a worm. Bad stuff, she says, I cannot tell whether about the defecating child or the dead animal or the serpentine band of multicolored garbage that delineates this day’s boundary between land and sea. Or me being there. She secures the slop bucket on her head with her left hand, takes my arm with her right, walks me home.

  Sometimes Alima and other preteen girls in my alley get their hands on someone’s cellphone and turn up the volume and dance to traditional laments. 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. Their chests not yet female, their giggly gossip and their dance moves already so; fawns. Princesses all, too. Future mothers of fishermen, alive and dead.

  * * *

  Khady Diallo, Ndongo’s third and youngest wife, in golden lip piercing and catwalk makeup over perfect skin, in Friday robes of blue and yellow eyelet lace and with a pink sequined shawl over her shoulders, on the bare vinyl mattress of Joal hospital’s maternity ward. The mattress is brown; the wall tiles are a pattern of pink flowers, the floor tiles are white. There are three wall fans and two doors: to the hospital yard on one side, to the toilet on the side opposite. Khady is curled up on her left side to face the door to the yard. On a cot in the corner a very pregnant schoolgirl in uniform is taking a nap. Someone’s leftover IV hangs from a white stand streaked with rust. Ndongo sits at the head of his wife’s mattress, picks at a rip in the vinyl. Contractions come every three minutes. This is her second child.

  A nurse enters from the yard. A dusty column of morning-sun glare whirls in behind her.

  Khady, good morning. You were supposed to be here yesterday.

  I was cooking.

  Well you’re all cooked now.

  Khady smiles, then quickly covers her face with her elbow. Draws tighter the shawl. A contraction. Ndongo lets go of the mattress, picks up his wife’s purse, opens and closes the kiss clasp. The purse is black faux leather with the word BOSS spelled out in rhinestones. Inside are lipstick, mascara, a cellphone that has run out of credit and that Ndongo is too broke to refill. Opens the clasp, closes. Opens, closes. This is his fourteenth time sitting by a wife in labor. It never gets easier.

  The hospital is neat, small brutalist blocks German soldiers built a few years back, beige walls, blue columns, a covered tiled patio, concrete paths. In the shade of the yard outside the pediatric ward, women with quiet infants wait their children’s turn for yellow fever shots. At the end of their line a preteen boy squats on the tiles and retches horribly.

  Did you go to sea this week? Ndongo asks.

  Yes.

  With whom?

  With Mico Sene’s cuttlefish jigger. And with Mamour Ndiaye.

  A purse seiner?

  Yes.

  I see.

  When are you going to sea, Ndongo?

  I don’t know.

  Opens the clasp of Khady’s purse, closes, opens again.

  Maybe tomorrow, inshallah.

  It has been a month since Ndongo last went to sea. The construction of the new pirogue has become retrogressive: each day the end seems to sink further away. Whatever Maguette the elder has been catching—on the Sakhari Souaré, on the leaking loaner—has been barely enough to cover the price of fuel. There has been no money for wood or nails. Master Ndoye has stopped coming.

  The other night Ndongo had this dream:

  We are fishing. We have just finished picking net when the pirogue begins to fill with water. She fills and fills. The fish in the bilges rise with the water. You can’t stop it. The pirogue begins to founder and we start swimming. Then there is a big sunken ship, an iron ship like the one in Palmarin, and we swim toward her. But whenever we reach our hands to grab her the hull disappears.

  Ndongo tells me this dream two days before Khady goes into labor. It is midafternoon; he and I are aboard the dry-docked Sakhari Souaré, prepping her for caulking. Ndongo, in flamingo-colored boxers, is taking a break on the bow thwart. Feet dangling, hammer in hand, he watches the sea—white, overexposed in the dry light of late autumn. Unreachable like the iron carcass in his dreams. Draped over the port gunwale his sunbleached jeans are a limp guidon banner of defeat.

  I am kneeling amidships, yanking with a pair of pliers old rusty nails from strips of rubberized industrial hose, the same kind that carries drinking water through Joal. The strips, about four inches wide and three yards long, are to keep the caulking inside the seams; we are reusing the boat’s old insulation.

  A man approaches, on his way home from the harbor.

  Eh, psst! How was the sea today?

  Okay.

  Got any fish?

  Some.

  Ndongo has spread a tarp in the net hold and on this tarp he is mixing the caulking emulsion: twenty pounds of cement, ten pounds of mahogany sawdust, baobab leaf powder, tar. The caulking is grainy and sticky and shiny like moist soil. We will stuff it into the long pockets of rubberized hose, which I hammer to the seams inside the pirogue’s draft, and nail it shut.

  The dry dock has become Ndongo’s second home. His two older wives come, bring tea fixings, lunch, children. His seventeen-year-old niece, Aïcha the tomboy, comes to tease and playfight, maybe a bit to flirt. When her affections become too rambunctious Ndongo cuts her off, says: My firstborn would have been older than you if he’d lived.

  Alassane’s first child. He died at birth, on the way to the hospital. She was in the back of a taxi when he crowned and by the time she arrived he was dead. Her oldest living son is Ousmane. Then Vieux. Then Ousseynou, now nine years old, whose twin brother died in a hospital incubator several days after birth because a nurse had cranked the temperature too high. He cooked in there. The family wanted to sue the nurse for neglect but Fatou Diop Diagne said no, God had willed for him to die. Life is so.

  Sokhna, Ndongo’s second wife, the mother of Maguette and four other living children, lost only one child. He was eleven days old. The nurses at the Joal hospital did not cauterize his navel properly and it became infected. When the wound began to bleed Sokhna took the baby to the regional hospital in Mbour and waited there for hours for the pediatrician to see him. While they sat in the waiting room the infant bled to death. She was in such a rush to return to Joal to bury him before sundown that she did not ask for the death certificate.

  What would that death certificate have said? My tour guide friend’s oldest daughter died in infancy several years earlier; as cause of death the doctors at the hospital in Joal wrote, “skin condition.” He never tried to investigate what that meant. Children die, he told me. Like most children’s graves in the town cemetery, his daughter’s is a neat unmarked triangular prism of sand. He visits it once a week, to tidy it up.

  Salimata, he tells the sand. Saly.

  * * *
>
  Ndongo was eighteen when he married Alassane, his cousin, the daughter of Fatou Diop Diagne’s sister, who lives in Dakar. He tells their love story so:

  You know how it is. When you are a young man you want to try everything, a lot of girls. Your relatives begin to worry that you’ll get one of them pregnant. My uncle in Dakar didn’t even tell my dad he was getting us married. One day he showed up in Joal with a bag of kola nut. My dad said, What’s this? And my uncle said, This is your son and my daughter getting married. Have some kola nut.

  They say the first wife is the choice of the parents, the second wife is the choice of the heart, the third wife is the choice of the eye—a trophy wife, the beautiful wife—and the fourth wife is the choice of reason, a child bride who will take care of you when you are old. But Ndongo cannot think of a fourth wife anymore. He must figure out how to support the three he has. Khady remains banned from the Souaré house. He pays her rent and he pays the expenses of all three of his wives and the small children, the ones who do not go fishing yet. Alassane barely makes anything braiding women’s hair at the harbor, and Khady, once a fishwife, stopped working soon after she began to show. Sokhna minds the children; her youngest, Moustapha, is six months old. When Sokhna was a schoolgirl in Dakar she wanted to be an athlete, a runner, but her grandmother would not allow that. Women who do sports cannot have children. How will you keep your husband if you do not have children?

  How will you keep him if you do? Ndongo’s wives click their tongues in sympathy when I explain that I have a son and am divorced. Before I leave town to visit a lover, my landlady, with a wink, hands me a string of black and red bin bin waistbeads and a translucent scarlet wrap to tie around my waist: the traditional lingerie of seduction. In my alley two unhappy cousins, Mariama Thiam and Coumba Ndiaye, suggest that I gain weight to make myself more attractive, and Coumba brings me costume jewelry. But mostly they spend their days sitting opposite each other on low wooden stools, explaining away their own loneliness, the rapacity of their men. Their husbands visited briefly last month for Tamkharit and then returned to their respective second families—Mariama’s in the Gambia, Coumba’s somewhere up north. Mariama is a little older, Coumba and I are the same age. Coumba’s husband took all of their children except for the girl, who now has a toddler daughter of her own. Mariama lives with her six children, her sole daughter’s infant son, and, inexplicably, the three-year-old daughter of her husband’s second wife. Folks on the block call the girl Gambie.