Fisherman's Blues

by Anna Badkhen

  Sometimes Mariama takes afternoon naps in the alley without a mat or even a scarf to lay her head on, and then the sand and seashells and goat droppings and cigarette butts and chicken shit and peanut husks etch odd designs into the soft skin of her face and chest and arms. Sometimes she enters the same neighbors’ courtyards five or six times in a single morning, asking the same people over and over if they slept well, if they are feeling healthy, wishing them a good day. And sometimes she pulls them aside in the alley and whispers that she has no money to feed all those children today, could they please help? But most of the time she is decorous and calm, and reasons that women in Senegal must be tolerant of husbands who vanish into polygamy because in this country there are many more women than men.

  It is not true. Only a hundred thousand more women, in a country of fifteen million people. Whence, then, all the second, third, fourth wives? Perhaps they are the abandoned ones, the ones robbed of husbands and fiancés—by philandering spouses, by the sea. I think of Fatou Diop Diagne. Always buying, selling, baking, embroidering bedspreads for sale, playing the lottery the older women of Joal organize each week. You have to hustle: he will have more wives, his attention will shift, he will forget to send money, forget to visit. You must be as inventive as the woman who outwitted Ndiadian Ndiaye.

  But Coumba, insomniac, is crying for days on end: her heart, she says, is ripping through her chest. She cannot stand this anymore! She wants a divorce! She storms into my room one day to announce that she has asked for a divorce! “Strip off your pretty clothes, and put on burlap to show your grief, beat your breasts in sorrow,” prophesized Isaiah—and in her suffering Coumba parades around the alley naked. Or lures neighbors into her tiny single-room adobe and in that semidarkness moons them, slaps her quavering buttocks, thrusts at them her weedily haired pubis. Her jeweled bin bin, unwanted, wink from between the velvet rolls of her stretchmarked nudity.

  * * *

  The Sakhari Souaré is now sealed; she will go back to sea in two days, inshallah. The western horizon is black against marmalade sky. A last seagull shrieks. Large bats take the place of birds. Ndongo wipes his hands on the sand, on the jeans he has hung on the boat.

  After Amadou ordered Khady out of the house Ndongo wanted to take the rest of his family and leave as well. He even bought some gillnet to start his own fishing business. He was going to work on loaners, or lease a pirogue to own. But his uncle Yoro—Amadou’s younger brother, a kind and pigeon-toed master caulker whose only wife is laid up with diabetes in their rented hovel of tin and pirogue board—said that if Ndongo left, people would talk, say that he was disrespectful toward his parents. So he stayed. He added his net to the net of his father.

  You know, Anna, he says. In Africa there’s a saying that an old man sitting down can see farther than a young man can see standing up. But I think that sometimes a young man can see in his sleep farther than an old man can ever imagine.

  He sees the loaner boat sail in. He jumps out of the Sakhari Souaré and pulls on his denim pants and strides with a sailor’s bowlegged swagger to the shore.

  * * *

  Khady gives birth at seven-twenty on a Saturday morning, at halftide on the flood. Ndongo calls my cellphone to tell me the good news:

  Anna, come to the hospital! I have a son.

  It was an easy birth. At half past eight Khady is sitting up on a cot by the door, eating a pain au chocolat, sipping café Touba from a ceramic mug. Her makeup is gone and she is wearing a multicolored wrap skirt and an oversize white sweatshirt inscribed with the promise LOVE FOREVER AND EVER. The newborn, swaddled in two cotton blankets, is next to her, asleep.

  Khady’s five-year-old daughter, Sokhna, named after Khady’s co-wife, is leaning against the cot on her elbows and letting her bare feet slide backward on the tiles—one, the other, both at once, the favorite game of bored little girls. Khady’s mother, who arrived last night from Djifer to help, sails around the room with more coffee, more bread, a banana, some water in a plastic cup. Ndongo slumps on a cot across the room and drums with the edge of his cellphone a nervous rhythm against the metal bedframe. He forces his mouth into a preoccupied smile at my arrival.

  Ma’shallah, Khady. Ma’shallah, Ndongo. May your new baby have a healthy life full of beauty and happiness.

  Amen amen amen.

  One more fisherman in the family?

  Ha, I guess, says Ndongo.

  No way, says Khady.

  Ndongo perks up.

  No?

  Absolutely not.

  And why’s that?

  Khady smiles beautifully at her husband. Takes a bite of her pain au chocolat. Takes a swig from the coffee cup. Takes her time.

  She says:

  I teased you. It’s a girl. I’ve known for months from the ultrasound that it was going to be a girl.

  Ndongo rises, crosses the room to his wife’s cot, unswaddles the bottom of the newborn’s blankets, peeks in. Khady laughs hard, nearly spills coffee in her lap. Ndongo laughs, too. Fooled by a woman, again. Sokhna, confused, looks from one parent to another then laughs as well because it is something new to do. Her grandmother chuckles, sits down, takes the girl by the hand, drags her into the hammock of skirts between her knees, rocks her there, slaps her shoulders lightly as she speaks. Tap tap tap.

  The gender is not important, she says. Tap tap tap. What is important is that the child—boy or girl—have baraka, the blessing of God. That’s what really matters.

  Tap tap tap. The grandmother sways and the girl sways within her embrace. Khady picks up the baby, gives her the nipple, sways also. Three generations of mothers and future mothers rocking this way, rocking that way, keeping rhythm with the sea.

  Now you are a big sister, the old woman chants. You will be wise. Sometimes you will carry the baby on your back. Sometimes you will wash her. When you carry her on your back you have to be careful not to fall. Tap tap tap. See? Anna is writing everything down. That means everything I say is true.

  And Ndongo, laughing, says, Amen. He reaches to caress Sokhna’s knobby back, plays with her vertebrae. One two three four five and down four three two one. Floats on a headrope. He winks at his wife.

  Remember? When you were giving birth to this one you screamed a lot.

  No I didn’t! But with this one—she nods at the swaddles at her breast—I really screamed with this one, wallahi! This stubborn baby with her big head.

  Women file into the doorway, utter a litany of blessings. Friends, neighbors, distant relatives. They bring baby soap, laundry soap, talcum powder: gold, frankincense, myrrh. Khady and her mother singsong greetings and gratitudes. No one from Ndongo’s side of the family comes. Fatou Diop Diagne does not visit the hospital nor Khady’s house to greet her new granddaughter. She does not make an offering of sweet lakh to the genie who has the power to protect or punish the women in her bloodline.

  It’s because of Khady’s haughtiness, she tells me later at the Souaré house over sweet mint tea. The tea makes my mouth taste like a garden. Khady should be more humble, act more like Alassane and Sokhna, Ndongo’s first two wives. The baby, she says, will have to do without the sacrifice.

  Will this cause problems for the baby?

  Eh! Who knows? Here we are, together, drinking tea. Perhaps the baby will not have any problems.

  * * *

  Ndongo acknowledges the visitors by clicking his cellphone against the cotframe and humming. Mm. Mm. Mm. He is rocking, too. Tallying up expenses in his head.

  The fifty-dollar hospital bill for delivery and vaccinations. Traditional new mother’s meals for Khady for the first week—boiled millet flour with sugar, bananas, soup with meat in it, rice with peanut sauce and sugar. Vitamins for Khady. Diapers. And a week from today he must hold a naming ceremony for the baby. He must pay for a sacrificial sheep and rice and a griot and musicians and a beautician for Khady and matching outfits
for her best friends, or else he will not be able to invite friends whose blessings will bring the girl baraka, bring her luck.

  Oh, God, how will he pay for all of this? There is no money. And there are no fish. A big pirogue like the one Master Ndoye has been building can carry a lot of fuel and go fishing far from shore, where the haul is more likely to be good. But the big pirogue is nowhere near done. She is missing sheers, thwarts, gunwales, splashboard, lazarette, motor well, counter, boomkin. A small pirogue like the Sakhari Souaré must stay close to shore. But there are no fish close to shore.

  Wallahi, Anna, I really don’t know how I will manage.

  Wisps of opera arias carry from the nurses’ station, where hospital guards are drinking sweet tea and listening to the radio. Morning light casts a rectangle of bright white onto the white tiles of the ward floor through the half-open door. Ndongo stares at the rectangle with his faraway sea captain’s eyes. He did not sleep at all last night.

  * * *

  A nurse discharges Khady and the baby at ten-thirty in the morning, three hours after birth. Khady goes to the bathroom to wash up and her mother produces from someplace a soapy rag and quickly wipes the bloody lochia stain off the mattress. Mamma spilled some coffee, she tells Sokhna, who is watching. Grandmother tricks. We learn them not from mothering our own children but afterward somehow, in some unconscious leisurely reflection, and we arrive armed with such wisdoms to receive the children we will not need to raise. Quick little lies, quick little comforts. On occasion my neighbor Mariama Thiam suckles her infant grandson with her own long-empty breast to quiet him to sleep.

  They file out of the maternity ward: Khady and the baby, Khady’s mother, Sokhna. Ndongo follows with Khady’s bag of yesterday’s clothes in one hand and a bucket with a teapot and cups and unfinished baguettes in the other. He leaves his women to wait with the bags in the shade of the hospital wall and steps into the asphalt road to flag a taxi. In the middle of Boulevard Jean Baptiste Collin, Captain Ndongo Souaré raises both arms high in the air like a man desperate, pleading for some fundamental deliverance.

  He pays the driver in advance, holds the cab doors open for the women. He does not go with them. He stands in the road, blinking at the bright light, then sets out, on foot, for the wharves.

  There is no one at the graving dock. No one at Mbaar Kanené, or at Mbaar Atelier Taïf. The Sakhari Souaré is out fishing with Maguette at the helm. Ndongo’s uncle Yoro is caulking the outside seams of someone’s pursenetter with a greenish paste of sawdust, whiting, paint thinner, crushed styrofoam, and baobab powder. The elastic mixture looks like rising yeast dough, like something you would want to put in your mouth. Ndongo pushes himself up onto the gunwale of a nearby jigger. Swings his legs to heel the hull. Maybe tomorrow he will go to sea. Depends on what they catch today. Inshallah. Inshallah.

  That evening from the north a wonder: a cool sustained wind, and out-of-season raindrops, which I mistake at first for crickets.

  * * *

  Who can say if there will be fish for him when Ndongo finally returns to sea? Of the hundred and forty-seven species of marine creatures fished off Senegal’s coast, fifty-one are threatened. In the last fifty years, a fifth of all fish stocks have become overexploited. Half of the fish stocks have collapsed.

  That week I watch the forty-footer Yaye Khodia Dieng cast an eight-hundred-foot purse seine in six spots in the marine sanctuary under the supervision of the sanctuary’s volunteer president, Karim Sall, who is also my landlord, and three rangers. The pirogue delivers her haul to a mbaar in the center of town, behind the old marketplace, where reserve employees and volunteers weigh each specimen on a toploading scale or a spring scale and measure them with a soft tape measure and consult a bilingual tome of The Fresh and Brackish Water Fishes of West Africa, Vol. II, to log them in a journal. Senegal’s seven marine protected areas have been inventorying their fisheries this way every six months for the last decade. This is how they track the ocean’s slow decline.

  The Yaye Khodia Dieng, with PARIS SAINT-GERMAIN and ILA TOUBA inscribed upon her green hull in immoderate rococo calligraphy, belongs to Baye Geye, an old retired fisherman with cataractic eyes who moved to Joal from Saint-Louis in 1971 and lives in a large walled compound near the harbor, right next to Mbaar Kanené. Her crew are Captain Malick Seye and his six teenage nephews. Malick is the brother of one of Baye’s wives and Ndongo Souaré’s distant cousin.

  Fishermen often moonlight for the conservancy, though they poach the reserve incessantly and openly and though the underpaid rangers habitually confiscate and resell the fishers’ catch they deem unlawful. Disputes between poachers and corrupt rangers come to blows sometimes. But in a small town all transgressions and offenses are out in the open and are easy to put aside when a day’s work for the reserve promises a paycheck for the entire crew. After all, the fishers are not snitching, like some. Snitching is a trespass unpardonable, punished by magic.

  The pirogue casts twice in the Mama Nguedj, then twice along the shore of Palmarin, and twice more within sight of Joal’s ruffled shore. Boys sing their hauling shanties—

  What’s your name?—motherfucker!—what’s your name?—motherfucker!—

  and

  Haul the rope!—I want to feel you—haul the rope!—I want to feel you—haul the rope!—

  and

  If you eat a kilo of meat—there will be oil in your shit!—

  and haul a few handfuls of tiny adolescent fish. They haul a juvenile green sea turtle, maybe two feet long; then four more, twice as large. Their rubbery flippers and necks are pale and barnacles jag where the scutes seam the enormous dark olive teardrops of their veined and marbled carapaces. One turtle clenches unchewed bright seagrass in its serrated beak, stunned to be caught midmeal. The Triassic reptiles take up the entire midships. Boys turn them upside down to stop them crawling and stand on their smooth yellow plastrons to pose for cellphone pictures. Impersonate the world that rests upon a tortoise. Are that world.

  A green sea turtle can weigh seven hundred pounds, measure five feet in length, spend several hours underwater without breathing, and may travel sixteen hundred miles from its grazing sites to breed, navigating by sunlight, wave direction, water temperature, and the magnetic field of the Earth. Adult green turtles are herbivores and live up to a hundred years in the wild. It takes them between twenty and fifty years to reach sexual maturity, the longest of all marine turtles; only one out of a hundred makes it to reproductive age. Polyandry is rare. A female lays about a hundred eggs per clutch every two years and buries them in sand at night; the eggs hatch about two months later, also at night, and the hatchlings—soft-bodied and almost black and no larger than an avocado pit—crawl seaward by instinct, by genetic memory.

  A green turtle can mate for seventy-two hours. You can acquire some of that stamina if you steep a turtle penis in hot water like tea and drink the infusion. Then you can maintain an erection all night long.

  I’ve tried it, one of the sanctuary’s rangers tells me. It works very well.

  An average green turtle penis is twelve inches long but drinking the infusion will not affect the size of your own penis.

  Ah! says Karim, my landlord. Having a long penis is not very useful.

  Karim is forty-nine, a retired fisherman. He is the volunteer president of the conservancy and of Senegal’s largest artisanal fishermen’s union, an occasional paid lecturer on mangrove conservation and marine protection, a husband of two wives and father of six children, a breeder of sheep and pigeons, and a loquacious know-it-all. He begins:

  When you get old it doesn’t stay hard, that’s why—

  —you have a short penis? I guess.

  We laugh.

  No-o-o, that’s why women look for younger lovers, Karim says. But it’s okay to have a medium-size penis.

  Fulani herders give the turtle penis extract to their inseminator bulls. If
you cut the single claw off the turtle’s flipper and hang it from an infant’s neck the baby will start walking sooner. Green turtle meat and calipee are part of the traditional coastal diet along Senegal’s coast. Turtle is more tender than beef, sweeter.

  Can we keep one? Captain Malick asks a ranger.

  No you cannot. We will weigh them, measure them, tag them, and release them.

  But just one?

  No.

  Oh, come on. It’s been a while since we’ve had turtle meat.

  The Yaye Khodia Dieng is almost to the mbaar when one of the teenage deckies squats down beside the largest turtle, squints at it—and suddenly and with all his might punches its leathery helmeted head. The turtle flinches mightily, paddles its useless upside-down flippers in the air. The boy sucks his teeth, hits it again. Unleashes some primal viciousness. One Leviathan against another.

  * * *

  Sometimes male turtles are so exhausted by coitus they slip off their mates’ shells and drown.