Fisherman's Blues

by Anna Badkhen

  * * *

  Once, on my sunrise run through the mangroves, I happened upon a group of men butchering a green turtle with axes and machetes behind the white shell cemetery midden near Fadiouth. The carapace was gone. There were two small piles of thick white skin and connective tissue and the men were chopping at the amorphous mound of bloody meat and lumps of bright green fat upon a black plastic tarp.

  * * *

  All transgressions in a small town are out in the open: every fisherman knows who the town snitch is. He spends his days at the same mbaar where sanctuary employees inventory their test catch. Fishermen say he has two ways of making a living: by telling them when it is safe to cast in the sanctuary—and by telling on them, informing the rangers. They say he makes a hundred dollars a pop either way. Trouble starts when he double-dips.

  The week he tells the Mansor Sakho that it is okay to fish in the reserve and then rats her out so she gets caught with bilges full of sanctuary catfish and has to pay nearly a thousand dollars in fines—that week the pirogue’s crew lie on the floor in one of the blue-walled rooms of Captain Mamour Ndiaye’s house and chainsmoke cigarettes and weed and plot revenge. Mamour, naked from the waist up as usual, does most of the talking.

  I will tell you this, he says. This is Africa. We have black magic here. And here, if you use the money you got by harming others to feed your family, then one day maybe one of your family members will die from eating that food.

  Amen, say the men.

  Just wait and see, says Mamour. Bad things will happen to this man. I have powers. If you destroy something of mine, next year I will destroy something of yours.

  Amen, say the men.

  The informer was a fisherman himself once, says Mamour’s brother Moustapha. Then some of the fishermen he had screwed became so exasperated they cast a spell on him. Cursed him away from water. Now, if one of his feet touches the sea, it becomes bloated.

  Yeah, and if he doesn’t watch it, says Mamour, he may go blind.

  Smoke pours out of his mouth and nostrils and churns below the yellow rings of dried rainwater on the canvas ceiling.

  * * *

  Later I stop by the mbaar. The man is there, watching young fishers play football in the sand. His back is to the cerulean sea. His left foot is bare. His right is sheathed in a black ankle sock.

  * * *

  You name a baby after someone you love, whose presence and spirit will safeguard the child, will guide the child to become successful, strong, lucky. You name one son Papa after your own father and another son after your best friend Papa; everyone in the family will know the difference. My landlord, Karim, named his eldest daughter Mah after his mother; he named his third daughter Mah after the girl’s mother, his first wife. A fisherman friend is named Abou after a tirailleur soldier who had served in the Korean War, but one of his brothers is named Abou after someone else; to tell them apart, folks call my friend Abou Korea.

  Or you name a baby to trick evil spirits, to ward off the evil eye. Amoul Yakar—Without Hope—is a child born after several stillbirths. Bougouma—I Don’t Want You—is a girl born after all her older siblings have died. A family’s tragic history outlined and locked into the name a child will bear forever. Along with our parental expectations, our fears, our hopes, our projections, and our failures, from birth and for the rest of his or her life, amen.

  Naming is a morning ritual. Early on the seventh day of the baby’s life elders gather. The father whispers the desired name to the imam, who holds it inside his mouth, safeguards it like a shiny blue bead until the time comes. In the mother’s bedroom, older women arrive in an unhurried procession of long brocade boubous and with matching wallets of faux crocodile skin, of patent leather, of beaded velvet. They bring money for the mother and soap for the baby. They shuck their sequined sandals by the door and sit heavily on the embroidered bedspread of the huge matrimonial bed and on as many plastic chairs as can crowd around it. They sip some café Touba, nibble on some pain au chocolat. Then, in the room heavy with their perfume and their pomp, they pick up the baby, dressed in a white and pink onesie that reads SWEETHEART on the chest and LOVE on each of the soles, and take turns shaving her head with a razor blade. They shift the infant this way and that, squeeze her between their knees, lay her across their laps, vertically, upside-down, sideways. They pinch the blade between forefinger and thumb, keep their pinkies delicately extended. A calabash to catch the soundless soft black ringlets. They pass them around, the baby and the blade and the calabash, the baby always first. They work thoroughly and without rushing and talk softly about childbirth: theirs, their daughters’, their sisters’, their friends’. The only light comes from the dull rectangle of the door draped with lavender gauze, and each time a new guest stands in the threshold for long salaams she blocks out the light and the women shave the baby in redolent darkness.

  When the newborn’s head is shaved completely smooth, the women add to the calabash with her hair a pinch of millet, so she may never go hungry; a shred of cottonwool, so she may always have clothes on her back; a splash of water, so she may never know thirst; and a kola nut, to bring her luck. Then one of them takes the calabash out to the street, where men suck on hard ginger candy and talk about fishing. The men take turns peeking inside the calabash to ascertain its contents and add the final ingredient of the baby’s future happiness: money. Then the women file out of the room and sit with the men to pray. At the end of the prayer the imam says the name he has been guarding all morning, the name that will protect and honor the child in this life and in the life after.

  Ndeye Khady: Mamma Khady. Mamma’s little girl.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Khady Diallo, in eyelash and nail extensions, gets her hair done in front of a large bedroom mirror decorated with her strings of bin bin waistbeads and her wedding photographs faded to red and pink. A tailor delivers a set of six matching orange and blue brocade dresses for her six closest girlfriends, who primp at Khady’s vanity table stacked with bottles of deodorant and hair spray. Outside, Vieux Sene and Gora Sall, whose wife Mariama Boye sells breakfast at Mbaar Atelier Taïf, lug to the roof a hundred pounds of rice, mounds of onions and carrots and turnip for the sauce, and two heavy cans of propane to cook it all, then set up two tarps—one on the roof, for the makeshift kitchen, one in the sandfilled street, for the guests. Older women upstairs instantly set to peeling and dicing. Ndongo unties the sacrificial sheep from the sardine-grade fishnet where children from the block tormented it all morning and drags it to the roof, where he slaughters it inexpertly while the women look away. Flies stick to the dark bloodstain. Boys fetch and arrange under and around the tarp the same borrowed battery of enumerated white and blue plastic chairs that attends all of Joal’s life events. Here in the afternoon several dozen women in lowcut mermaid dresses of rich brocade and lace will fan themselves, untie the infants from their backs, let their hips swing.

  By five o’clock an unbroken and ageless drumbeat pumps through giant loudspeakers, floods Joal’s Santhie Deux district, the neighborhood of immigrant fishers nearest the harbor. In a corner of the party tent four drummers spray sweat. Fronting them a wormy griot in skinny jeans and a tanktop is debauching the women.

  Madames! Madames! Dance of the First Wife!

  Whack! go the drums, and first wives step into the arena, whirl, gyrate, slap one another’s bejeweled palms.

  The first wife is wise / she knows all of her husband’s desires / she knows how to please him / and obey his parents!

  Hell yeah! Jumping squats and pirouettes and outthrust hips in swags of flying sand and cheeks blush with sparkling rouge and sweat and cheers and laughter and the griot motions for the band to up the speed and announces the more frenzied—

  Madames! Dance of the Second Wife!

  Whack! Whack! go the drums.

  The first wife is old / she can’t remember anything / the second wife i
s much nicer / and far more beautiful!

  And the second wives, barefoot and in inches of gold bracelets and towering headdresses and makeup, twerk and giggle, make to rub against the griot, against one another, against the tall djembe goblet drums—

  Ladies! Ladies, the Ass Dance!

  Yeah!

  Who took the chair? / Who, who took the chair? / Show us how you go down baby / Shake that ass like this, roll it like this / Who took the chair?

  And the dancers jump into the sandy arena under the tent alone and in pairs and threes, and kick up dust and perfume, and ululate and twist and toss toss toss their brightly wrapped buttocks high in the air, and thrust their breasts at the griot and his drummers, legs and arms akimbo until their clothes unravel, wigs and turbans fly off, a raunchy hurricane of violet and scarlet and indigo and silver and gold, a tempest of womanhood, the fishwives’ ecstasy this time for no one’s pleasure but their own—though from the shade across the street men in seated rows tap one another’s forearms politely to get a better view of the clamorous rainbow erupting under the tent.

  And shake it shake it shake it yeah!

  Okay, ladies! And now! Get down for! Dance! Of the Third! Wife!

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  And to a drumroll Khady sails into the heart of the celebration in a long dress of black and silver gauze and fake diamond earrings down to her shoulders and a silver clutch and matching spike heels. She smiles, lets the griot hold her by the waist, lets him hold the microphone to her lipsticked mouth.

  Who makes you happy, Khady?

  Ndongo!

  What? Who makes you happy, Khady?

  Ndongo!

  Who? I can’t hear!

  Ndongo!

  Louder, girl, who? I still can’t hear!

  Ndongo-Ndongo-Ndongo!

  Khady crosses the street to the row of chairs where her husband sits with his friends. Her heels sink through the sand. Glittering with makeup she leans down, kisses Ndongo on the cheek in front of the cheering crowd. The captain breaks a sweat. She plops into his lap to pose for pictures, directs his hand to her waist. He squeezes deeper into his chair, as if it could corkscrew down through the unpaved street and reappear aboard a pirogue where he can set wide his sea legs, be tough, be confident, be in charge.

  Ndongo’s mother and his first and second wives, Alassane and Sokhna, are invited to the celebration. They do not come.

  * * *

  As the sun drops, the naming-day guests leave, the musicians pack up, wind calms, waves quiet. In the flat silver water under the flat silver sky a fisherman pays out his seine, now ankle-deep, now thigh-deep in flow tide. The shore: the Earth’s exposed shoulderblade. Stirred by the moon, the sun, the farthest star in the universe, set in motion by cosmic powers, the ocean wipes it clean each day twice.

  By the time the fisherman hauls his seine, the sea erases into the dark. A heavy African night falls.

  In Khady’s rented room, hairless and blessed, the newborn sleeps alone at the edge of her mother’s bed.

  * * *

  Fishermen at the mbaar tell a story of a woman who used to work on pirogues.

  She worked well, says Coura Kane.

  She could outwork any lazy man, says Ndongo.

  Wallahi, that girl! When she went out to sea with her brothers and her oldest brother couldn’t come, she would be captain for that day, says Vieux.

  Where is this woman? Can I meet her? The men shrug. Been a long time. Maybe she is married now. Yes, maybe in some other town. The she-captain is more elusive than the genii. A slippery, free waterspirit. For all the rocking in their mother’s arms Khady Diallo’s daughters will never know the ocean’s rise and pitch. The women who are flesh and blood, the ones with whom I drink tea and cook and gossip and bargain over vegetables, are the humble ones, the ones who remain ashore, like my neighbors Mariama Thiam and Coumba Ndiaye; like Action’s mother, Marie Badiane; like Captain Mamour’s wife Yacine, waiting by the sea for uncertain returns. Like the woman I pass on one of my twilit walks home along the wrackline. She has brought her three children to sit with her on the dirty sand under a large pursenetter. In an immobile row they face the Atlantic. One child to her left, two smaller ones to her right, huddled inside her single transparent lavender shawl. Waiting, waiting. Penelopes, the tribe of ancient sea widows.

  I keep forgetting that I, too, am a woman at the mercy of men.

  After so many years trying to affect an observer’s detachment from my hosts I have grown to believe in my separateness: that I am a benign interloper for whom patriarchies make exceptions, almost invisible to the people who entrust me with their stories, excluded from the aspects of life related to love or sex—even spared, up to a point, by warring armies, though not by grief. Keeping apart is often lonely, but it also feels professional, emotionally safe. It is a foolish and unrealistic endeavor. In Joal, as in the world, our lives leach into one another constantly. My landlady’s three-year-old son demands that I give him his afternoon baths. Apparently I sudse well. Children in the alley have begun to call me Auntie. Despite myself my carefully calibrated distance recedes with each trip to sea, each night ashore worrying about a boat that is running late.

  Eight

  White sky, white sea, and no horizon. It has been like this for a week. December dust is settling in. Dawns seem delayed. Beneath white clouds the reef egrets spooked out of the mangrove marsh fly blue. The gurgling of herons in a kapok tree like clatter of bones, like a death rattle. The stagnant pools of summer rainwater have become concave football pitches where boys kick balls with bare feet. Baked rot rims them limegreen.

  The night-fishing season has begun and Magal Touba has finished but no pirogues go out: the waxing moon has kicked up waves and scattered the fish. Now not Ndongo alone but all of Joal’s fishermen pace the shore with the unsettled groinache of young lovers. Kedge anchor rodes that parcel out the beach dance up and down, taut and slack with the nodding sterns of their pirogues. Umbilicals. The shore is so dry that at night my blanket and mosquito net sparkle each time I shift.

  * * *

  Where the money came from, Ndongo would not say. But after the naming ceremony Master Ndoye returns from Mbour to finish building the pirogue. He carvel-planks the sheers and ratchets them in place and hammers the slender inwales alongside them like ellipses. He secures the boat’s curves with nine thwarts, knees the thwarts to the hull, removes the ratchet strap. Builds footholds in the bilge under each thwart. Finds the sturdiest strips of recycled mahogany still palimpsested with the scoffed paint job of the old Ndaye Adja Kane, kerfs them into gunwhales, nails those in. Circles the pirogue often: clockwise, counterclockwise, shuts one eye then another to check for symmetry. Anna, hammer. Anna, nails. Anna, hold. The mahogany is heavy, splintery; against its warm weight and the shipwright’s incantatory orders I am not an apprentice but merely a tool. Master Ndoye nails in the risers port and starboard, fortifies the boomkin with two knee joints, lowers a splashboard into place above the lazarette. On the last day he walks up to the keel and backs out his semioval signature stamp into the bowsprit port and starboard: his whiskey plank. Then Ndongo comes and plugs a fist-size gap in a board with a flipflop.

  Together Yoro and I caulk the seams. Ndongo paints the bow red and white and green, the stern green, the hull below the waterline brown, the topside white. He paints the ceiling brown and the waterline black. Ousmane paints the middle of the thwarts the palest blue, nails rectangles of multifilament net from thwarts’ bottoms to thwart risers to portion out holds. I paint the gunwales and the top of the transom scarlet. The bitt, where the mooring lines get wound—red at the bottom, yellow in the middle, green at the top, the colors of the Senegalese flag—is misshapen, jagged, perhaps to offer easier grip to those crew who watch for fish on the prow. Or to approximate the rostrum of a sawfish, that ancient totem of strength that has been fished out to near extinction
. Ndongo does not know for sure. It’s just how we’ve always done it, he says.

  The next afternoon the artist Moustapha Faye arrives at the dry dock in splattered denim jeans and a tee shirt. He paints a design of three lobed green leaves in the middle of the hull on each side. He shadows the leaves canary yellow. He draws red arabesques like claws streaming downward from the leaves. He paints a pair of red-tipped green and black spears in the stern. In the middle of the hull he spells the new boat’s name in black.

  On the starboard side: SAKHARI SOIRE. On the port: SOIRE SAKHARI. Inside each letter O, a white star.

  An alternative spelling, I say.

  It’s a proper name, we spell it however we like, says Ndongo.

  If they spelled it the other way, with the o-u-a, there would have been no room for the red part of the design, says Vieux.

  Amadou Souaré says:

  Her license will say “Sakhari Soiré, sixteen meters,” with an i.

  He squats and writes in the sand with his thick index finger, in Arabic, ma’shallah; says: Once the artist is finished painting the hull I will give him this word to write inside. To protect against envy. And the letter waw. To help the pirogue leave and return safely.

  Amadou is in a good mood. His new pirogue is almost ready to sail. And a week earlier he went to Kaolak and finally married the woman he had been pining for.

  The late December sunset is deep orange and the low cloud on the horizon is dusty lavender, the sky above it pale yellow then pale blue. The moon overhead is almost full. The sea is an uninterrupted sheet of gold. Upon it flocks of birds: pelicans, seagulls. A pod of pelicans stretches from a vee into a straight line and flies low and coils above the water and then lifts unevenly like a snake about to sting and lowers again and finally rests on the water in a constellation of black dots. We watch it. At a nearby church, in French and off-key, children practice carols about Jesus and chocolate. The beat is vehement, a hallelujah.