by Anna Badkhen
The Sakhari Soiré sails off without me. A magicked barque. Broken by a colonial relic then raised from the dead; hauled, pushed, cajoled, cursed at, blessed, launched on the solstice. A resuscitated semiderelict pile of redwood held together by nails and caulk and charms that herself holds all the hope and all the loss in her phoenix hull. That bears my name on her stern, punctures the false and real membranes between the land and the sea, between truth and myth, between the storyteller and the story.
Exiled, grounded, I beg onto other men’s pirogues.
Nine
Winter brings pied avocet and ringed plover, brings curlew sandpiper and red knot and whimbrel. Brings Audouin’s gull, one of the world’s most rare. Birds come from the Arctic tundra of the Yamal Peninsula and Yakutia, from Mongolia, from Spain. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Their collective wingbeat charts the course of the annual migratory route of ninety million birds, the East Atlantic Flyway. They have magnetic sensing, like compasses. They know no borders. They follow thermals down coasts.
It happens that when seabirds fly at dawn or sunset, speeding to breakfast or back to roost in perfect unswerving chevrons, they suddenly collapse! collapse for no reason you can see! swerve so chaotically and with such frenetic violence your heart sinks and you think the world is ending—has ended—and then just as suddenly they recover and re-form and continue in their chaste formation, as if nothing has ever happened, as if you didn’t just nearly die from heartbreak.
* * *
This year the birthdays of Jesus and Muhammad fall on the same week. Mawlid singers quiet and carolers take over beneath the waning supermoon until Mawlid songs start again. This devotional round goes on and on for days, a tidal movement that culminates with Christmas Mass, when the festive bells of Joal’s churches clang deep into the chilly night.
By four-thirty on Christmas morning the only music is the forlorn song of dogs howling in the dark, the braying of donkeys, the surf’s diaphragmic exhale upon the dark shore. Under a lonesome orange streetlamp outside his sleeping compound Captain Abou Korea, tall and wearing a beige knit sweater with a shawlcollar and a matching wool scarf under his slicker, takes a minute to curse out his no-show crew.
Motherfucker, he says. The hardest thing in fishing is having a crew who don’t want to work. I have two young men who work for me. Lead-swingers. Slackers. They live just over there. So I go to wake them up just now and one says he has a stomachache and the other says he has an earache! Why couldn’t they tell me this last night?
Now it is just Abou Korea, who is fifty years old, and his son Alassane, who is sixteen. On top of that, the horsecart that usually drives Abou Korea’s outboard to the boat does not turn up. The captain will have to lug the motor to the boat himself. Three blocks of ankle-deep sand, fifty feet of cold, dark water. He is still recovering from back surgery for a cyst.
Sha-ta-ta-ta-ta, he sighs. Oy oy oy. Motherfucker.
He hoists the motor on his shoulder, spits, swears once more, and walks through the black toward the invisible shore. Alassane and I carry drinking water, fuel, the bowlight, the tool bucket, a bailing can, a bucket with a teapot and shotglasses and coal, burden boards, spare net. It takes us three runs. Alassane makes one extra, to the bakery, returns cradling to his chest four fragrant hot baguettes wrapped in newspaper: Oslo’s Aftenposten and Dakar’s Le Soleil from two weeks back. In dark alleys things slink as we pass. Dog shadows. Maybe ghosts. In overcast night I guess the tideline inaccurately, step by accident into frigid surf, hypothesize Abou Korea’s stooping presence. He taps my arm.
Can you haul net?
Sure. I brought my gloves.
You’re my crew today, then.
* * *
The Le Fut Budos, thirty feet, fifteen horsepower, is painted the red, blue, and white of the French tricolor. Abou says the pirogue is named after a town in Gascony because a Frenchman from there gave him the money to build her. Manned with half her normal crew and at half throttle to conserve fuel, she sets sail to west-southwest shortly after five A.M. with her red bowlight blinking. Stirs soft contrails of luminescence as she eases away from shore. Alassane secures buckets and cans neatly in their proper holds, arranges burden boards into a platform amidships, climbs onto it, folds his legs under him very carefully, and falls instantly asleep. It will take hours to get there at this pace.
Away from the mottled darkness of Joal the sea is mostly calm and gray, gray sky, stars and moon almost completely behind cloud. The east begins to pale at six-forty and Venus is swollen above a fogbank touched with the palest blues of predawn. Abou Korea sets before him a square wooden box and opens the lid. Inside is a large compass with a fluorescent ring around the face.
On cloudless nights Abou Korea navigates by the stars; during the day by the position of the sun, the direction of the waves, but it is not day yet and the stars are cast over. He has GPS, too, but does not want to run down the battery. He consults the compass every few minutes and launches into a recitation of all the things that are wrong with the sea nowadays, his personal variation of every fisherman’s refrain. Big pursenetters go too fast, very dangerous for smaller boats. Marine sanctuary officials are corrupt. The government takes the fishermen’s taxes and duties but offers no social security in return. There are too many boats and too little fish. And what about all the mollusk flags where we are going? So many flags, sha-ta-ta-ta-ta.
Not talking to me nor to his sleeping son but simply to keep himself awake. A trick of the trade.
* * *
The highlights of luminescence are gone and water just slips past now. Altocumulus billows lay stepladders across the sky, imitate ocean swells. At seven A.M. the east is dusty orange, Venus bright but fading in layered silkscreen sky, and insects onboard wake up: a white moth, a disoriented wasp, accidental voyagers. Seagulls arrive, singly. The tide is going out and the flags we pass tilt to westward. Some mollusk boats appear, fade out.
Abou Korea fishes his GPS out of his slicker pocket, checks the direction. Four miles to go. He shuts it down again. He has not checked the nets since before the full moon.
Let’s see what kind of fish I got.
Fish, in Abou Korea’s parlance, are murex, cymbium—anything in the sea. A common tenderness. Fishermen also do not say that fish or mollusk spawn; they say they give birth. But at the harbor all fishers call their catch “product.”
I want to finish the job by three in the afternoon. It will be hard shorthanded. Because my crew are shits. Oy-oy-oy-oy. Alassane, though, he is reliable. He will do what I say. Alassane! Alassane! Eh! Psst! Wake up! We’re almost there.
The boy sits up, then stands, pulls on a yellow slicker and green slicker pants that have lost their suspenders long ago. He ties them on with a length of green fishline. The sea runs blood orange in all directions.
* * *
A murex net is about five hundred feet long, a little over a foot wide. Plastic bottles poured full of concrete anchor its ends to the ocean floor, stretch it wide. From each anchor runs a line to a buoyed flag. Abou Korea’s flags are made of orange mesh onion bags and black strips of tarp. Today the Le Fut Budos must haul and check and pick seventeen nets, then set them again. But the first net she hauls belongs not to Abou Korea but to a fisherman from Djifer. Four days ago Abou Korea watched this man set net too close to his. He tried to warn him away but the man would not listen, probably thought that Abou Korea wanted more murex to himself. Now, the full moon waves of the last week have tangled and twisted the two nets into a shaggy benthic mess fastened tight by hundreds of mollusk clasps.
There are crimpled scallops and cymbium and crabs, and there are minuscule clams that stick to clusters of brown seaweed, and there is red seaweed, frilled and hard and slightly bitter to the taste, and there are tiny florets of pink and yellow and white marine flowers. There are amorphous blobs of man-o-wars that unfold exquisitely the second you toss them back in the sea, each medusa danci
ng its own singular pulse. There are sharp small barnacles and large beaked triangles of Chautard’s pen shell that look like broken-off pike heads and that sometimes bear black pearls, which no fisherman here sees because you toss these shells right back into the sea. You don’t eat them. Maybe somewhere else in the world, but not here. The snarled nets are heavy with shells and rattle like maracas.
Motherfucker, grumbles Abou Korea. I’ve been a fisherman for almost forty years. And tell you what: the profession is destroyed. By lack of discipline and by greed.
The more the captain talks, the more worked up he becomes.
Sha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. At the mbaar, drinking tea and talking, they all look like men. But you know a real worker when you go to sea.
We spend the next four hours picking, untwining, tearing. No one sings. The snarl seems interminable. Around ten-thirty the wind picks up, the sequined sea ripples, tosses the unanchored boat on glittering high tide chop. By one o’clock the wind dies and in its place come flies, lethargic and clingy. From where do they appear suddenly in the afternoon, fifteen nautical miles offshore? Abou Korea complains:
The amount of years I have spent on the sea? I pray that Alassane doesn’t spend them in the sea. Just want him to do anything else, really, that is not in the sea. The problem in this area is that away from the sea there aren’t any jobs that pay.
The ocean in late afternoon is slow green molasses that slides under the boat. Not much murex today. Abou Korea blames the wind: in big waves the mollusk burrows into the sea floor to avoid being tumbled. By the time the sun sets we will have picked four nets out of seventeen, with a box of murex to show for it. It will sell for exactly the price of a tank of fuel.
Motherfucker, Abou Korea says. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired. Sha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta! May we never know such exhaustion in the afterlife. Alassane, I think maybe we should take out the murex nets and switch to cymbium nets instead.
Okay, Dad.
I pull shake smack grab pry. Under my wet, awkward fingers sea creatures stick pale protuberances out of triangular white shells with narrow orange-yellow trim. I yank at lines and tug them free and pin their pleats down to the bilges with my foot. Sand and shell fragments and seaweed spray and lodge in my hair and eyebrows, weigh down my eyelashes, gristle inside my mouth. My pen and soggy notepad are stashed away somewhere. I am a deckie. I sprain my thumb.
That afternoon a dragonfly latches onto the seat of Alassane’s rubberized pants and hitchhikes on his ass all the way to shore.
* * *
A month later, full-moon waves drag Abou Korea’s shadefish trammel onto the rotten skeleton of a pirogue that capsized off Sangomar thirty-five years earlier. The net snags. Sha-ta-ta-ta-ta. It’s an expensive net. Abou Korea anchors the Le Fut Budos to the net and revs the fifteen-horsepower motor high and the trammel rips, and rips again when Abou Korea tries to hook it off the shipwreck from a different angle. After that, the net would not budge at all. Sha-ta-ta-ta-ta. God protect us against Satan. Motherfucker. The captain grinds his motor, breaks off a piece of his own pirogue’s bowsprit. Two hours later he lets it go at last, promises to return—then runs out of fuel within swimming distance of Djifer and has to flag down a passing pirogue to siphon off some gasoil. He spent six miles worth of fuel trying to haul the goddamned trammel. When he returns for it two weeks later the net is gone.
I run into Abou Korea one afternoon near Mbaar Sarrené, where he is mending cymbium net. He beckons me, then lies down on his bad back on the beach sand next to the mbaar and from there looks me in the eye and tells me that his fishermen friends blame me for the lost net, say that bringing a woman aboard his pirogue caused this bad luck.
Abou Korea makes lying on the sand seem dignified. I stand next to him, awkward and small.
Do you think it was because of me, Captain?
Ah. I don’t know. Probably not. Fishermen are superstitious.
His eyes let go of my face then and he turns his head to look past me at the pale-blue sea. Then he says:
The next day I caught four shadefish with another net, more than a hundred and fifty dollars at the harbor.
Abou Korea does not remember the name of the sunken boat, but knows her captain, Mamadou Ndiaye, who survived the capsize with the crew.
* * *
About thirty miles south of here, at the depth of fifty-nine feet, lie the remnants of the MV Le Joola, a Senegalese ferry that capsized in a storm off the Gambia in 2002 with nearly two thousand passengers onboard. The sinking ship deployed a single lifeboat. The government of Senegal turned down international offers of assistance and did not dispatch rescue teams for hours. Most of Le Joola’s sixty-four survivors were plucked out of the sea by fishermen.
* * *
Under the eucalyptus tree between the hospital and Mbaar Sarrené the fishermen have switched from belote to checkers. Their checkerboards are sheets of plywood graphed with magic markers, their checkers are yellow and red soda caps, their benches are pirogue boards propped up on cinderblocks. Before lunchtime their little square fills with kitchen smells: boiling rice, boiling fish, pepper sauce, monosodium glutamate.
From their shaded vantage they can watch the winter days blow out to sea in a procession of pirogues: first mollusk boats then gillnetters then pursenetters if the moon is not full. In a full moon gillnetters stay put because moonlight overpowers the luminescence churned up by fish schools and you cannot see the fish. They can watch the comings and goings of neighbors: Christian children in plastic domino masks for Mardi Gras; Gambia and his friends tired from overnight trips to ghostliness; Serer boys bareback on chestnut horses at full gallop on the evening beach; teenage girls playing football outside Abou Korea’s house, skirts hiked up to their thighs; Marie Badiane, the mother of the drowned fisherman Action. She has not been to the harbor since her son died.
How do you make a living now, Marie?
Oh, you know, this and that. It’s just hard to see the port yet, all the boats coming in. But soon, soon, inshallah. All our hope is in the sea.
Along the beach to the south of the gamblers wind and waves have flattened half the burial mounds. If that was what they were. Ripe Sodom’s apples tremble over the dunes.
* * *
Knowledge, Captain Daouda Sarr tells me, is doing things.
But the more things I do, the more everything I thought I knew seems to flatwash into a watery vagueness, amorphous and changeable, where all definitions are recharted and relearned, all lines crossed, all meanings slippery. I helped build a pirogue—and so what of it? She is plying some distant seas unknowable to me. And I? Again it comes, this familiar and implaceable lostness, this sense of dislocation that feels as if I am overlooking something important yet ineffable, missing something I cannot quite identify. It feels, too, queerly shameful, the way it rises from the gut as a deep blush, a gasp: what have I done? My mother once described hot flashes this way.
Now I am bailing the Stacko Mbacké, Daouda’s thirty-foot gillnetter. Her crew are Daouda’s uncle Gorgui Sarr, who is fifty-nine years old and has spent half of his life in Spain, and Daouda’s nephew Babou Sarr, twenty-four and very large and gawky, as if his body’s boundaries are yet unknown to him, as if he is still growing. When Babou walks on gunwales the wood creaks.
Don’t break my boat, eh!
To me, Daouda continues to speak in riddles, in koans. Are gris-gris powerful because of the magic locked within them or because of the magic they represent? Does medicine heal because of its chemical properties or because you believe it will work? Presently he asks:
How long will it take you to learn to bail?
What do you mean?
To bail! To bail! Me, I am still learning to bail. I have been a captain for thirty years and I am still learning to fish. What can you teach me?
What indeed. What the sea teaches best: to gorge—to gorge on beauty. “Every object,
well contemplated, awakens a new organ within us,” wrote Goethe. A kind of opening that allows for a recognition of the ineffable, guides through liminal spaces. Look. Low orange sun illuminates the black smog from the Tann Ba smokers that masses over the receding skyline of Joal. Large pink man-o-wars float past the pirogue, and upon the placid surface of late afternoon sea the wake of small murex boats returning to shore is a crisscross of spiderweb silk, the thinnest-spun gold thread. In the white sky a duck flies. Then ten more ducks; they bank and pick up at once and bank again.
Seasonal birds, like more than two hundred other species on this coast, most of them Palearctic. Fewer come each year. Cities and deserts swallow their habitats, men hunt their kin, pesticides poison their eggs. Climate change uncouples the timing of resource from the timing of migrations, syncopates their traveling cycles, puts the birds out of step with themselves. The birds are confused.
What if all birds the world over moved somehow in synchronicity imperceptible to humans? All the birds everywhere on the planet tied by a perfect and omnipresent choreography of which only we flightless mammals were oblivious? I don’t know about that, Daouda says. I know that fish are like birds. They lay eggs in Europe but every year they return here at the same time. And their children do as well. Fish do the same.
On the Stacko Mbacké men pray for fish. Gorgui bends low, touches forehead to gunwale. Daouda, left hand on the throttle, mouths a prayer, touches his solar plexus with his right. Then he begins to sing in a full open tenor, in Arabic, an ode to Cheikh Amadou Bamba’s favorite disciple, the dreadlocked Ibrahima Fall, who promoted hard labor as a form of worship: