by Anna Badkhen
Oh, Cheikh Ibrahima Fall!
No one can be as powerful as you.
Give us something no one can take away from us.
Give us light!
Oh, la illaha illa Allah!
Oh, la illaha illa Allah!
The hymn rolls with the ebb tide and the sea is blue and smooth and in its mellow waters the sun quivers like yolk.
* * *
Eighteen miles offshore. At six-thirty a sudden breeze furrows the chop. Men cast net. They cast in a straight line, as all gillnetters do at night, stretch its hanging panel in the middle of the sea: this is called a driftnet. Daouda cuts the engine, anchors the pirogue, comes over to midships, and sits down on the burden boards, the back of his neck against a thwart.
And now, he says, we wait—and we wait—and we wait—
Babou chimes in:
—and we wait—and we wait—
Then Gorgui:
—and we wait—and we wait—
The men are laughing now. They make tea. They pass around bananas. They check net every couple of hours and pick some of the fish out of it and grill it on the boat brazier for supper. Sunset blushes whitecaps pink, golden, red. Northeast wind blows a swarm of bees onto the boat. Daouda watches them with concern. They will not be able to return to shore, he says. They will fly and get tired and land on the water and get wet and never get up again. He is sorrowful for the bees.
Several years ago Daouda Sarr got paid to smuggle a hundred and twenty-one people to Spain aboard an eighty-two-foot pirogue from the tropical forests of Casamance. The boat never made it: she ran out of fuel two-thirds of the way up and drifted until a Moroccan coastguard cutter towed her to shore. All aboard ended up spending nearly two months in a Moroccan prison. Long enough that Daouda learned to speak Arabic. When smugglers offered to hire him again, he refused. What I was hoping for in Spain was to eat until my belly was full and to live in peace, he says. And all of that I have here now.
The sun melts into a triangle, a pyramid, a square, a pink stripe. Last seabirds in silhouette. Nothing.
Split neatly in two perfect halves the moon rocks directly overhead, directly below the bowsprit. Daouda waits until it sets in a flaxen stripe, then steers slowly alongside the net so we can haul it in segments. In black sea the yellow row of buoys is a lubber’s line. We begin to pick. Large sardinella, slippery with winter oil; those were the first fish ever canned, two hundred years ago, to feed Napoleon’s army. Mackerel with razor gills. Halfbeaks with startlingly soft bellies. Flat bonga shad. In moonlessness the sea worries, the waves rise, angry chop grows. Bioluminescence trickles down my water-wrinkled fingertips, lights up my toes when I wiggle them in cold bilgewater, bubbles into the boat with the leaks: myriads of protozoa smacking against one another, against the inwales, the thwarts, the fish. Soon I am too tired to notice. I pick and bail and pick with unbending fingers and bail again. Around four in the morning, barely awake and numb from the cold, we head back to port.
Oh, Cheikh Ibrahima Fall,
You are the light!
Oh, la illaha illa Allah,
You are a strong man!
Oh, la illaha illa Allah!
Oh, la illaha illa Allah!
Daouda sings. Mollusk flags pop at us out of the darkness: eerie cemeteries of flags. We reach Joal by six and anchor just offshore. There are some pirogues. The shore is empty yet, dark, no one to buy our fish. Babou snores loudly in the bow. The rest of us bob in and out of sleep. Our limbs are leaden from fatigue and cold. Gorgui lights the brazier to make a pot of hot sweet tea and other brazier lights flicker on other boats in the sleepy marina where other frozen fishermen, exhausted to the threshold of delirium, wait on their anchored boats to find out their catch’s worth.
The Stacko Mbacké unloads her fish at dawn. Daouda’s two wives, Fatou and Seynabou, stand together on the shore, petite, pretty, warm. One of Seynabou’s legs is slightly shorter than the other, a memento from when she was a little girl and a vaccination she got at Joal’s hospital became infected and the doctors ended up cutting out the festering chunk. The women wave. They smile. During the six months of the day-fishing season Daouda spends two nights in a row with one wife, then switches. But when he comes home from night fishing he goes to bed with the one who puts his laundry in the washtub first, even if it is the same wife every morning. Which wife will keep him warm today? I do not want to guess.
I stumble home on woozy legs. Men hired a tractor to drag off the beach the stern of the Serigne Mansor, the gillnetter that shipwrecked on winter solstice, but her bow remains a dark crag rising from the night sand, mostly buried under the washings of weeks of high tides, irretrievable. Her net forever lost. On the dark beach near the smashed boat a teenage boy in wet briefs, all ashy goosebumps and sinew, has moored his father’s pirogue to a palmtree stump and now is trying to find his pant leg with a sandy foot.
Psst, white woman! Eh! You went fishing?
Yes.
La illaha illa Allah! Today?
Yes.
And after you sold the fish at the harbor, did you get your share?
Of course. I always get my share.
* * *
My landlords are still asleep when I come home. I unlock the compound gate and heat up a bucket of water on a propane burner. My bath sponge is recycled from blue and green gillnet; fishermen in Mbaar Sarrené make sponges like this. I put my laundry in a plastic washtub, sprinkle it with detergent. I will get to it later. I fall asleep in sweaty morning by myself.
* * *
Night-fishing season in full swing. For weeks I go to sea for twenty hours at a time and pick net in moonlight. On departing pirogues my crewmates call their girlfriends until there is no more cellphone signal and no more daylight and from then on each boat charts a shimmering course through bioluminescent sea in majestic isolation. Fish schools whirl underwater in sparkler circles. I take bucket showers afterward but still find fish scales on my pillow after morning naps. I dream I am growing gills.
Ashore Joal empties of men. They are either asleep or at sea. Some, like Ndongo, are gone for weeks.
On the way home from the harbor drowsy fishermen ooze into Mariama Boye’s breakfast shack.
Salaam aleikum, Mariama, how are things?
Al ham du lillah—we’re still alive.
Where is Gora?
He’s fishing in the Gambia.
Eh! Your husband, Gora, is going to take a second wife.
That’s right, he’ll take a Gambian wife!
Yes, he’ll take a Gambian wife and she will cook him nice dinners.
She will wash his clothes and bathe him!
And she will spend nights with him!
Many men marry in the Gambia, like my neighbor Mariama Thiam’s husband, who never returned. I know one pursenetter captain who married his third wife in the Gambia. Now he has one wife in Joal, one in Mbour, one in the Gambia.
You got a woman in every port!
That’s right. This way if I am fishing and I go to Mbour, I always have a dinner and a bed, or if I go to Joal or to the Gambia, I always have a dinner and a bed, too. This is what I call a man!
He adds:
I’d also like to have a wife in England.
Why, you plan to go fishing in England?
Why not?
Mariama Boye smiles at the fishermen’s taunts. Her big arms, big face, long golden earrings that brush her round shoulders, her soothing kindness. She offers refills on the coffee, another boiled egg, some extra mayo on that po’boy. When the men leave she wipes baguette crumbs off the table with a rag, straightens the pots of bean sauce, onion sauce, boiled noodles; makes sure all the lids are on tight. She wipes her hands very slowly. Then she says:
You know? Maybe he will. Maybe he will marry another woman, in the Gambia. He always keeps going to the Gambia.<
br />
After Mariama closes shop, Taïf the mechanic begins a busy day. It is late winter. As shadows grow shorter, queues at repair shops grow longer: pirogues have to travel so far to catch anything these days that all the outboard motors are acting up.
It could also be the dirt, Abou Korea says. Aboard the Le Fut Budos we pick nets that are soiled brownblack, greasy. What is it? He does not know. Maybe crude oil. I bring the net to my face, smell it, but the mesh, like everything, smells of fish and seabrine. This kind of dirt often comes this time of the year, but it will pass, Abou Korea says. The ocean current circles around, sometimes it brings dirt, sometimes fish, sometimes nothing. The sea is so.
Every few days the women of the Souaré household relay the latest bearings for the Sakhari Soiré. Now she is in the Gambia. Now she is in Casamance. Now Ousmane has hitched a ride south with another pirogue and joined the crew. With most men out of the house, Fatou Diop Diagne sets up a breakfast stand inside her compound. At five o’clock every morning she drags a large wooden desk under an awning of corrugated tin, sends a grandchild out to the bakery for a heap of baguettes, heats up last night’s oily onion yassa sauce, murex sauce, pea sauce, spaghetti, and sits down facing the gate with her embroidery in her lap to wait for customers.
For a few years after Fatou moved to Joal with her young husband, she made quite a bit of money braiding women’s hair at the harbor, which was farther south then, down the alley from my room. But one day Amadou told her to stop. He said she braided hair very well for strangers instead of cooking very well for the house. After that Fatou no longer braided hair for money.
For the next twenty-five years she would walk to the harbor, ask her husband’s fishermen buddies for free fish, and sell the fish in the market at a twofold markup. That was when she and Amadou build this big house: poured concrete patio floor, tiles in every room and under the awning, blue walls, blue and red metal window shutters, an indoor shower, and a flush toilet. Back then, if you made thirty dollars a day by reselling fish it felt as if you had made no money at all. Now you can’t expect to make ten. Now Fatou buys shrimp in Joal and resells it in Dakar during the shrimping season, but even then there are often too few shrimp to make the trips worthwhile.
It used to be, too, that the pirogue’s daily share of earnings covered the cost of all three meals for everyone in the house. But a few years ago Fatou had to change the rules: two hot meals a day on the house, everyone buys their own breakfast. Now they can buy it from her. But today the crew are gone and it seems no one in the neighborhood is hungry. Her breakfast stall is neglected, her wares untouched. Fatou fans herself in a plastic chair beneath a clothesline draped with little boys’ gym clothes and translucent women’s panties, and chants:
Where, oh where, are the people who will buy my food? Selling breakfast doesn’t work today. Sha-ta-ta-ta-ta, it doesn’t work.
It’s because the sea hasn’t been working this year, says Amadou. It’s the second month of night-fishing season and we are all still waiting for fish. No one has enough money for your po’boys.
Fatou nods. A mouse runs between her blue chair and the blue wall, scurries past the tulle door curtain into Alassane’s bedroom. There, a large laminated photograph of the Sakhari Soiré floats over a painted backdrop of an orange sunset, blue clouds, blue surf, and a volcano such as studded this coast once, helped form it millions of years back. The picture, taken from the starboard side of the boat, occupies the prime spot of the three-tiered iconostasis of faded pink photographs of Sufi cheikhs and women made up beyond recognition. Alassane put it in the center of the very top row, under a large brown teddybear, next to a photoshopped collage of caliphs and marabouts of the smallest of Senegal’s four Sufi brotherhoods, the Layenne.
The Layenne say that after the death of the Prophet, the Light of Muhammad—which God had created long before anything else, before heaven and Earth, before the oceans and the empyrean, and which emanated from the finger of Adam and from the forehead of his wife Hawwa—resided in a volcanic blowhole on the Atlantic shore of Dakar. In French the Layenne call it la Sainte Grotte de la Lumière: the Sacred Cavern of Light; in Wolof they call it Xûnt-mi: the Cave.
From there for more than a thousand years the Light of Muhammad emerged nightly on a divine search. At last, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it found what it had been looking for: Libasse Thiaw, a hereditary Lebou fisherman from Dakar. When he turned forty—a mystical number that signifies rebirth and renewal; the amount of years it took Mousa to walk Jews out of Egypt; the age of Muhammad when Archangel Jibril revealed to him that he was the God’s messenger—Thiaw proclaimed himself Seydina Mouhammadou Limamou Laye, the Prophet incarnate.
Like the Prophet, Limamou Laye was illiterate, cast no shadow, and left no footprints on sand, though you could see his tracks on hard rock. There is one still by the Cave—you can touch it. He sermonized in Wolof, preached austerity, healed the sick, exorcized the possessed, and prophesied his own imprisonment by the French, which lasted three months. Like the Prophet, Limamou Laye was initially pronounced mad. Eventually he gained a following and established the Layenne brotherhood. He outlived the Prophet and died in 1909, at the age of sixty-six.
They say the Light of Muhammad still lingers in Xûnt-mi. The cave is in a compound not far from the pale fortress of the United States embassy, almost to the westernmost point of continental Africa. A stuccoed wall delimits the compound. No one guards its two gates. Signs on the wall declare it a holy site and caution visitors to dress modestly. You pass a custodian’s house where goats chew on garbage and laundry ripples on the line, you pass a large gazebo where pilgrims from far away take their rest. The Atlantic is rough here, always in whitecaps. You leave your shoes on the concrete steps that lead toward the edge of a cliff jutting into the sea. The steps end in a small patch of sand. The custodian always keeps the sand freshly raked to erase any visitor’s tracks, like the Prophet’s. To your left, if you face the ocean, a hole. An aluminum ladder squeezes vertically down into the narrow dark. You descend past the sea-tortured crenellations of brownblack rock into a deep womb where suddenly two openings of light whirl out to westward: the cave’s two proximate mouths, lit up a pale blue by the sea. You stand in the warm surf, you remember: in the beginning, or soon thereafter, God split the Light of Muhammad in two to create water and heaven.
Pray, says the caretaker. He has slid down the ladder after you. He touches your arm, offers up his palms to the cave’s igneous roof, to the sea: pray like this. Now put your head here. A tiny shoulder-level grotto, fragrant. Does it smell of the incense the custodian rubs into it day after day or of the perfume thousands of pilgrims brought here on their hair, faces, necks? They say Muhammad always smelled of camphor and civet musk, that he never rejected a gift of perfume.
Pray again, the custodian says, then go up. He is so fast, why is he in such a hurry? A blast of wet wind picks up your skirt. Up in the sun you blink to see what you missed before your descent: an irregular indentation in a chunk of basalt. The imprint of Limamou Laye’s foot. Now put your right foot into his imprint. See how much bigger his foot was than yours? Now rest your left knee here, in this indentation. Pray. Pray.
All efforts to fix on photographic plate the image of Limamou Laye have produced nothing but blankness. But there exists an image of his son, who was born with a birthmark that spelled on his chest, in Arabic, the name Issa: Jesus. The Layenne confirmed Seydina Issa Rohou Laye as the reincarnation of Jesus when he was thirty-three years old; after his father’s death he became the first caliph of the Layenne. In his portrait you can make out the Greek letters alpha and omega in the folds of his turban. This stenciled image now watches over Dakar from many walls—including the wall of the Xûnt-mi compound. On this particular portrait, on the turban, someone has written in big block letters: BABY.
* * *
The Layenne celebrate Christmas and believe a pilgrimage to Mecca unnece
ssary. When they ablute before each of the five daily prayers they wash their legs all the way up to their knees. Almost all Layenne are Lebou fisherfolk. Fatou Diop Diagne, Ndongo’s mother, is Layenne.
The Lebou number fewer than a hundred thousand people and live almost entirely in Dakar, mostly in Yoff, a tiny semiautonomous fishing theocracy chinked out of a stretch of volcanic beach in the capital’s northwest, an hour or so on foot from Xûnt-mi. They speak Lebou Wolof, a dialect that has its own names for most fish. Some say the Lebou are a Wolof subgroup, others that they are an ethnic group of their own. Their origins are disputed. Some say their ancestors fished their way westward from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, establishing themselves first in Libya around the vanished Lake Tritonis, which Herodotus described as a “great lagoon,” before continuing toward the Atlantic and down the coast of Mauritania until they stopped at Cap-Vert peninsula, where Dakar is today. Others say they descended from a band of riparian hunters who trace their origins to Egyptian pharaohs. Fatou Diop Diagne says the Lebou are the same as the Wolof, just more stubborn and a little more difficult to be around.
* * *
Millions of dragonflies hatch, speckle the evening sky like television screen static. Tiny asymmetrical stars of horseradish tree flowers get caught in hair and clothes, their heady saccharine fragrance mixes oddly with the smell of fresh and smoked fish and refuse. In the morning, dew begins to gather on beached pirogue gunwales and thwarts, on mbaar benches. Somewhere beyond, clouds form and float across the sea, brittle archipelagos of shade.
Ten
The ocean glows at night. The pirogue glides upon her own brilliant wake. Fish schools flicker like sunken treasure. You cast net: the Christmas garland of the floatline lights up the instant it hits water, a floating halo in neverending black. Luminescence weeps into the boat through seams in blinking rivulets. You bail buckets of radiance. The outboard motor churns pure light.