by Anna Badkhen
When you haul a full net on a moonless night with frigid wet fingers you pull against a coruscating mass of cold fire scooped into the mesh out of the surrounding darkness. Straining against this dazzling hallucination the pirogue rotates under the Milky Way as if on a turntable: so perfectly flat and depthless the sparkling sea, so perfectly flat and depthless the sparkling sky. Fish jump to escape the net, trail the same white blaze as the shooting stars above. Lights of other pirogues tinsel the horizon.
You tip the seine into the boat: Look! Your cuticles twinkle. Fish thrash, spray the thwarts with glitter, spill light into the holds, each scintillation a blazing pinprick that lasts a tenth of a second. Soon the boat is dark again.
* * *
We were fishing off the Gambia first. Then we were fishing off Djifer. There were no fish. From what I heard at the harbor there were more fish here.
But you know how fishermen are. We hear there are fish somewhere, we go there—but fish move.
Yes, they don’t wait for us.
After several weeks of lean pickings down south, the Sakhari Soiré is back in Joal. Her crew, bloodshot-eyed, ashy, thin, drape over chairs and stools in the Souaré courtyard; above them their torn and faded laundry flaps from clotheslines in midwinter wind like pennants on a dressing line. Only young Vieux, who has grown man’s muscles on his little boy’s frame and has adorned his wrists with multicolored silicone bands that say ADIDAS, PLAYBOY, CHELSEA, mementos of all his ports of call where wristbands are ten for a buck, seems to have any energy left. He parades his new jewelry and his new ripped body around the courtyard. He picks up toddling siblings and halfsiblings, brags to young Maguette about his marine exploits. His brother Ousmane, face scaly, skin ashen, stretches out on the floor of his mother’s bedroom—one eye on a French football game on TV, the other swollen shut—and endures Fatou’s fuss over his eczemaed face.
Ousmane, how was the Gambia?
Eh! To be honest, it sucked.
Why?
There was no fish.
Did you make any new friends down there?
Some.
Outside a small child screams: someone is pulling a guinea worm out of her leg. Ndongo sails into the room with baby Moustapha, his and Sokhna’s youngest, in the crook of his arm, lets him sip water from his tin cup, lets him drool over his stained football jersey, coos. Such a big boy! Look at how much you’ve grown! Sokhna comes in after them, takes the baby away, laughs.
I have to watch it with Ndongo, she says. He’s a fisherman, you know. If I leave Moustapha with him long enough, next thing you know he’ll take the baby fishing!
The Sakhari Soiré will sail again tomorrow. She will go back to the Gambia, or Casamance, or Sangomar. Wherever there are fish.
* * *
The day I am finally allowed to go to sea aboard the new pirogue her captain is Maguette. Ndongo stays ashore. He has hired himself out to mend a friend’s seine so he can begin saving the money for his dream: a boat of his own, a purse seiner. Together with a motor and a net the pirogue will cost thirty thousand dollars.
The departure is scheduled for noon, at low tide. Adamantine sky, hard as flint. The pirogue points landward, stretches the hawser tied to her bollard of the day, a keel stub poking out of the sand like a rotten tooth.
For a few minutes before coming aboard Maguette and his crew stand at the tideline and watch the sea. Size it up the way laamb wrestlers size up each other in a ring. Divine it for fish or perhaps treachery. Then Maguette says:
Wallahi, I really would rather fish during the day. Night fishing is exhausting.
Yeah, I hate fishing at night, says El Hadj Ndour. El Hadj is a new hire, a former laamb wrestler who prefers to fish on pursenetters. He is thirty years old. All of his usual boats are away on long trips, so he has hired himself out for the night to the Sakhari Soiré.
Six months of this is a lot. In my opinion it should be only three months.
During the day-fishing season, by the time we cast net today I’d already be home, daydreams Maguette. I’d be taking a bath, and my wife would be putting incense in the room, preparing a nice dinner for me.
But this time of the year there’s no fish during the day, says Maguette’s friend Ibrahima Kama. He is in his early twenties and he, too, has hired himself aboard for the trip because his regular pirogue is having a lay day.
So we must fish at night. But you’re right, I hate it, too.
Used to be that in this area there was a lot of bonga shad, says El Hadj. Used to be they would come at the net at such speed they’d rip the net. Wallahi, there used to be a lot of bonga shad here.
The bonga shad catch has decreased by two-thirds in a decade.
Yes, there would be times there’d be so much fish you wouldn’t fit it all in the boat, says Cheikh Bathily, Maguette’s second mate. You’d call other boats to come pick your net—or you’d mark the spot on a GPS, take what you could carry to sell at the harbor, and then return to pick the rest.
I know! Last year this happened to Coura Kane’s brother. They called us to help them pick net. Also Boubacar, the one who lives in the same house as Khady, Ndongo’s third wife—happened to him, too.
You can’t see any real fish bubbles during the day this time of year anymore, says Cheikh. When I was young you would see a lot of bubbles even during the dry season.
Cheikh is forty and older than any man onboard except for the first mate, Pa Modou Diouf. Pa Diouf used to be Amadou Souaré’s first mate back when Amadou still went to sea. He is fifty-six years old, tiny in stature. His only wife and six children grow peanuts and millet on a farm inland that he visits on holidays; the journey is two hours by shared taxi and another half hour by horsecart. Most of the year he lives with the Souarés, in their big house. He was in his twenties when he saw the sea for the first time. The sea was so beautiful, he told me once. It wanted me to stay, so I did.
Pa Diouf does not join the conversation. He rarely does. After a lifetime of chasing mute fish on loud motorboats he mostly whistles and gestures. Talking, he begins—then gives up, waves with both hands, looks away: nuff said. At the Souaré compound he likes to sit in a metal chair out of the sun and nod at the small children who play at his feet.
Men count down to noon. A foot or so above the wrackline a small eddy throbs over a clamshell: a clavicle of ebb tide. The ocean’s heartbeat, the first. Maybe the one reliable timepiece in the whole world.
At last Maguette says, Bismillah, and the men roll up their sweatpants and tiptoe toward the pirogue, curl the balls of their feet against iceblue winter water like herons. The air is in the upper nineties during the day but the sea is still frigid. Between the boat and the shore a silver school of fry skims the water and momentarily it is as if the sea is turned inside out, exposing some sacred vital organ.
* * *
The pirogue hugs the shore, points south-southwest. Ousmane is at the helm. Next to him perches Ndiaga Kane, an oupa Ousmane’s age. In the hold just fore of the helm everyone’s flipflops and provisions bags, two car tires for lifesavers, two spare fuel cans, two jerrycans with water. In the next hold, between the sixth and seventh thwarts, Pa Diouf has fallen asleep on a burden board, his head on his green rucksack with a broken zipper. El Hadj sits on the fifth thwart, over the net hold where Maguette has stretched out on the net to make some phone calls; the net around him rises like green spume. Little Vieux, in a small pink hoodie, settles in the bow and cuts up some rotten fish from yesterday’s catch for bait. Next to him Cheikh Bathily ablutes with drinking water, prays, then brews strong minty tea. The faded green and blue Arabic calligraphy of prayers inside the boat’s ceiling is already illegible, eaten away by saltwater after two months at sea. Fish scales laminate port risers and gunwales.
Ousmane steers his grandfather’s boat through the white pall of smoke of Tann Ba. If you see the smoke you know there is fish at the h
arbor, at least some, at least for some. Steers her southward along the filao and Sodom’s apple groves that cinch the soil over unmarked fishers’ graves. Across the mellow mouth of the Mama Nguedj, where the outboard snags for several minutes on a large sheet of transparent plastic tarp. Past Fadiouth, above which a giant red sacré cœur floats atop the postmodern belfry of the Church of Saint François Xavier, named for a missionary who helped Portugal colonize Asia around the same time as other Portuguese missions assisted the enslavement of West Africa. The heart and the church are brand new, rebuilt after a hurricane shattered the nineteenth-century original almost two decades earlier. The islanders proudly tell visitors that all of Fadiouth’s residents, Christians and Muslims alike, pitched in to rebuild the church. Carved into the new church doors below the heart, invisible from the sea, bas-reliefed wooden fishermen trawl a wooden Atlantic with molded wooden seines.
Each year Fadiouth’s residents fortify their teetering tabby homes with sand they scoop from the outlying bars that protect the midden from ocean waves. Soon there will be nothing left to stop a swell from taking out to sea the island’s church, the nunnery, the mosques, its entire shell skeleton. Terra firma: the term is deceptive.
The Sakhari Soiré sails past Tindine Island, a small sandbar between Fadiouth and Palmarin where European colonists once made the Serer cultivate cotton. Only hyenas and genii live on Tindine Island now. If you build a house on the island you will go mad. You will have nightmares, or you will be walking and fall all of a sudden. They say it is safe to step ashore and walk around as long as you intend to leave, but no one really does. No one really disembarks on Tindine, only sorcerers. Wild cotton plants snarl island sand.
At last shore falls astern. A freshening steady sou’wester, unusual for the season, blows damp. The turquoise sea sparkles. Light spray to port. To starboard the wake cuts the sun in two: a shining glob like a bead of oil, and, inside the wake, a mosaic whirlpool of golden sparkles.
In midafternoon the rusted navigational buoy of Sangomar clangs into view, warns sailors of the Point of Sangomar, the genii meeting spot. For more than a hundred years coastal erosion has been severing the landbridge that connects the point with the mainland. Occasionally the point splits entirely. European sailors first began to record the periodic rupture in the late nineteenth century. Nine inches. Eleven inches. Three thousand feet. Two and a half miles at one point. The tide scrapes silt and sand off the mainland and deposits them at the island’s southern tip. Takes man’s land and delivers it to the genii. In the Saloum River Delta inland from Sangomar, the tide disinterred a body from a village cemetery, then laid it out to dry.
And sixty miles offshore, oil companies have begun to mine the vast deposit of oil and gas that lies five hundred fathoms deep. How will the drilling affect the genii? The fishermen?
No problem! says Ndongo. We’ll fish around the rigs.
The way they fish around the vanishing fishstocks, the unpredictable weather, the foreign ships, magic, sickness, life.
White streaks of seagull shit dribble down the buoy’s red and white stripes. Above it tiny puffs of cumulus hover; below, the dark green sea reflects meringue sky. A black flipflop and a blue chocolate wrapper sail past on watery clouds. Under the buoy and the jetsam and the clouds real and reflected lie hundreds of millions of barrels of petroleum, unseen riches that will keep men coming here even after the fish are gone.
Ousmane cuts the motor.
Vieux reheats the lunch his mother, Alassane, prepared for the crew: an aluminum basin heaped with rice and a spicy sauce of onions, eggplant, bitter tomato, smoked cymbium, cuttlefish, sardine, and meaty white grouper, once abundant but now overfished and threatened. While we eat with our hands—more delicious this way, the fishermen say—the cumuli concentrate into a haze. Part harmattan, part fog frames a jade seascape. It is astonishingly quiet.
After the meal Vieux leans overboard to wash the basin. Ousmane, in the bow, threads a lighted marker buoy onto the gillnet’s floatline, makes sure the two anchors on the leadline are secure. Maguette starts the motor. At five minutes to four the sun throws a handful of flags to the southwest.
The Sakhari Soiré circles a pearlescent sea.
Prepare to cast.
Cast net.
El Hadj leans against the gunwale and lowers the green net to the green sea with beautiful long motions, releases it into a straight bottom-set line more than a mile long. A hopeline. An assayed boundary between fish and no fish. Then Maguette steers the boat half a cable’s length to westward and drops anchor. It is common to leave a bottom-set net alone. It is also common for a boat to return to find her net shredded by a passing industrial trawler. A torn net costs hundreds of dollars to replace, strands a fisherman ashore. At sea, a torn net becomes a ghostnet, an indiscriminate rogue hunter that continues to snag fish and pelagic birds and marine mammals for years. Ecologists call this ghostfishing.
* * *
The breeze scores the ocean lightly and evenly, as if someone has pressed a net into the surface and lifted it. The men wait. They talk about shariah law and marriage and birth control. Is it okay to use condoms when having sex with one’s wives and is it okay for the wives to go on the pill? The answer to both questions, the men decide, is yes. Is it okay to have an abortion? Maybe, if the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother. Is it okay for the wife to have her tubes tied (the men cannot agree on this, maybe if she’s old or really sick) or for the husband to have a vasectomy (wallahi, no no no!). They talk about wives: how many, how old, where to house them. Same house is cheaper, different houses quieter. They make references to radio talk shows and Friday sermons and teachings from the Koranic schools they attended decades ago. They do not involve me in their colloquy, do not look at me as they talk. Maybe they have forgotten that I am a woman. Or maybe they do not care for a woman’s opinion on such things. On their shores the fates of women are ultimately up to men. In the bow Ousmane and Vieux thread baited hooks onto two lengths of line, wrap the line around their forefingers, and cast. Whenever something bites—a sardine, a mackerel—their faces light up in gorgeous smug surprise, as if this were the first time they ever had caught fish in their life.
When I was the same age as Ousmane, says Cheikh Bathily, sometimes we would know what kind of fish we’d catch because before we’d go out on a trip the owner of the boat would see a marabout and make sure we’d catch that specific kind of fish—grouper, for example.
There is a boat that two months ago caught two hundred and ninety-five boxes of grouper in the Gambia, says El Hadj. Forty kilometers from Djifer.
I’ve never seen that much grouper. But once I was on this boat that caught a hundred boxes of rouget.
We once had a hundred and fifty boxes of blue butterfish. It’s good, but man does it smell vile!
Stories. They have kept us afloat since time immemorial. True or false, each one is a buoy of faith. Daouda Sarr says that once upon a time people told children stories at night, and that each story had a moral. Children would learn from these stories, and they would forever remember what to strive for, what to avoid. Back then people farmed or fished, lived simply, had less stuff, and needed less than today. They didn’t have to have televisions or cellphones. People worked less and during the offseason they would stay at home. They had the energy and the time to tell stories to their children. Now people want, want, want, and they work very hard and all year long, and they come home tired and have no strength or time to tell their children anything, though Daouda does sing to his children and teaches them the names of their ancestors.
Suddenly Maguette jumps up from the midships thwart.
Motherfucker!
A gillnetter flagged to Djifer, the El H Lamine Thior, has sailed up while the Sakhari Soiré’s crew were chatting. Now she is casting her net into the sea near Maguette’s.
What the hell does he think he’s doing? Anchors aweigh!
Maguette runs from thwart to gunwale to the sternsheets pushing off the wood so hard the entire boat shudders and rolls and El Hadj grabs the smoldering brazier to keep it from sliding into the hold. Maguette yanks the starter rope, jerks the choke and yanks the rope again, and on a sputtering motor shoots the pirogue full speed ahead, nearly ramming the other boat with the bow.
Eh! You! The place where you are casting net is too close to ours!
The crew on the other boat pause, lift their faces from the luffing net in silence, consider Maguette where he stands in the stern, seesawing and furious in a trucker’s hat embroidered with an American flag and a portrait of Che Guevara. The men aboard the Sakhari Soiré, too, watch their captain, also say nothing. A young man in brown overalls at the other boat’s helm motions for his men to keep casting, shouts back at Maguette:
What do you want us to do, haul it?
You’re too close! Didn’t you just see us cast here?
So what? You don’t own the sea, do you?
What you’re doing is unfair!
The other man turns to his crew. Come on guys, keep casting, let’s finish up. He revs the motor. The rest of the El H Lamine Thior’s net slips into the water and she speeds off. Maguette gives chase. In close pursuit but not fast enough. The other boat’s crew stare straight ahead as he strains alongside. The goddamn motor. He yells to his men:
Grab her net!
Cheikh raises his hand.
Leave her net! Don’t fight with them, Maguette. We’ll have our chance at sea today, inshallah. Peace is better than fighting. Don’t fight with them.
Take her net, I said!
Cheikh stands up, steadies himself in the rocking boat, thrusts out his palm toward his captain.