by Anna Badkhen
Maguette. Listen, son. Trust me. It does no good to argue. The same thing happened yesterday, with that other pirogue, and in the end you got more fish than them. It’s all a question of luck.
That utterance itself a conjuration. A prayer, a magic spell repeated on every pirogue, in each mbaar. Daouda Sarr is not quite right: there is a story fishermen tell the children they take aboard, the same story with the same moral they tell themselves daily, to keep going to sea, to keep going. This is it.
Maguette rages on but slows down to half throttle, steers the boat back to her anchoring spot, mutters to himself. His men look away. The exhaustion of the night-fishing season frays everyone’s nerves. Two months later, at dawn, the crew of the Sakhari Soiré, helmed once again by Maguette, get into a brawl with the Ya Fatou Ka, a pursenetter that belongs to Djiby Dioh, the son of Joal’s legendary first fisherman, Ngo Dioh. The argument nearly costs Joal its fleet.
The men will tell it so:
After a long night at sea Maguette moored the pirogue wading distance from shore in Joal’s packed harbor. He had begun to haggle with the fishwives when the Ya Fatou Ka wedged next to the Sakhari Soiré. As she slid toward the shore she glanced off the starboard topside of the Souarés’ pirogue, not quite scuffing it.
Hey, watch it, don’t hit our boat, said Saliou, Ndongo’s teenage halfbrother.
Hey, boy, don’t tell me what to do, said the Ya Fatou Ka’s skipper.
Hey, fuck you, motherfucker, said Modou Diagne, Ndongo’s maternal cousin, who is twenty-one.
Oh fuck your mother, said the man. Then two or three fishermen from the Ya Fatou Ka reached over and grabbed Saliou under the arms.
Accounts of what followed vary. Saliou says the men dragged him aboard their boat and someone whacked him on the back and shoulders with a loose burden board, though his only injury after the scuffle is to his right hand, knuckles bloodied as if he had punched someone or something hard. His crewmates say Saliou did get beaten up but aboard the Sakhari Soiré, not the other pirogue, but they are not entirely sure how that happened exactly because after the insult to his mother, Modou Diagne heaved a gasoil canister and proceeded to slosh the Ya Fatou Ka with fuel so he could set the pirogue on fire until someone knocked the jerrycan out of his hand and into the sea.
Picture such an exuberant conflagration! How quickly the rush of fire licks the boat’s curlicued designs and prayers off her topside and all the way to the sky. How gorgeously she burns, this mahogany pirogue caulked with tar and paint thinner—and the one not a palm’s width away from her, and the next, and the next: picture, after months without a drop of rain, the holocaust of an entire seashore aflame as the fire dances from boat to boat wedged cheek by jowl above and below the tideline and loaded with fuel cans empty and full.
After the scuffle Saliou went to the harbormaster to complain about the assault and was about to head to the gendarmerie but his father forbade him from going. When I hear the story from the crew Amadou and Ndongo are at the harbor, trying to settle matters peacefully with Djiby Dioh and Harbormaster Samb. Djiby Dioh is an influential fisherman in town, and an old pal of Amadou’s. Amadou does not want bad blood between him and Djiby. Besides, it is best to keep the whole arson thing from the law.
The seething crew congregate at the Souarés’ compound, replay the confrontation, scheme a retaliation with young fishermen friends who have stopped by for gossip. It is close to noon but the fishers are unwashed, jittery from adrenaline and hunger and fatigue.
Next time I go to sea I’ll bring a sword like a Fulani, wallahi, says Saliou. I won’t use it, I’ll just show it to them.
Next time you should go fishing with your own stick of wood, says his neighbor Modou Geye, a fisherman himself.
Next time you should get the fishermen on shore to throw rocks at the other guys, says an oupa named Daouda, one of the sons of Yoro the caulker. He is fifteen but looks much younger. He is hefting a chunk of cement in his pudgy right hand.
Next time, he adds, I’ll brain Amadou Souaré with a rock because he shouldn’t have stopped us going to the gendarmes, wallahi.
The sea: the slow erosion of every boundary. Geography, tradition, family. Maybe this is the trouble Adama Sidy the sorcerer saw in his visions.
* * *
Sundown like honey. The sea flows slow. I squeeze into the stern hold with Ousmane and Ndiaga and Vieux, dig in my drybag, and share with the boys two bananas, some candied peanuts, beignets.
You take very good care of us, Ousmane says.
I miss my son, I admit.
I am your son, he says, shines a chaplipped smile. Vieux crawls under a tarp next to me and falls asleep between the gascans and the motor.
At seven-thirty, Maguette starts the motor and lets the Sakhari Soiré drift alongside the net so Ndiaga Kane, El Hadj, and Cheikh Bathily can lift the net by the yellow floaters, check for catch section by section. Some sardines, not many. Maguette steers away, anchors, kills the motor. All is still again. Darkness falls heavy and the photosensor goes off in the bow and a faint red light shines from the bitt. A three-quarter moon dances in the bilges. The sea is a black pearl. It rises and falls softly in long, sweet swells. It is too quiet to talk.
Stars wheel above. Ocean wheels beneath. Before he turtles asleep inside a hooded sweatshirt Pa Diouf points a narrow finger: Polaris. He names it in Wolof: Biddew Xibla, the Star of Destination. Pinned to it, the world turns.
The crew doze off. In the bow Maguette boils a large pot of pearl couscous with sweet reconstituted milk for supper, covers it, ablutes for prayer. In the stern I pee into a bailing can. The second I empty it overboard, luminescence sparks up and a cricket starts in the stern. I rinse the bailing can in the twinkling ocean and laugh.
The moon goes behind some clouds. The cricket deafening, then gone. Maybe I hear the buoy of Sangomar clang once. Or maybe this is in my head. The suck and kiss of the sea against the hull: an elongated silence. Distant boats rev motors, check nets, quiet.
Quiet.
A caesura.
* * *
What is it that comes next, that sudden measured breath, that almost sedate surfacing to port—two breaths, two sets of surfacings, that pass the boat from stern to bow one after the other in close and eternally slow succession and then go on and away in the dark, in the gray night, no luminescence in their wake nor at the rise and fall of their enormous streamlined humpbacked bodies? I stand and look and look. But I see nothing, and soon the coupled breath is gone.
Dolphins. Totems. Guardians.
Everyone else aboard is asleep except Maguette. The captain is praying.
* * *
Maguette rousts the crew just before midnight. They chow down on the lukewarm pasta, shiver, pass around two hot shotglasses of sweet tea, cup the heat in their pruned fingers. The moon is out again and reflects on the sea surface in undulating stripes, white striations that make the net seem full of fish.
We haul net. The surreal phosphorous boil in its wake, its own twinkling lattice, the glossy darkness when it is finally all aboard. The men sing almost in a whisper, halfhearted from the cold. Or maybe afraid to wake something in the night. Haul like a lion—haul like a donkey—we will eat some—sardinella. Maguette and Cheikh switch on their flashlights; we pick net. Quiet shanties of other distant pirogues, other frozen, tired crews. A shooting star every time I look up. Shooting stars whenever I look away, too.
Maguette shines the flashlight at the holds, evaluates the catch by sight. No one aboard a pirogue ever says, We got a lot, or, There’s too little. Fishermen appraise their haul silently and keep their judgment to themselves, and they know without discussing it what the pirogue must do next. Now the crew of the Sakhari Soiré know: Maguette will take this fish to Djifer, where they will spend the morning and go back out to the same fishing grounds in the afternoon. The buyers at the Djifer harbor will pay less than tho
se in Joal but the pirogue will save on fuel.
Maguette, you sneaky bastard! You want to go to Djifer because your wife is there at her parents’ house. But listen! Take care of the new baby, but don’t try anything else!
Eh, what else can I try? We’ll be there in daylight. I can’t do anything like that in daylight.
Oh, there are plenty of things you can do in daylight.
This Maguette! He has a powerful gris-gris. He made it so the sea wouldn’t have fish so he could have an excuse to play with his wife!
Guys, guys, listen, this is important. Whatever you do in Djifer, be careful where you eat. There’s this one woman at the harbor, you shouldn’t buy her food. I was on a boat once and we all bought lunch from her and then the whole crew had the runs. Let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than a boatload full of guys who gotta go, wallahi.
True. Especially if there’s only one bailing can.
That’s why I always say, you’ve got to have at least two bailing cans.
* * *
The net Ndongo is fixing is a purse seine half a mile long and so old it has faded from black to maroon, terracotta, beige, brown, burgundy. The job takes weeks. Ndongo spends them camped on the flat concrete roof of Khady Diallo’s apartment building. He has stretched a striped white, blue, and pink tarp over the roof in lieu of a parasol; under the tarp the seine spills its soft pleats like a giant man-o-war.
A midmorning in February. A full moon pales in bright sky. In her kitchen downstairs Khady is preparing lunch on a propane burner, her makeup perfect and baby Ndeye Khady strapped to her back. She is singing under her breath along with the radio. Upstairs I shuck off my sandals, curl up in the soft shapelessness of the net, its fishy embrace. Catnap any way you like here. Wind flaps the tarp, twangs Khady’s clotheslines, rushes old plastic bags through the sandy alley below and lifts them up and blows them into the net, against Ndongo’s bent back, against my bare arms. The steam of Khady’s ceebu jën winds up two concrete flights of stairs.
Ndongo, spreadlegged on the edge of the seine, stitches the floatline onto the net with blue fishing twine, counts out the stitches. Five stitches to tie the net to the line. Ten stitches to circumvent each yellow styrofoam float. Then five stitches on the line again.
Two more weeks and I’ll be done, inshallah, he says.
That’s a lot of lay time, I say.
You’re right. But the sea will never finish. It will be there. So I have time. When I’m done with this we’ll go back to the Gambia.
Vieux Sene arrives, in white earbuds and a tartan cap and a black down vest. Ndongo shows him the floatline he has been stitching on, explains his method.
What do you think?
Looks good, says Vieux. He has been hustling, mending net, selling fish, helping friends when he can. He takes off his sneakers to step onto the net, threads a shuttle with more blue twine, for Ndongo. His socks smell rotten.
And how’s your own pirogue, Vieux?
Eh, it’s still broken. I still don’t have enough money to repair it. Soon, inshallah.
Inshallah.
An hour before lunch the net’s owner arrives, removes his flipflops, crawls up onto the summit of the net. He is a young man and last week his only wife died in childbirth; the baby lived. Now the baby is with a sister-in-law who is nursing a newborn of her own, the two older children are with the grandparents, and he is here, on Khady Diallo’s roof, in the middle of his old net. Where else? I offer my condolences. Thank you. Life is so, he says. Everything is God’s will.
We sit in the wind, in the blowing sand and trash. Ndongo counts out the stitches. Vieux unspools and respools blue twine, talks to someone on the phone. I take notes.
Anna, says the net owner. Will you remember all this?
I hope so. That’s why I have this notebook. So that later when I look at my notes I can see everything: Ndongo and Vieux, this flapping tarp, you in the middle of the net, the smell of Khady’s good food—
All the dirty plastic bags flying around—
Yes, I will remember those too.
* * *
Anna. Come tomorrow. Six-forty in the morning. I want to try something different.
Ndongo plans to leave for the Gambia the next afternoon and remain there until the night-fishing season ends in May. But he wants to squeeze in a day trip off the Petite Côte before he leaves, even though there are few fish here and this is not the season for day fishing. Ndongo wants to squeeze every last fish out of the sea.
I arrive at Mbaar Kanené before first light. The world at this hour lacks definition, a flat discus smothered between low tide and a three-quarter moon. Gillnets are just arriving in Joal harbor marina, anchoring offshore to wait for the fishwives and middlemen to wake. You can see the still patch of water before the harbor flicker like a fire show with their bowlights and their burning braziers doubled in shallow reflection. Downcoast the moored pirogues, mostly jiggers, point out to sea, strain their improvised bollards: other boats, a palm trunk that rests on the sand, pirogue fragments. It is a week past spring equinox and with the first hint of light fog begins to curdle in the savannah. It will migrate to sea by noon, momentarily drowning all in milk. Then it will be burned apart and carried back eastward in tissue-thin wisps.
At ten to seven the eastern sky blushes, pales, illuminates a handful of early seagulls, the procession of pirogues strung along the horizon toward port. Illuminates the new odd seaweed the sea deposits ashore this time of the year: soft dark green tubular antlers, coral-like white constellations of white sequins. Illuminates, south of Mbaar Kanené, a purse seiner unloading her catch onto a horsecart: her captain would rather pay the cart driver than the annual harbor dues that would allow him to sell at the marina. Past this scofflaw horsecarts caravan toward the harbor. Fishwives with buckets, purposeful men. A big black sow wanders along the wrackline also, snout to the ground, her droopy teats swaying low. Above all this, on the southernmost leg of their migration, kites soar. No sign of Ndongo or his crew.
I am drinking café Touba in Mariama Boye’s breakfast shack when he calls. The trip is off. Sokhna, his and Khady’s daughter, is sick: unable to hold down any food, feverish. Ndongo has taken her to the Joal hospital, Khady has taken her to a convent just north of town. The nuns gave her syrup, the doctors two injections. Khady herself boiled the root of Sodom’s apple and papaya leaves into a tincture. Nothing worked. Now they are taking her to a Serer village of millet farmers a few miles inland to see a local medicine woman, a sorceress. I should come too.
Dawn finds Ndongo and Khady Diallo sitting side by side on the sorceress’s waiting porch, next to a hundred-pound bag of yellow onions: he on a plastic woven mat nuzzling baby Ndeye Khady’s faint curls; she in a metal chair. Sokhna, in a matching wax print skirt and top over pink fleece Pokémon pajama bottoms, is draped over Khady’s knees. The sick girl is weeping from pain. The night before, when Khady was nursing the baby and Sokhna had nodded off at last into restless sleep, Khady saw the disembodied head of a horse float through their room. She thinks it was the devil.
There are other patients on the porch, two women with toddlers. A teenage girl brings us some plastic cups on a dinted tin plate, a large pot of weak sweet coffee, another tin plate with halved fresh baguettes, and a message from the healer: If her medicine doesn’t help, at least her patients won’t go away hungry.
Ndongo tells a story:
I have this relative in the Gambia. One time he was eating and something got stuck in his throat. They took him to the local hospital but the doctors there couldn’t do anything. I think this was in the port of Bakau. So they rushed him to the capital. He could barely breathe by then. The doctors in the capital were getting ready to operate on his throat, cut it open. Then one of his relatives said, Wait, before you do that let me call my friend. This friend, he was a healer, a sorcerer. He poured water into a cup, said a praye
r. They lifted up the man—he was so sick by then he couldn’t sit up on his own—and poured this water into his mouth. And—wkakh! The man spat it out. It was a fish bone.
La illaha illa Allah! say the women with the toddlers.
That’s true, says Ndongo. If people in the West were like us here in Africa they wouldn’t spend all the money on doctors. They would just go to a marabout or a healer in the bush.
And Khady Diallo says:
I wonder how much this medicine woman charges.
We sip the healer’s coffee. A duck and a single yellow duckling parade across a large swept sun-cobbled yard, past a big mango tree with round shade and large green fruit, waddle around a tall papaya tree and disappear behind the sorceress’s hut: a single rectangular cinderblock room roofed with palm thatch. The fronds of the thatch are gathered into a peak at the top and cinched with a car tire. Under an awning held by three neat wooden posts the corrugated tin door is ajar and a beige curtain billows and falls behind it like a luffing sail.
Each appointment lasts about an hour; Sokhna is third in line. At eleven in the morning Ndongo and his family enter the crepuscule of the medicine hut.
From the rafters hang strings of onions, bunches of herbs, deflated balloons of baobab fruit, a ram’s horn. On the walls portraits framed and unframed: a wrestler, a man in robes, imams. On the floor a battery of plastic bottles of different sizes filled with liquid of all shades of brown and green, several baguettes wrapped in newspaper, grocery bags with something inside. Part kitchen, part shrine. On a wide bed opposite the door a young man is lying on his back. The sorceress herself sits facing the bed on a mat covered with a stained bedsheet in white and blue stripes. Her name is Khady Gning; she goes by Mère Khady. A stern-looking obese woman past her middle years. Toe rings of silver and copper on her left foot, silver rings on her left hand, copper and silver bangles on her right wrist. Her black-and-white calico dress shows a black sports bra through the armholes, her yellow homespun pagne is held in place by a red rope that dangles with many keys. I wonder whether the keys are gris-gris or to open something. Gris-gris, arguably, are to open something.