Fisherman's Blues Read online

  Gillnet, says Joal’s oldest native fisherman, is the only net that you can use in Senegal to catch anything worthwhile.

  A gillnetter is large enough to carry only one net, so you guess the diameter of the mesh to take onboard before you go to sea. Large fish will bounce off small-caliber mesh; small fish will slip through wide openings. Today Ndongo is casting a monofilament net with openings twenty-eight millimeters wide, four millimeters wider than the smallest caliber Senegal allows.

  Ndongo steers broadside to the waves and a sea breaks over the port gunwale. The pirogue shakes; I bail harder; the boys on the thwarts adjust the bend of their knees to compensate for the sudden tilt, keep their eyes on the surface.

  Cross-section the globe right here: the surface is also a line, a kinked cardiogram of the planet. Under the keel, in all that amniotic murk, do you see any fish?

  * * *

  Wind up to twenty knots blows the western sky full of boiling black cloud, but overhead it has cleared and the bright humid sun has swung to the south. In this light, aglow on leaden seas, the pirogue is as if onstage. On her bow, the rusted carcass of a shipwreck.

  The skeletal frame of a cargo ship two hundred feet long. An iron hull the color of dried blood the sea has whittled down to a stalagmitic grid of sinew so filigreed it snapped in two amidships. Her name misremembered, like her home port. Some say she was hauling sugar from Banjul to Dakar when she ran aground a mile or more offshore in 1978, the year Ndongo was born; her crew deemed her unworthy of rescue and abandoned ship, and she eventually drifted to her resting place within three hundred feet of the low tidemark. Some say she was a Japanese boat carrying electronics; her crew had brought her to the shore of the farming village of Palmarin on purpose, to fix her engine, but discovered that it was beyond saving, took the electronics, and journeyed on by land. They say that no matter her history the villagers of Palmarin looted the ship, took everything they could, even the walk-in freezers. The villagers laugh. Ridiculous! The village had no electricity: What use would have been the freezers?

  She tilts to port, pointing to shore, where between the green shallows and the palm groves that give the village its name a row of houses gape at the sea with their innards exposed, pink, blue, ocher: the sea has taken their front walls. Macabre life-size dollhouses, their silence on display. Were there people inside them when the wave came, and did they survive the sea, and where are they now? Ndongo clicks his tongue in disapproval, says: Coastal erosion. All along the coast the ocean is sweeping the beach clean of homes. His own house, in Joal, is four thoughtful blocks inland.

  Grass grows on top of the poop deck. Water pours in and out of the disemboweled chambers with a slow whoosh, gurgles in the echoing cavities. In the labyrinths of the sunken hull, Ndongo says, fish hide.

  Prepare to cast.

  Ndongo issues orders quietly, almost inaudibly, safeguarding some hardwound coil of superstitious expectation. Or hiding his intentions from the genii below, as if the predatory contour of his boat is not giveaway enough.

  The fishers pull on dark green rubberized overalls over ripped gym shorts. They pull on gloves knitted of skyblue polyester that unravel at the fingertips. They spread along the port gunwale and stand swaying over the net. Pirogues always cast to port. Who knows why? They have been doing so since time immemorial, in many disparate waters. Jesus’s revolutionary advice to the luckless New Testament fishermen in the Sea of Galilee: “Cast your net to starboard.”

  Let go.

  The crew bend as one and start ladling the net out to sea. Yard by nylon yard, arms straight, palms facing out, they push the mesh overboard in synchronous rapid motion. Coaxing it out. Offering it to the ocean as an oblation. Ndongo revs the engine and circles the shipwreck counterclockwise at an inward curl, and in the wake of the Sakhari Souaré the unspooling dotted yellow line of headrope floats draws a tightening conch around the rusted shell.

  Faster, faster. Work like men, work like men.

  The last of the net plashes into the water. The instant its four-fluked grapnel anchor slips out of the pirogue after it and sinks, the crew grab a hammer—a knife—an awl—a loose wooden burden board—and begin to whack the pirogue. They pummel the gunwales and the ceiling hard, and they stomp on the thwarts with bare feet in a ferocious and ancient abandon, and Ndongo heels the burden boards in the stern and pulses the accelerator. Amid this unholy sacrament the skinny boy Maguette swiftly strips down to cotton boxers and a red gris-gris belt weighed down with leather amulet pouches and somersaults into the spiral heart of the gillnet right by the shipwreck and there begins to splash madly in the green boil of the sea to scare the disoriented and deafened fish into his father’s net.

  Terrible clamor echoes off the corroded vaults. From roosts somewhere within the poop deck panicked pigeons fly out, scores of tumbling birds each piercingly defined in midmorning sun against the blueblack cloud. In the bow, the Sakhari Souaré’s first mate, one of Ndongo’s halfbrothers, drops a board into the hold, reaches inside the waterproof pouch around his neck, pulls out a cellphone, turns his back to the wreck, and snaps a selfie.

  Above the iron ossuary seabirds gather. Ndongo maneuvers the boat clockwise out of the maze of net, then steers her back into the spiral, cuts the motor, lifts it to run over the floatline, starts again. When he reaches the innermost end of the coil he cuts the motor again and motions to the crew: Haul net.

  Like men now, like men.

  They haul net hand over hand and lay it inside the boat in dripping crosswise pleats. They hum under their breath as they work, an old melody in a minor key, lonesome like the empty net they are hauling. It is ten o’clock.

  Cast again.

  Again the helical release, the mad whacking. On the bow the first mate again pulls out his cellphone. His name, too, is Maguette; he is twenty-four, Ndongo’s halfbrother from their father’s second wife. Ndongo named his son after him. He yells into the receiver:

  Allo! Yes! Nothing yet! What you got? Okay! Okay, bye!

  Who’s that?

  Baye Samb! He said he caught a full boat of mullet!

  Do you want to call others and find out what they’re catching?

  Sure!

  He squints at the screen, pushes buttons with a forefinger sticking out of a ripped blue glove.

  Allo, it’s me! No, no fish yet! Yes! You? Okay, if you find a lot of fish give us a call afterward, okay? Okay, godspeed!

  The other fishers have spread out in the boat. Ousmane hauls the floatline, his uncle Saliou the leadline weighed down with handmolded slugs of lead and concrete, his cousin Ibrahima the middle. Hand over hand. Hand over hand.

  The net snags.

  Hey, Maguette, hang up and help!

  They tug gently at the panel, lean so far out to port that the pirogue lists at forty-five degrees.

  Careful, careful!

  It’s stuck on something underwater!

  Quickly, quickly, we’re losing time!

  A yank, the net is loose, and bright brown seaweed sprays into the boat. They say in Japan men eat this stuff like salad.

  Heave-ho.

  They haul net. Ousmane, Ndongo’s eldest surviving son, is fifteen; his firstborn died at birth—the first of three dead boys. Ousmane bears the brunt of the captain’s parental hopes and disappointments; his lower lip is swollen and cracked, a pale crazing of scar and pustule from when he picks at it and chews it in stifled teenage recalcitrance. Saliou, Ndongo’s other halfbrother, guesses he is nineteen. Ibrahima is sixteen, the eldest son of Ndongo’s sister, and he is sporting a brand-new fancy footballer buzzcut, a flattop with a lightning bolt shaved above his left temple, and sings quietly, a hymn in approximated Arabic.

  What are you singing, Ibrahima?

  I dunno, something about Muhammad, peace be upon him.

  Like men, like men. Work at the same speed so you haul at the same
speed.

  Ibrahima stops singing. The two Maguettes and Vieux, Ndongo’s thirteen-year-old, sit on the starboard gunwale behind the hauling crew, pick net.

  A sompat grunt, about a foot long, spiny and speckled like a hyena. A short-snouted cassava croaker. One—two—three juvenile threadfins no longer than three palms each. Small shiny flat fish local fishermen call money of the sea. Villagers from inland will sometimes buy those jerked. The boys toss them overboard—there’s plenty of good fish—and the fish sink past the confetti of their own scales. Three or four recover and swim into the deep, vanishing.

  They throw the fish they choose to keep into the bilge amidships. Purple bruises from ruptured vessels spread along the dorsal fins and behind torn gills like ink on blotting paper. Ndongo sucks his teeth again: disfigured fish will sell for less.

  Watch it, watch how you pick, you’re costing us money.

  Little Maguette gathers in his fist a section of net where a pale crab is stuck and smashes it against the gunwale again and again until the carapace breaks into bits small enough to shake out of the mesh. Crab entrails streak yellow and black on the kid’s bright boxers with particolored cassette tape print. In the bilge a torn-off fish head dances on a single fin, flaps, flaps, stills.

  Hurry up and haul. Keep the net level, it will make your work easier.

  A rouget.

  Okay, boys, hurry up, you’re wasting time. Make this a quick one, we got places to be.

  Ndongo admonishes in a low voice. At sea you must be careful to tone down your frustrations. Nothing on its endless surface to obstruct a disagreement from swelling into a brawl. Some of the waves that rock the Sakhari Souaré have traveled hundreds of miles across the Atlantic. The fetch length of grudges born here may be as oceanic, their toppling as deadly. In the Joal harbor returning fishers have tried to set one another’s pirogues on fire.

  In the bow Ousmane pries open the lid of a white plastic bucket that once held mayonnaise, rummages. An extra set of gloves, an awl, a screwdriver with a plastic handle painted in the stars and stripes of the American flag—here, a shuttle and a spool of fishline. He threads the shuttle slowly and perches on a thwart to mend a gash in the net.

  Ousmane, hurry up, man, we’re burning daylight. Ousmane. Did you hear me? I said get a move on!

  The last of the outgoing tide sluices out of the shipwreck, a sucking sound. In the hold amidships the Sakhari Souaré a couple dozen fish are slowly dying in bloodied bilgewater. A severed head sloshes to and fro. Vieux, getting ready to bail, picks it up with two gloved fingers, tosses it overboard. The sea has flattened out again, bottlegreen against heavy sky. Suddenly the northern horizon vibrates, undulates, shatters: a pod of pelicans is flying low above the sea toward us. Ndongo sets course for the pelicans.

  * * *

  I met Captain Ndongo Souaré the previous evening in Joal, in one of the seaside gazebos fishermen build to bide their time ashore. They call such gazebos mbaars.

  Two thousand pirogues bristle the length of Joal; from the air, the town looks like a harlequin hedgehog stretched out alongside the Atlantic Ocean. There are no slips, no docks. The boats berth a wading distance offshore, anchored in the shallows, or right on the sandy beach, near one of the town’s seventy-three mbaars.

  Each mbaar reflects the affluence of the fishermen who use it. There are elaborate pavilions of poured concrete and corrugated tin roofs. There are improbable lean-tos cobbled together from bits of discarded pirogues stuck upright in the sand and roofed with the green meerschaum of tangled gillnet. Walls fashioned from tin, from rotten driftwood, from lacy curtains. Walls thatched with the droopy branches of filao, Casuarina equisetifolia, which French colonists imported to Senegal from Australia a few years before decolonization to contain erosion and fix nitrogen in the soil their own gluttonous hegemony had helped deplete. No walls at all. Lavish or poor, each mbaar is treated like a home: you take off your shoes before you enter, you clean up after yourself before you leave. Each bears the name of the fisherman who contributed the most to its construction or upkeep. Captain Coura Kane, a scion of one of Joal’s oldest fishing families and the owner of several pirogues, paid the most to build the mbaar in which Ndongo hangs out; it is called Mbaar Kanené. It has nine beams of weathered tree trunks and a sloping tin roof. Its sole long bench is a board from a shipwrecked boat propped up on some broken concrete blocks. It has no walls. A jumble of nets, heaped in layers, takes up the whole floor; here men sit, mend nets, and talk fish. Here I came to find a skipper who would take me to sea.

  For two decades, documenting the world’s iniquities, I followed stories inland. I had never worked on the ocean. Now I wanted to learn: How does the shifting demarcation line between earth and sea define the way we see the world, shape our community and communality at the time of the Anthropocene? After my teenage son left for college, I ended my apartment lease in Philadelphia, stored my library in a friend’s garage, gave away my furniture and warm clothes, and flew to Senegal.

  It was late September, end of the rainy season. A hard rain blew, and a dozen regulars huddled in the center of the mbaar. Some sat, the others stood stretching, hands on the low roofbeams. Outside, on the sand, their boats were filling with rainwater: the Cheikh Sadbou, the Fatou Fall, the Stacko Mbacké, the Khady Faye. Gillnetters mostly, named after the Prophet, the fishermen’s wives, their favorite saints, their mothers and fathers and grandparents, because fishermen take their ancestors with them to sea. The rain made everything white. White sea blended into white sky. The pirogues lay at the edge of nothingness.

  Hi.

  A man squatted on a net a few feet away from me, out of the rain, his back to the sea.

  Hi.

  What’s your name?

  Anna.

  Hi, Anna. I am Ndongo, Ndongo Souaré. Can I have one of your rings?

  Rings are gris-gris. Like hair or blood, they hold the bearer’s power. With the help of a sorcerer or a marabout, a new owner can use them to obtain some of that power, maybe even all of it. Rings are portals, too: a sorcerer can also manipulate them to inflict misfortune on the original owner. You burn or bury your hair and you burn or bury anything stained with your blood. You guard your jewelry. Nice try, Ndongo Souaré.

  We have hardly met, I said. Maybe when we know each other a little better.

  Before Ndongo could respond, a woman stormed in under the awning, and everyone in the mbaar turned to her. She was older, in a rich red dress and matching headwrap dripping with rainwater. Burgundy eyeliner traced stern lines over hairless brows. Without stopping for salaams or to remove her flipflops, she made a beeline for the fisherman, gigantic in her rage. Ndongo shot to his feet.

  You!

  A manicured forefinger stabbed Ndongo’s chest.

  Where. Is. My. Shrimp. Have I not told you that I need shrimp? How come you sell your shrimp to the boys at the harbor when you know, tsk, you know by God!—she spat—that I need it myself. Thirty kilos. Eh? Eh? Useless. Useless!

  The other fishermen bent to their nets in silence.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Well! Sorry, everyone.

  A beautiful smile beneath those burgundy brows. Suddenly, a slight woman, short, in soggy red clothes, stood in the middle of the mbaar.

  Salaam aleikum. How are you? How is the family? How is the work? How is the sea? Are you getting any fish?

  Offered and returned, the salutations went round in the practiced millennial rhythm, an invocation of peace, your wife, your husband, your children, your work, your fish. She turned to me.

  I am Fatou Diop Diagne, this one’s mother.

  A mother, a grandmother, a first wife, a co-wife. A fishwife, a midwife, a beignet maker, a hair braider, an embroiderer, a breakfast saleswoman. The keeper and assuager of the family’s protector genie. The granddaughter of Lebou fishermen from Senegal’s capital, Dakar. Whose own mother piloted
fishing pirogues all by herself. Whose great-grandfather—Ndongo’s great-great-grandfather—had taken a genie wife. Whose magical power was to expand when angry or in charge, balloon in a way you could not physically pinpoint, somehow taking up all the space without visibly changing, a kind of intangible human blowfish. A force more terrifying, sometimes, than the sea.

  Maaleikum salaam, Madame Fatou. I am Anna. I am a writer. I am here to research a book about fishing.

  That’s great! Bismillah, bismillah. May you have luck in your work.

  We shook hands.

  How is the sea?

  I don’t know yet. I only arrived this month. I’m looking for a pirogue to take me fishing.

  And Ndongo said:

  Come with me tomorrow. We leave at six, rain or shine. We meet by the water, near the mbaar.

  He grinned. He had his mother’s smile.

  * * *

  By noon the sun burns hot. The batik sky condenses toward the horizon and weighs down the ocean edge with black storm clouds. Upon the water, pointing in all directions like matchsticks randomly spilled out of a box, sway hundreds of fishing pirogues.

  The Sakhari Souaré spends the afternoon chasing fish. The dance of fingers, the flight of arms. Bubbles, bubbles! Fish are jumping! Big fish, a school!

  Only Ndongo speaks.

  They’re close they’re close.

  Then, quieter still:

  Cast net cast it cast cast—cast.

  Spray and seaweed fly at the stern and the boys knock at the fish so hard the red covering board of the port gunwale dances. Both little Maguette and Vieux splash into the sea, but Ndongo says Ousmane can’t go. You are a man, so work like a man. The boy pouts. Ndongo drops anchor and trawls it along the ocean floor: this will scare bottom fish into the net. The net comes up gleaming with bonga shad, each perfect. A full gillnet hauled aboard: a waterfall streaming upward, a silver breath sucked in.