Fisherman's Blues by Anna Badkhen

Author:Anna Badkhen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

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The next day a flotilla of two sails out of Joal: a purse seiner crewed mostly by strong young men who cast and haul the heavy net, and her catch boat: a typically lightly manned receptacle to carry the fish to harbor. The catch boat’s crew are Bathie Diakayaté, a twenty-three-year-old orphan who has never gone to sea before, and his cousin Oumar Kane, the tenth and youngest son of a fisherman. Oumar is twelve. The pirogue, the Khady Sarr—forty-two feet, forty-horsepower motor—bears his mother’s name.

The tandem hauls anchor early, aiming to be back by dinnertime. Fifteen miles offshore, in international waters, the catch boat’s motor malfunctions. The net boat’s captain tells the cousins to drop anchor and wait for his return while he catches some sardines. A few hours, max. He takes their coordinates. The sustained wind of the dry season shatters the Atlantic into spangled eddies of black jewels. The Khady Sarr bobs on the sparkling sea, rocks the cousins to sleep.

But the captain’s GPS records incorrectly the Khady Sarr’s coordinates. When the net boat returns for the boys in the afternoon, they are not there.

The cold wakes the child. It is night now, the wind blows raw. Bathie, too, shivers awake. In the dark the ocean bleeds black into endless black sky. The boys see a pirogue’s green prow light, hear an approaching motor. They have a flashlight; they blink it at the light, beckoning. The pirogue passes, the sound of her motor dies, and now it is only the two of them atop the vast and terrible womb of everything.

The pirogues’ owner, Coura Kane, a distant relative of Oumar, organizes a search party, but it is brief, because he is too poor to foot the fuel bill, and unsuccessful. Khady Sarr, Oumar’s mother, crazed by fear, grovels on the tideline, trying to stare her son and nephew out of the horizon. I run into Coura at Mbaar Kanené, the one he helped build, on the morning of the third day, his eyes bloodshot from vigil and weeping, a sheaf of papers in his hands. He and Daouda Sarr and Malal Diallo have been petitioning one government office in town after another to organize a proper search. Bureaucrats keep asking for more papers. The fishermen sit in a kind of stupor, worry the prayer beads of their grievances and sorrows.

The coastguard comes here to do surveillance for traffickers or if there are drugs—but they will not lift their finger for lost fishermen, wallahi.

They are just eating our money.

In Senegal the government only tells fishermen to pay. It’s not helping us at all.

They tax our boats and give our fisheries to foreign trawlers and they tell us we can’t fish near the shore. If this continues there will not be any fishing left in Joal.

If there isn’t fish again next year there won’t be any money.

If we’re even here next year.

A couple years ago we tried to put a GPS chip in the boat but it didn’t work.

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