★ 11/20/2017
Journalist Badkhen (Walking with Abel) delivers an evocative, hauntingly beautiful narrative of life in Joal, a fishing village in Senegal. As she embeds herself within boat crews and frequents the seaside gazebos where the fishermen spend their time on shore, Badkhen lucidly describes the rhythm of the village’s daily life (hauling the catch, building a pirogue), as well as its challenges. Between overfishing, illegal foreign ships, and climate change, Joal’s catch is a tenth of what it was a decade ago. Acutely observant, Badkhen meticulously documents Joal’s cuisine (po’boys with murex sauce); lore (spells for catching fish, genies); and special rituals, such as the sacrificial feast to prevent the sea’s anger. She captures the fishermen, their wives, children, dreams, feuds, and banter, and her writing is descriptive and poetic. Images flash before the reader: the barefoot fishwives “in bright multi-layered headwraps and embroidered velvet bonnets” rushing down to greet the catch of the day, the ancient mounds of shells “among the brackish channels that vein the mangrove flats between the Petite Côte and the mouth of the Gambia River,” and a “murmuration of weavers” flying out of an acacia tree. This is a moving tribute to a traditional way of life facing enormous change. (Mar.)
2017-11-28
A reporter reveals the cultural, economic, and spiritual forces affecting a Senegalese fishing community.For nearly 20 years, journalist Badkhen (Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah, 2015, etc.) has reported on daily life in Africa and the Middle East in six books of nonfiction and articles in venues such as the New York Times and the New Republic. But she had never focused on a population utterly dependent on the ocean. "How," she asks, "does the shifting demarcation line between earth and sea define the way we see the world, shape our community and communality"? For a season, she lived and worked in the West African port of Joal, Senegal, joining in the "primordial sloshing" aboard handcrafted boats that, day and night, in calm or storm, set out into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean for fish. During night fishing, she sailed for 20 hours at a time; on land, she writes, "I dream I am growing gills." Fishing as livelihood, she quickly discovers, is becoming increasingly imperiled by industrial vessels and climate change, reducing the catch to a tenth of what it had been 10 years earlier. "To live off the sea," she realizes, "is to submit to its vagaries, to endure constantly the tension between desire and defeat." Fishermen "rely on miracles for a living," sought through sacrifice and prayer to God and to the ocean, "whose waters carry their fortunes and their sorrows and their dead." For Badkhen, those roiling waters exerted a primordial power: "The ocean bewitches," she writes, "reveals the ancient predator in me." The community bewitched her, as well, and her affection was reciprocated: village children called her Auntie; her name was painted on a ship's bow, as mascot. The author's prose is lyrical, precise, and lucent, whether she is portraying fishermen and their families or the sea at night. "Luminescence weeps into the boat through seams in blinking rivulets," she writes. "You bail buckets of radiances. The outboard motor churns pure light."A highly absorbing chronicle of a transcendent journey.
Fisherman's Blues is a colorful and affecting portrait of an entire way of life, but it's also a report from the front lines of a small industry in the twilight of a struggle it never thought it would even face, much less lose…There isn't any realistic light at the end of the story Badkhen tells. But readers can still be grateful for this graceful, perceptive account.” -Christian Science Monitor
“A profound account of a single community—its primary industries, religious beliefs, and rhythms….[it] unfolds like a novel, featuring well-drawn and sympathetic characters, and show[s] how thoroughly the implications of environmental disaster seep into everyday life.” -The New Republic
“No polemical treatise, Badkhen's Fisherman's Blues offers a critical take through subtle and beautiful methods of storytelling. It creates a remarkable snapshot of lives we'd otherwise never know...Developing trust with subjects and truthfully rendering their life stories with great elegance, [Badkhen] achieves a level of poetic political action.” -Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“In elegiac vignettes, Badkhen portrays the trick and snare of a heroic and punishing profession…Her poetic style liberates the reader from the familiar, straightforward quality of traditional reportage, but her work remains equally honest and arguably more compassionate….Fisherman's Blues is Badkhen's ode to a community's fraught ties to geography, and a gentle lament for an existence eroding at the shoreline.” -Dallas Morning News
“A conventional account of life in Joal would be fascinating reading in and of itself—a crucial snapshot of an endangered lifestyle. What Badkhen has written instead is something more like a ghost, an incantation, a life captured in words. In powerful language shaped by the winds and tides, Badkhen not only describes the fishers’ lives but also imbues them with an energy that borders on the uncanny.” -Paste Magazine
"A intimate, urgent, and compassionate narrative about how human and natural landscapes are being interrupted by the Anthropocene." -LitHub
"Evocative [and] hauntingly beautiful...a moving tribute to a traditional way of life facing enormous change." -Publisher's Weekly (starred)
"Badkhen is a spellbinding writer, her observations at once hypnotic and elegiac, witnessing a fragile community just barely getting by." -Booklist
"Lyrical, precise, and lucent...a highly absorbing chronicle of a transcendent journey."
-Kirkus Reviews
“Badkhen’s keen observation and participatory research results in a book that gives readers a glimpse into what will be lost.” -Library Journal
"This book is the story of a community full of love and strife and humor. Their way of life is an ode to humanity, and I’m so glad Anna Badkhen, one of the most creative and important nonfiction writers in our era, has allowed us to know them." -James McBride, author of The Good Lord Bird
"Badkhen shares the rough and rich daily life of the masters of the Atlantic, and with piercing gaze and a style as passionate as it is precise reveals the secret dignity of their most ordinary gestures." –Boubacar Boris Diop, author of Murambi, The Book of Bones
“A work of quiet genius. Badkhen has an uncanny ability to address some of the most complex of modern human problems — food shortages, human ambition, family relations—while, at the same time, conveying the spiritual awareness and binding allegiance and love that characterize an enduring community of fishing families on the coast of Senegal. Her keenly observed descriptions of the sea are startling and gorgeous, and her patient consideration of what matters most in human life is unexpectedly hopeful.” -Barry Lopez
"A masterpiece. Badkhen makes the natural world immediate, vivid, vital—sacred. She digs down into the truth of human experience on the planet at this time, and the book resonates with all our time on the planet." -Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
"A gorgeous and timely reintroduction to the world of my upbringing—a world too often ignored, yet whose contribution to tomorrow’s global civilization could be priceless."--Pierre Thiam, Senegalese chef and author
Anna Badkhen immerses herself in the rhythms of life in Joal, a fishing village in Senegal, laying bare the doubtful future for artisanal fishermen because of industrial fishing fleets that have swept up everything in their wake, leaving empty oceans. The prose is lyrical and almost mournful, and it teems with energy, but the author’s narration does not pulse with the same sense of life. Badkhen interviews the fishermen and their families, goes to sea in their small boats (despite women being bad luck), and bears witness to the constant waiting for the return of fish. But her singsong cadence, slow pace, and even tone undermine the energy of the audiobook and fail to maintain the listener’s attention. A.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Anna Badkhen immerses herself in the rhythms of life in Joal, a fishing village in Senegal, laying bare the doubtful future for artisanal fishermen because of industrial fishing fleets that have swept up everything in their wake, leaving empty oceans. The prose is lyrical and almost mournful, and it teems with energy, but the author’s narration does not pulse with the same sense of life. Badkhen interviews the fishermen and their families, goes to sea in their small boats (despite women being bad luck), and bears witness to the constant waiting for the return of fish. But her singsong cadence, slow pace, and even tone undermine the energy of the audiobook and fail to maintain the listener’s attention. A.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
