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A review by graywacke
Fisherman's Blues: A West African Community at Sea by Anna Badkhen
4.0
Badkhen uses the phrase "like an itinerant storyteller" near the end of this book. A Russian born American whose books are about journeys through war zones, the African savanna and Afghanistan, this may have served as her self-description. In a poetic voice she does a complete immersive journalism, trying to become part of a Senegalese fishing village, invisibly of course. Except that she fails to become invisible, as she acknowledges. She does join these fisherman on their long fishing voyages in their rickety boats, hiring herself out and helping with the labor, getting very intimate with many of those around her, even as they see her always taking notes, and sometimes ask her to write things down for them.
This is a community on the edge, starved out of the Senegalese interior, they are still viewed as migrants some hundred years or so since they took to the sea, only to witness the fishing stock crash and continually diminish (she doesn't analyze too much, but the fisherman blame the large international fishing vessels with gigantic nets and no restrictions.) The community lives a precarious life where death is cheap, crews are lost, and bodies wash up routinely. They are surrounded by temporary unmarked graves which all seem to wash away eventually. And yet they are connected to the larger world in numerous ways, and many of the men she talks to have left Senegal to find work, usually illegally, in Spain and elsewhere, sometimes doing very well, sometimes just to be imprisoned.
I finished this book, which she reads herself, very much in it's thrall, very enchanted by everything she reported and sees. Yet, I notice a lot of negative reviews, and complaints about her prose. She writes in a thick poetic prose where the facts and the story come second to the atmosphere she is trying to create. And I suspect that the same discomfort readers tend to feel with poetry in general today crops up in these reviews. So, recommended to those with more poetic tastes.
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36. Fisherman's Blues : A West African Community at Sea (audio) by Anna Badkhen
read by the author
published: 2018
format: 7:54 overdrive audio (304 pages in hardcover)
acquired: Library
listened: June 8-19
rating: 4
This is a community on the edge, starved out of the Senegalese interior, they are still viewed as migrants some hundred years or so since they took to the sea, only to witness the fishing stock crash and continually diminish (she doesn't analyze too much, but the fisherman blame the large international fishing vessels with gigantic nets and no restrictions.) The community lives a precarious life where death is cheap, crews are lost, and bodies wash up routinely. They are surrounded by temporary unmarked graves which all seem to wash away eventually. And yet they are connected to the larger world in numerous ways, and many of the men she talks to have left Senegal to find work, usually illegally, in Spain and elsewhere, sometimes doing very well, sometimes just to be imprisoned.
I finished this book, which she reads herself, very much in it's thrall, very enchanted by everything she reported and sees. Yet, I notice a lot of negative reviews, and complaints about her prose. She writes in a thick poetic prose where the facts and the story come second to the atmosphere she is trying to create. And I suspect that the same discomfort readers tend to feel with poetry in general today crops up in these reviews. So, recommended to those with more poetic tastes.
-----------------------------------------------
36. Fisherman's Blues : A West African Community at Sea (audio) by Anna Badkhen
read by the author
published: 2018
format: 7:54 overdrive audio (304 pages in hardcover)
acquired: Library
listened: June 8-19
rating: 4