Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea Audiobook (Free)

NAMED A Preferred BOOK OF THE YEAR FROM THE CHRISTIAN Technology MONITOR AND PASTE Newspaper

An intimate account of life in a Western African fishing community, tugged by currents ancient and modern, and reliant on an ocean that’s being radically changed.

The ocean is broken, fishermen say. The ocean is clear. The genii have taken the fish somewhere else.

For centuries, fishermen have launched their pirogues from the Senegalese port of Joal, where in fact the fish used to be so plentiful a man could drop his hand into the grey-green ocean and draw one out as large as his thigh. However in an Atlantic decimated by overfishing and climate change, the fish are harder and harder to discover.

Here, Badkhen discovers, all boundaries are permeable–between property and sea, between myth and truth, actually between storyteller and tale. Fisherman’s Blues immerses us within a community navigating a period of unprecedented environmental, economic, and social upheaval with resilience, ingenuity, and wonder.