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. Badkhen captures a way of life that certainly won't survive the century, and although the men, women, and children of Joal will lose the sea, readers will have the small comfort of visiting their world in the pages of this book.
Badkhen's distinct journalistic approach places her among and outside the populace, where she dances back and forth between separate witness and embraced participant. She offers an ever-widening knowledge of the culture ... Her poetic style liberates the reader from the familiar, straightforward quality of traditional reportage, but her work remains equally honest and arguably more compassionate. She manages to avoid critique, and rarely projects her Western morals on the habits and predilections of her comrades, instead allowing us to notice our own.
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. What Badkhen understands is that exceptional writing—the kind that makes readers weep and fellow writers snap pens in admiring frustration—need not get in the way of truth or reality. In fact, it can enhance them, creating a kind of hyperreality more akin to thought than physical experience. Badkhen’s rhetorical dancing along the shore captures the essence of life on the Atlantic’s edge in a way no normal paragraph could ever hope to achieve; it is reality-as-poem, an eternal elegy for moments that are already dead and a society that will eventually die as well.
While politicians argue over a response to climate change, writer Anna Badkhen takes a different approach. The lives of fishermen may not seem like an obvious choice, but their daily struggles and triumphs illuminate a certain truth at the heart of these issues. 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 ... Badkhen’s lyrical prose swells as she describes the pastoral beauty of life at sea ... Developing trust with subjects and truthfully rendering their life stories with great elegance, she achieves a level of poetic political action.
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 ... This is a moving tribute to a traditional way of life facing enormous change.
The author’s prose is lyrical, precise, and lucent, whether she is portraying fishermen and their families or the sea at night ... A highly absorbing chronicle of a transcendent journey.
