Fisherman's Blues Audiobook By Anna Badkhen cover art

Fisherman's Blues

A West African Community at Sea

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Fisherman's Blues

By: Anna Badkhen
Narrated by: Anna Badkhen
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About this listen

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Christian Science Monitor and Paste Magazine

An intimate account of life in a West African fishing village, tugged by currents ancient and modern, and dependent on an ocean that is being radically transformed.

The sea is broken, fishermen say. The sea is empty. The genii have taken the fish elsewhere.

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

Here, Badkhen discovers, all boundaries are permeable - between land and sea, between myth and truth, even between storyteller and story. Fisherman's Blues immerses us in a community navigating a time of unprecedented environmental, economic, and cultural upheaval with resilience, ingenuity, and wonder.

©2018 Anna Badkhen (P)2018 Penguin Audio
Anthropology Ecosystems & Habitats Sociology Outdoor Fishing
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Critic reviews

“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)

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