Perspective

Salt: A Tribute to Ghana’s Fishers

2024

by

Vanessa Jaiteh

Few places I've been lucky enough to visit hold as much poetry as Ghana. In the fall of 2022, I wrote a poem about my fieldwork on fisher safety and working conditions in Ghana's fisheries. The exercise was part of a creative writing course for academics by Prof. Helen Sword, whose focus on Writing with Pleasure helped restore my somewhat fraught relationship with scientific writing.

Chains on a vessel
He skips a beat
It’s just… you know… back in the day…
Now it’s fish they ship away

A pool of blood
A moonless night
Such tenderness
Your light shines bright

The open sewer
The tuna stench
Their graceful posture
My back on that bench!

Crabs, coral and canoes
None spared by the gigantic net
A threat, a kick, a bowl thrown at you
Rusty water still tastes wet

Mornings at the navy base
The fiery star’s hot kisses
Lucky me, I said – who said?
Theirs is work no one misses

Traffic, more traffic
The road never ends
Under the madman’s strict orders
The black man’s back bends

Fieldwork is sweating
The big stuff, the small
It’s learning to sit with
The ache of it all

Fieldwork is heart work
Sometimes it’s fun
And always in Ghana
The sun. The sun.

Salt: A Tribute to Ghana’s Fishers was originally published in Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts.

2 Responses

Po says:

April 13, 2025 at 8:06 pm

that’s a very touching poem

Reply
1. Vanessa Jaiteh says:
  
  December 12, 2025 at 4:42 am
  
  Only seeing this now, Po, but thank you!
  
  Reply

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Salt: A Tribute to Ghana’s Fishers

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