I had never seen anything like it: sapphire blue parasols, dozens of them, studded along the shore like little gems, twinkling in alabaster sand, stretching on forever. Beneath each parasol was a chair, contorted every which way, and filthy from the sandy debris deposited by their previous occupants. I paid my €15 toll to a young, shirtless man, claimed a spot with unobstructed access to the water, and began unpacking my wares for the day’s activities, scanning the faces and bodies on the beach, taking it all in. So this was a lido. 
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Innocuously derived from the Latin word for “seashore,” the lido is best described as a private beach club, accounting for a multi-billion euro industry, with the ones in Sicily serving well-to-do Italians flocking from the mainland in August and fewer initiated tourists like myself throughout the remainder of the year. I had come to Sicily on a pilgrimage, to see the island as the hero Odysseus had, to lay my own eyes upon Scylla and Charybdis, the sea monsters who once perched on the Strait of Messina, the Isole dei Ciclopi, home to Poseidon’s son Polyphemus and his fellow one-eyed horde, and maybe even catch a squinted glimpse of the nymph Calypso’s Maltese home, just beyond the southern coast.¹ I discovered lidos through my travel research, which consisted mostly of Google image searches and poring over Tripadvisor forums, all promising an experience unlike any I’ve ever known with drone captured photos of desolate beaches, sanitized of people, the desire for solitude burrowing deep into my mind. Neither the forums nor photos warned of Italy’s politics and their bearing on the Sicilian beach, that the lido would become a crucible for examining the country’s anti-Black and anti-migrant ideologies, and that my own internal sense of Blackness would shift, ever so slightly, as I reclined on those shores.

That summer, my ceaseless bus boarding and train catching along the Ionian coast was punctuated by hostel check-ins, piazza strolls, trattoria meals, and many visits to local lidos. I cared little for churches and quickly grew tired of ruins, so I went to the water, often. I went for the waves and the sunshine, but stayed because it was one of the only public places where I felt safe, even as I lounged half naked, without a cellphone, surrounded by hundreds of strangers. In the piazze I worked hard to avoid the perverse stares of shopkeepers, rolled my eyes when my requests for tavolo per uno were met with leers, and always remembered my personal calculation of one Aperol spritz or two glasses of wine as the safest amount to drink while out dining alone. Often, if I made the mistake of locking eyes with someone, I would be crudely asked “refugee?,”the answer to which they certainly already knew, but still sought confirmation.
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These refugees, whose collective identity was always summarized through legal taxonomy, were mostly from South Asia or North and West African countries like Tunisia and Senegal, many of them with skin a varying shade of mine, though not all of them Black. Their arrivals to Sicily’s shores over the past century are documented through interchangeable headlines like, “Scores of migrants land on beach”² and “Migrants dock in Sicily after 40 days at sea,”³ and paired with dystopic images of Zumba dancers, their hips gyrating as a tanker approaches.⁴ I both witnessed and participated in this beachside dispassion, as all lido visitors are required to do, lolling in their bathing suits while interacting, through slight or exploit, with migrants selling goods such as necklaces and blankets, or services such as hair braiding and massage, earning as little as €5 for hours of effort under the blazing sun.⁵ While Italians, for the most part, ignored lido vendors, I could not look away and desperately, unsuccessfully tried to make contact. I wanted to share that look, that curled lip, that raised eyebrow that acknowledges the absurdity and subjection of this sandy place between sea and city.

Not long after I boarded a plane in Trapani and made my way back to Toronto, Operation Safe Beaches was launched throughout Sicily, intended to crack down on criminal activity allegedly plaguing the lido, like tax evasion and theft.⁶ In reality the program sought to lessen the nuisance of poverty and marginalization, in order to safeguard the right of leisure to moneyed Italians and wealthier tourists. “We will make sure that Italians can spend a quiet week under the beach umbrella, after having worked a whole year, without having a vu cumprà (‘wanna buy’) annoy them,” said Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right, anti-migrant politician who introduced the program. Although ousted from his position as Interior Minister shortly after making that statement (though, Operation Safe Beaches remains), Salvini has since taken his campaign trail to the very same Sicilian shores he endeavoured to scour of migrants, hosting many a rally bare chested, spritz in hand, posing for selfies with his tongue out like Hot Girl Meg.⁷ An unusual stage to garner political favour, Salvini says he “[chooses] the beaches and not places of work or hardship because during the summer nobody wants to see images of suffering.”⁸
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As Salvini and his nationalist, xenophobic party Lega continue to rise in popularity throughout the country, a humanitarian crisis steeped in anti-Black racism continues to churn throughout Sicily, spilling out onto the beach. Young African migrants, in particular, are constrained on all sides, from the moment they embark upon the journey to Italian shores their need and vulnerability are severe. Once they arrive they are condemned to menial, exploitative labour, and are met with a national resistance to a multiethnic, intercultural reality.⁹ African migrants are often prohibited from renting rooms in cities and towns, ordered by law and force to remain “out of public sight,”¹⁰ dwelling instead in abandoned factories or otherwise dilapidated buildings. “It’s not that we want this work, walking up and down the beach every day,”¹¹ but there are few options available to those who are socially, judicially, and economically stifled by the whims of Italian politics, markets, and law. 

Before I arrived, my understanding of Sicily and its inhabitants was ambivalent, equally shaped by the Odyssey, readings of which allowed me to map the marvelous and supernatural onto an accessible geography, and by the ways in which Sicilians on screen and in popular culture stealthily tried on Blackness for size, like a mask or a change of clothes. I knew that Sicilians, historically, had been considered “racially inferior” to Italians living in the Northern parts of the country, owing to their geographic and cultural proximity to Africa, and as Sicilians began to immigrate to antebellum North America in the nineteenth century, these racist ideologies flourished with extreme ease alongside anti-Blackness.¹² This thread of racial adjacency was picked up in films I adored and watched repeatedly, like A Bronx Tale, written by Sicilian native Chazz Palminteri and directed by Robert De Niro, a bildungsroman brimming with tension and intimacy between Italian Americans and Black Americans, epitomized through protagonists Calogero and Jane and their respective warring families–an uptown Romeo and Juliet.¹³ Then there is John Cassavetes’ Shadows, a film which put American independent cinema on the international map, and depicts two weeks in the lives of three Black siblings living in New York City. In the film, tension arises because only one of the siblings, Hugh, is dark skinned, and in reality, he is also the only one who is Black among the film’s leading cast.¹⁴ The film’s female lead is Lelia Goldoni, a Sicilian playing a Black woman who passes for white, a revelation met with disgust by one of her white suitors. Shadows, it has been said, turned the “concept of race upside down,”representing it “as a total illusion.”¹⁵ If Blackness could become an ethnological sleight of hand, a dazzling gimmick for Goldoni to perform in Shadows, then on the other side of that trick mirror, across the Atlantic and on the shores of Sicily, lies the unmistakable dispossession and deprivation of Black and migrant lives, a garbled reflection of the very national panic roused by Sicilians’ arrival to America centuries earlier.

Duped as I was by images and cinema, that recurring interrogative–”refugee?,” became a sort of siren song, betraying a deep seated suspicion of me and my Blackness, and through its asking, as was its intention, I was reminded that these pleasures the island offered were not for my enjoyment. Even as I was subsumed under a kind of (anti) Blackness I didn’t anticipate or immediately recognize myself inside, the shameful reality was that at least I had a return ticket, money in my bank account, and a passport that granted me a myriad of privileges beyond this day on the beach. Alongside recent arrivals, millions of Italians, the children of African immigrants, born and raised in Italy, are denied citizenship, rights, and protection under the law.¹⁶ Even the most hallowed of Italy’s celebrity class–footballers–if they are Black, like Sicily’s own Mario Balotelli, routinely endure banana peels thrown at them on the pitch¹⁷ and chants of “there are no Black Italians” from spectators in the stands.¹⁸ This is what I turn over in my mind as I lay on the beach, beneath my very own parasol, as the waves advance and retreat, vanish and reappear before me. 
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Yet, in the wake of my disillusion, that word, refugee, began to take on a new texture in placing it next to its cognate fugitive: one who wanders; one who longs for freedom, movement; and what Saidiya Hartman describes as waywardness: “the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man, or the police.”¹⁹ The Odyssey’s opening lines tether our hero’s wanderings to his exploits during the Trojan war, arguably the most significant event of Greek mythological history: “Tell me, Muse, of that clever man, the one who wandered exhaustively, after he ravaged the mighty citadel of Troy.”²⁰ And Odysseus’ epithet, πολύτροπος, while often translated as ‘cunning’ and ‘wily,’ also means ‘much-wandering,’ interlacing notions of fugitivity and imagination, resourcefulness and errantry, illustrating that the one who strives to escape physical boundaries, does so psychologically, too. The sea, by its nature, integrates all that it separates–a boundary, a threshold, a portal. How many worshippers of Demeter and her daughter Persephone have dove beneath the water’s surface to prepare for the revelations of their mysteries? How many heroes did these waters usher to Hades, the realm of the dead, and Elysium, the residence of the gods? Innumerable are the ships that departed these very Sicilian shores, to do battle with neighboring lands, enslave their people, and return with spoils. Unknown are the slipstreams left by ships carrying human beings against their will, delivering others who boarded by choice to new lands, overflowing with hope, survival on their minds. Remaining cramped and hemmed in would not do–we needed the sea, the whole entire complete deep blue sea.