NO 1

Kriden asked his parents for a few thousand dollars and hopped the next boat out of the country.

As we walk the mile up and back from town to the grotto, Kriden tries to convince us that single party rule--dictatorship--is the best system for Tunisia. He says eyebrow-raising things like: “Arab countries aren’t ready for democracy.”

I’ve noticed that tyrants the world over love that line; it transforms their repression into benevolence, caretaking. I’ve also noticed that in the soporific heat of many such equatorial nations, I find myself nodding along to such statements, lulled by seeming common snese until I remember to whome I’m listening.

• There are three boat graveyards on Lalmpedusa: one inland at the town dump, one by the harbor, another in the water. The wheel-houses of wrecked vessels poke out of the water. The refugee boats could belong to Lampedusa’s fishermen, except for the Arabic names scrawlled on their blue hulls and the green dates spray-painted on each, the dates of their landing. The boat graveyards are so rife with facile poetry that I avoid visiting them until the very end of my visit. When I do, I attempt to record the physical details, the tinself of used Mylar blankets, the names--Hajji Hassan, Basam--and none of the wistfulness the ruined boats imply.

• While the refugees are hidden away, there are two black faces visible on Lampedusa. One belongs to the woman on the napkin dispenser at the port cage. She smiles from every table, her face emerging from a sea of coffee beans: “The Pleasure of Black” reads the slogan beneath her disembodied head. The other face belongs to Father Vincent Mwagala, a Catholic priest and very different kind of missionary who has come from Tanzania to work among the refugees and islanders here.

Above his desk there’s a cross made of two ribs of sunk refugee boats.

Orange crosses blue. The priest is as frustrated as I am about the impossibility of speaking to arriving refugees. “We know they’ve arrived but we don’t have contact with them,” he says. On rare occasions he talks to arriving sub-Saharan Africans coming from Libya. “Life is difficult for them there. They are poorly treated in different ways. Their labor is unpaid and when they got to report it, the police pay no attention to them. IT’s worse if you don’t speak Arabic.” I ask him if he’s suffereing here, and he says