I picked up Emma Jane Kirby’s The Optician of Lampedusa: A Tale of Rescue and the Awakening of Conscience in Otis and Clementine’s, the used bookstore/café/cat rescue I visited in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia. I thought it might be a book at least tangentially related to walking–or perhaps walking-adjacent–because the refugees fleeing Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria ten years ago walked to ports in western Turkey and then got on overloaded boats to Greece, sometimes drowning when those boats capsized. Any time I think about those journeys, I realize how privileged I am to be able to choose to go on long walks, and to have the ability to wear appropriate shoes and carry my things in a backpack, instead of wearing whatever was on my feet when I fled, and keeping the few possessions I have left in a plastic shopping bag.
However, while The Optician of Lampedusa is, as I suspected, about refugees fleeing their unsafe home countries for Europe, I had the location and the country of origin wrong, because I didn’t know where Lampedusa is. It’s an Italian island off the coast of Tunisia, and the refugees in question are Eritreans. I don’t know how they got from Eritrea to the coast of northern Africa, although it’s possible that they walked part of the way. I didn’t know Eritrea was a vicious dictatorship then, and I don’t know if it still is so terrible that its citizens will risk anything to escape.
The Optician of Lampedusa is a nonfiction novel, given the level of detail in the story it tells. It focuses on the experience of, not surprisingly, an Italian optician who lives on the island–a finicky man who likes things to be just so, giving us the kind of access to his thoughts and feelings that are characteristic of fiction rather than nonfiction. The optician, his wife, and six friends are on a sailboat, enjoying a weekend pleasure cruise, when they encounter hundreds of refugees whose boat has sunk. The eight Italians are able to save 47 people, but another 368 drown. Their own boat, which was intended to carry a maximum of ten passengers, is nearly swamped under the additional weight, but they would’ve continued trying to save the refugees from the sea anyway, except that when an Italian coast guard ship arrives, the crew tells them to stop. Among other things, it’s illegal–it was at the time, and remains illegal now, too, for all I know–for private individuals to interfere when boats carrying refugees sink: the reverse of a Good Samaritan law. The rescuers aren’t charged, perhaps because the event generates so much media coverage, but still, they are traumatized by the experience–by the number of people they can’t save, and by their sudden realization of how immensely privileged they are. The optician recalls how the experience makes the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, something he had ignored previously, tangible:
But he could not ignore the fact that the waving hands had always been visible to him. They had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them.
The fact that the main character is an optician is obviously symbolic, but the acknowledgements in the back of the book indicate that actually was the man’s profession. No doubt, though, that’s the reason Kirby chose to write about his experience–or at least part of the reason for that decision.
This is a quick, vivid read, and although the use of British slang to translate what the Italian characters say is sometimes a little jarring, the prose is lucid and affecting. It made me wonder about Canada’s decision to continue pretending that the United States is still safe for refugees under the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, despite the Trump administration’s behaviour towards noncitizens. Of course we would risk further tariffs and other retaliation from the Americans if we were to centre our foreign policy on ethical or moral grounds, and enough Canadians are upset about all the newcomers arriving here that they’d vote for the Conservatives (or did in the last election) if the Liberals didn’t reduce the number of people we accept, so there are economic and political reasons for pretending that the U.S. isn’t dangerous to migrants–and to its own citizens, too: we can probably expect 2SLGBTQ+ folks to begin crossing the border, for instance, the way that high-profile academics have done. It might be easy to ignore the humanity of those seeking shelter with us, as the optician did, but perhaps, as he discovered, once we experience the truth that they’re just like us, only not as lucky, we might find that turning a blind eye to them is no longer possible.