Am I the Subaltern if I speak?

Journal reflections on Black travel, Europe, and the tourist’s gaze

When traveling
I enjoy searching for life outside the tourist's gaze.

Laundry hanging on a line,
A local corkboard that, maybe, carries the memories of last week, last year, last decade.
Prices that don't make me clutch my pearls, or make the conversion calculator in my mind cry.
An older man leaning over the rails of his balcony in boxers.

These reflections are interrupted by the harsh loudness of a man's British accent, I can't exactly place it and another procession of suitcases clamoring over the cobblestones.
More of us have arrived.

The Tourist’s Gaze is a phrase coined by John Urry in the 90s to speak about the expectations and entitlement that the tourist places upon the local to cater to their experience. So much of the tourist’s gaze is supported and upheld by the commodification of culture and relationships of dependency upon the tourist industry. However, I think that the best full articulation of what the tourist gaze looks like and feels like comes from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. The first half of the very short book reads as a tongue in cheek travel guide.

“You move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the hot, clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed (which is to say special); you feel free… you needn’t let that funny feeling you have from time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into a full fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday.”

It’s one of my favourite books.
But it speaks about tourism within the context of the Caribbean (specifically Antigua) and the tourist as a white North American or European. Maybe it is one of my favourite books because I never have to see myself in the face of the “ugly tourist.”

The waitress at the restaurant looks like she's someone's cool middle aged aunt. Her short curly mohawk is dyed a rusty red. She has piercings in her eyebrows and heavy black liner. She, and the prices are the reason I decided to eat here.

I wonder if she's queer.
There's a rainbow flag flying in the street behind us and she seems to look up at it and smile. But maybe she smiles at everything when she's working. I don't know her; I just feel like I do.

I smile at the flag. It makes me feel a little safer. Although it probably shouldn't. Everyone seems surprised to see me here. Black, femme, long thick knotless braids past my ass. I've never travelled with braids, but I've also never travelled to Europe. I don't know if the staring would be minimized if I had worn my natural hair. And - I am a tourist. They seem accustomed most to Blackness through the lens of traumatic migration and poverty. I notice that this is often where I see my own reflection. In these moments there is sorrow and kinship. There is also shame and fear. Shame because, here as well, the passers-by seem to treat poverty as a personal falling. They do not make eye contact, they do not stop, they do not hide their disgust. Shame, because I am here caught between wanting to witness humanity and wanting to grant privacy. I do not belong here. And now, I am yet another set of eyes, witnessing as capitalism continues to function exactly the way it was intended to.

A pigeon swoops towards my table as I'm eating and writing. The waitress is serving other patrons.
"Don't be scared they're just hungry. They are used to being fed. But now it's illegal. If they catch you feeding the pigeons they'll fine you 500 euros. Nobody tells you this." I gasp in surprise, and thank her before taking a long sip of my drink. I’m remembering the man who seemed to be encouraging me to feed pigeons at the train station.

In Venice, I have no plans other than being here. A compromise with myself. Honoring my desire for rest and my desire to fit as much exploration as I can into the limited time of my vacation. Maybe, it's also a compromise with my ethics and the complicated feelings I have about travel. What can I do but witness this slowly sinking city? Try not to demand that its inhabitants cater to me in the hours I am here.

Construction tunnels.
Wires and phone lines cutting across picturesque architecture
Abandoned telephone booths
The faint smell of piss when I turn a corner (hard to get a picture of)

I do not try to linguistically fit in. I say grazie out of politeness - and slowly growing habit. In the same way I say merci automatically even when I'm back home in Toronto. I wonder if this is the entitlement of anglophone travel, an assumption that you'll get by just fine without learning the language. I also wonder if this is minute resistance. My refusal to embrace yet another colonial language. The one I was born with and the one I'm struggling to learn, already rattling around my brain.

I am curious
About this too
Our desire for deception
Or belonging
Or both
Does a local ever mean it? When they say they couldn't tell you aren’t from the place you're visiting? Or is this part of the experience too? The shared participation in deception. I attempt to deceive you and you let me believe I did. Why do we need to be fed this lie? Would we not enjoy the time spent without believing we could maybe belong here?

No one participates in this deception for me. Everyone starts by asking where I'm from. Other tourists stare at me and tell me with their up and down looks that I also don't belong to them.

Halfway into my solo travels, I decide I will not pay anymore to see anything old. This came from a general discontent with Florence's Uffizi gallery sharply contrasted by the abundance of joy I got from perusing the work of the artists sitting just outside the gallery. The Uffizi's ceilings are the only thing that saved the experience for me. In Venice, I found two contemporary art spaces (a pop up exhibit and a gallery) that were both free. I would have gladly paid entrance to both, they gave me everything that the classical spaces were lacking. Soul or connection, perhaps.

I think also, about who profits from me pouring Euros that I do not have into seeing buildings and pieces of art by people that have long since passed. It's not the artist's themselves, nor their kin. The galleries and museums which are cultural institutions that uphold an idea of European exceptionalism that justified and continues to justify systemic dehumanisation. And so, why shouldn't I put my money towards the only spaces where I saw art centered around Palestinian resistance. Why shouldn't I pour resources towards the art that celebrated people that did not exist in these classical art institutions? Or maybe, I was simply running out of money and making a choice to spend less is easier than feeling I cannot really afford a vacation.

Architecture and fauna are the subjects of most of my photos. I have no interest in capturing swarms of tourists and I have no consent from inhabitants. I think a lot about photography made valuable through the way it captures a human subject. The way it breathes – making you feel connected to a collection of pixels on a screen or ink on paper. What must it be like to be a person captured by the lens of a stranger? What must it be like to see your face nameless credited under the name of another? To hang in galleries or private collections without ever being invited into those same spaces? To become the face of a country, or a movement or a moment in time – simply because you were living your life when a tourist decided that they wanted to capture you?

Houselessness
Catcallers
Men who don't respond to no but sometimes respond to I have a boyfriend

There is something quite self aggrandizing about the tourist being the arbiter of authenticity. We search for experiences, restaurants, neighborhoods, cafes… people – that are authentic and real. But how would we know? Moreover, do we want to know? In so many ways we all for "authenticity" to be performed for us. We assume that what is authentic now has always been. When in fact this is a deeply infantilizing and paternalistic belief. All cultures will grow and evolve. All people change over time. To assume that their change is unauthentic is to freeze them and turn them into a spectacle. But maybe when we search for authenticity, we are not looking for the image of essentialism. Maybe we are looking for the familiar. To say: this feels real to me, because I recognize it from my own life. And nothing feels more real than that. So, it must be real here too.

Vegan restaurants
Chinese food
Second hand car dealerships
Contemporary art

The great irony of my desire to observe life outside of the tourist gaze, is that that is such a deeply tourist thing to do. We do not need to witness and observe life as a special spectacle in the place we are from. There is newness and excitement in seeing people live their everyday lives in a place that you only get to visit.

I loved Italy. And I felt guilty for loving Italy. I loved Italy and I felt like maybe, I could only love it as a tourist. Italy would not love me back as a citizen. There is something freeing in Black solo travel – occupying European spaces in a way that it was never intended for me to enjoy. I could love it for the revelry in defiance alone. But I also loved the streets, the architecture, the sun beating down on my skin ever presently. My tongue heavy with sauce and cheese and espresso. The smell of the air in Tuscana. The smell of the ocean on the coast.

“all of this is not real like any other real thing that there is.”
(Jamaican Kinkaid, A Small Place)

I loved it and hated, that I could never forget that I was never meant to love it. I loved it and could never forget – that in another world we would all get to love the pieces of our planet without guilt, without entitlement, without a tourist industry, without the gnawing presence of displacement and colonial anger.

Grandparents in the kitchen of family restaurants.
Middle aged couples celebrating anniversaries and birthdays.
Eyes closed smiling up at the sun.