We Will Not Look Away
This summer, the sea held both joy and sorrow.
It began as an ordinary day at sea. Our Black Fish Captains, Corynne and Edwina, set out on a small, chartered fishing boat in search of seabass, hoping for a good catch and soaking up the late summer sun.
As the boat traced its course across the Channel, the sea revealed something unexpected; empty dinghies, adrift.
At first, they seemed like nothing more than empty boats. But then they noticed the details: children’s shoes, clothes, bags; thin plastic sides that should never have held so many bodies at once; the absence of lifejackets. And their stomachs turned as it dawned on them what these vessels had carried; and what they had lost.
Every week, people – most of them Black, brown, and displaced by war, poverty, or climate collapse - are forced to climb into overcrowded, flimsy boats in the hope of reaching Britain. There is no safe or legal way for them to make this journey. They set out at night, often fifty or more crammed into a vessel designed for half that number, with barely any life jackets between them. Some never make it. Bodies are pulled from the sea each year. Others are intercepted by border forces, detained, and treated like prisoners for the “crime” of survival.
Out on the water, they heard the skipper describe how migrants in detention are given only the barest necessities - a bed, a little food, a grey tracksuit. they heard from others on board how French authorities cut the ropes of dinghies, leaving survivors in the sea to wait for rescue; knowing the English coast guard would have to act once they drifted across the invisible line we call a border. Borders that cause so much harm.
The day was full of contradictions. On the boat, some men’s words about migrants landed sharp and cold, their laughter too casual in the face of human suffering. A skipper uneasy with his own choices, making strained excuses as objects were stolen from abandoned craft. Later, arriving back to shore, they saw swimmers training for a Channel crossing; unaware, perhaps, of the wreckage lying just beyond the horizon. The juxtaposition was brutal. Some lives celebrated for endurance and triumph; others cast adrift, criminalised for the act of survival.
And still, the lines pulled in fish; many, many mackerel, enough to feed us all at our recent Black Female Travel × Black Fish collab event. Edwina caught her first seabass, grinning as it broke the surface. There was beauty, there was empathy, there was solidarity with others on the boat who were horrified too. They carried home grief, but also abundance; proof that the sea can hold both.
For us, as Black bodies at sea, there is a weight to all of this. Fishing, swimming, being in nature- these are painted as “white” pastimes in Britain. To step into them can be healing, but also heavy with the gaze of racism. And yet we insist on claiming that space. We insist on our joy. Because when St George’s flags fly on every street corner, when anti-migrant hate grows louder each week, when racism is allowed to roar unchecked; joy itself becomes an act of defiance.
Because the truth is this: people are still being pushed into danger. Children are climbing into boats at night with no safe passage, fleeing wars that are not accidents but the direct consequence of centuries of imperialism, extraction, and greed. These places are not chaotic and unsettled by nature - they have been made so, their resources stolen, their peoples displaced, while the West grows; fueled by lies and profit. And so the crossings continue. People keep risking everything, because what waits behind them is worse.
We are taught to look away, but we cannot and will not.
Black Fish exists right here in this tension: we light fires, we gut fish, we laugh, we feed each other. And we also refuse to look away from the suffering around us. We hold both grief and joy, because to be alive in this world, in these bodies, demands both.
