Florida, our motorboat, renamed after the slain Gazan journalist Anas al Cherif, goes faster than others.
We have finished a filling breakfast: unleavened bread, made by the captain, and fluffy eggs, made by a gentle older man who has been reading Ghassan Kanafani on the boat—on land he is a member of parliament in Tunisia.
At 12h34, we wait for other boats to catch up with us. One of our mates—a Tunisian actor—washes dishes with sea water while the South African farmer and businessman packs them away.
The sky is clear, the weather is hot and one is tempted to jump into the deep blue Mediterranean. The waves are gentle belying the seriousness of the mission we are on: to open up a humanitarian corridor for food, medicines, and baby formula to Gaza.
Here off the coast of Sicily, as we chat about the ordinariness of life, it is as though weather reports of a storm in the early evening are a myth.
But we know we will need to cook dinner before that happens. It is difficult to hold a pot steady on the stove while also trying to maintain balance and not be thrown back and forth in the 1.5m-by-1m kitchen.
At 12h34 off the coast of Sicily, with the world calm around us, it seems as though we shall not have another evening where we countdown to daylight as the red lights of the Israeli Occupational Forces’ drones fly over our boats.
We hope they do not drop anything on our boat as they have done on other boats before.
Auralgraph: Sicily, Italy, 2025. © Zukiswa Wanner.
Author, editor and publisher Zukiswa Wanner is an internationalist with a South African passport. She has written five novels, four children’s books, a travel book, satirical nonfiction, a long form essay on Palestine, and for various publications in Africa and beyond. In 2020 Wanner received the Goethe Medal from the German government for her contribution to culture. In 2024, she returned it in protest of Germany’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza and for its silencing of pro-Palestinian voices. Wanner’s writing has been translated into Kiswahili, Shona, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Turkish. In 2025, she was a member of the Global Sumud Flotilla.