My most uncomfortable moments living in Tramin have involved children stopping to stare at me as if I were a curiosity. During my early days in this town, I’d often frequent cafes on my own and would find a blonde child anywhere between the ages of 2 and 5 staring at me point blank. They never smiled, they never attempted to talk to me, they just looked at me in a way that made it seem like I was out of place, like I had descended into their landscape from another planet, an alien being. Their mothers would then arrive and scoop them away without ever apologising to me for their child’s strange behaviour or explaining to their child that it was not cool to stare at strangers. When I met this lovely African feminist who, like me, because of her marriage to someone in South Tyrol, moved here more than a decade ago, I got the confirmation I needed that these gazes were somehow racially motivated. She has been living in a town in Meran and at the time when she moved, most of its inhabitants simply hadn’t encountered a Black body before. She was always stared at, more indiscreetly than politely. She assured me that it had gotten a lot better than it used to be.

The first time I was here during Christmas, I was alarmed to see photographs in the town magazine of children dressed as the three kings who visit Christ, one of them in blackface. Alarmed sounds mild. I felt shocked, enraged and horrified that this was so routine, the Church didn’t even bat an eyelid. I complained to my mother-in-law, who grew up in Augsburg and retains her outsider lens. She shared my anger but told me the Traminers saw this as an act of inclusivity. I found it ridiculous, the lengths they would go to in order to depict that one of the three kings was not white while retaining the myth of Jesus Christ as white saviour. It was absurd considering Christ was, in all likelihood, a brown Palestinian, or a person of colour. This Christmas I found an explanation for the Western depiction of Christ; he is a manifestation of the white coloniser Jesus, which could be seen as standing in opposition to the Brown refugee Christ.