For starters, (at time of writing this answer) there's no sass syntax that uses selector&. If you were going to do something like that, you'd need a space between the selector and the ampersand. For example:
This allows you to extend selectors with other classes, IDs, pseudo-selectors, etc. Unfortunately for your case, this would theoretically compile to something like .itema which obviously doesn't work.
You may just want to rethink how you're writing your CSS. Is there a parent element you could use?
This feature has landed in the newest version of Sass, 3.3.0.rc.1(Maptastic Maple)
The two closely related features which you'll need to use are the scriptable &, which you can interpolate within a nested styles to reference parent elements, and the @at-root directive, which places the immediately following selector or block of css at the root (it will not have any parents in the outputted css)