In the past few months, among other things, I have been involved in a project to publish a second edition of Silg fuq Kemmuna – a rather long novel which first appeared in the early 1980s. My task was to ensure that, as much as possible, the text was cleaned of the orthographical and grammatical errors that had crept into the original edition.
Its basic problem, however, was that it had been printed in miniscule type, in order to reduce the number of pages and thereby cut production costs. Even so, at over 440 pages, the book that eventually came out had to be priced at some Lm2.75c, at the time a prohibitive price for a Maltese literature book. Many of those who overcame this hurdle, complained that they could not conclude the novel, because the small print hurt their eyes. At least, that was the excuse they gave me.
What’s special?
I had not been through the novel for over 20 years. It deals with the experiences of a group of young people towards the end of the 1960s and tries to describe some of the perspectives that were prevalent in Malta then. Re-reading the stuff I had written did feel like travelling in a foreign country: it was the past, and in L.P. Hartley’s famous dictum, they do things differently there.
Yet, the memory of this particular foreign country was still with me, alongside the belief that those were very exciting times indeed. Many people of my generation, as well as of the generations immediately preceding and succeeding mine, share the conviction that we were very lucky to have been young in the 1960s. New things happened then; new things never before attempted, were done then; and somehow we had been part of what went on.
To be sure, there are those who argue that such convictions are self-serving. Most generations claim likewise about their younger days. Such claims mask the reality that all decades have their good and bad points, featuring events that define the future just as much as the 1960s may have done.
Indeed the argument can be taken further: it is futile to believe that if there exists a design in the affairs of men and women, it can be measured by the span of decades. Human history does not unfold according to some yearly calendar. The latter has, after all, itself been set arbitrarily.
Actually, when one compares the political, economic, social and behavioural developments of today with those of the 1960s, some might consider that decade to be quite tame. Work and lifestyles have become much faster and much more demanding. The context today is that of an extremely open society which indulges its openness on a world scale, and deploys its hedonism with an insouciance that makes “extreme” behaviour look like the natural order of things.
Entertainment, travel, information are available for an ever-widening proportion of society. All this would not have been imaginable in the 1960s. So what can have been so special about that decade?
Guevara and Bond
Intellectually, I can follow and probably agree with this reasoning. Then sometimes something happens – it might be a banal incident – and I find myself reverting to type. I find myself nostalgically recalling those years when… And I start hard-headedly insisting that the 1960s left behind them a big legacy.
It again happened to me a few days ago when, at a popular restaurant in Valletta, they started playing the songs of Rita Pavone. She was a pint-sized Italian pop star, still in her teens, with a mischievous boisterous style that for a couple of years and more, made her very popular in Italy as well as in Malta. I gather that she is still alive and well – good luck to her – even if, as a grandmother, she has now probably become less boisterous.
The point is that listening to her old songs, and remembering each and every one of them by heart, simply served as a trigger to reinforce the dubious conviction that the 1960s left an indelible mark on the consciousness of all those who are living now, no matter when born.
If Pavone – a long-faded icon of the Italian pop scene – can still have this effect, what about those other icons and iconic images which are still going strong? JFK, Che Guevara, the naked young Vietnamese girl running away from a napalm attack, the Beatles, James Bond, the jumbo jet, a man landing on the moon…
It might make better sense at this juncture to ask the question: from where did the sixties get their particular distinctiveness, if they truly have one? What does it consist of? And what does their legacy, if any, consist of?
In Silg fuq Kemmuna I stressed as a theme the way by which Maltese youth were changing their aspirations and lifestyles as a reaction to the growing openness of their society. But I wrote the book between 1970 and 1973, perhaps too close to the period being described for one to cull from it enough relevant material for a long-term assessment. Interestingly, the young writer Guzé Stagno recently told me about the project he wishes to work upon: a historical novel about the 1960s. For him, it is history, since he was born well after the decade was over and must research it as if he were dealing with 1565 or 1798. I do hope he is progressing with this work…
Global awareness
Rather than play the devil’s advocate, I would actually like to argue that the 1960s did indeed leave a particular legacy that is identifiable even now, and that remains alive.
The legacy may not be as widespread and pervasive as some would claim. But it is there.
Firstly, the period marked a span of time when communications went really global. Not in the sense of telegrams and long-distance phone calls – those had been available to all parts of the world for scores of years – but in the sense of immediate and tangible communications that reached the mass of the people across practically the four corners of the globe.
Television, beyond radio, generated a global consciousness of what was going on that could mobilise the masses of Cairo, as much as the inhabitants of the American mid-West and the slum-dwellers of Calcutta.
This in turn led to a global awareness of what was going on from east to west, from north to south. Culturally, it generated a tremendous expansion of the entertainment industry, in both television and popular music. Most such developments were dominated by the US – but the Beatles and James Bond were British. Just as importantly, the ground was being laid for social and cultural mores to start being calibrated according to a world scale, something which had not really happened in the 1950s with Elvis, or in the 1940s with the spread of long distance radio – or even with World War II.
In economic terms, raw materials and financial and consumer markets were steadily being opened to increasing international competition, though they still remained far from the levels of globalisation we have around us today. It could be argued, however, that the momentum towards economic and financial globalisation gathered pace in the 1960s; in doing so, one does not have to take a position about whether this was and is, a good or bad thing. For sure, the study of US multi-national corporations took off then, with academic studies and polemics proliferating on both sides of the Atlantic.
Open Societies
The key to developments was the new openness experienced for the first time by a wide swathe of societies that had for centuries remained closed upon themselves, either because they were so organised traditionally, or because they came under the control of some foreign power or another, which wanted to remain in sole effective charge of their resources and markets. The collapse of European imperialism was a major political fact that was being digested and explored by many many peoples. Meanwhile, neo-colonialism was taking shape.
Meanwhile too, the tragedies and farces that decolonisation sponsored were witnessed by a worldwide audience.
They could view, practically on the very day if not the very moment they happened, the events of the Seven Days’ War in the Middle East, the assassination of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and Prime Minister Lumumba in the Congo, or the landing of US astronauts on the moon.
Curiously, the spreading openness of societies was fuelled by the overriding contest between the US and the then USSR.
They not only competed militarily on a global level – with the culminating event being the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 – but by way of giving backing to this or that regime which played up to them. The clash of ideologies contributed vastly to political turmoil based on exchanges of ideas, visits, military expeditions and conferences, many of which were regularly reported on the global media.
However, the overriding event was Vietnam. More than an event, it became an all-engulfing process that dominated the consciousness of the 1960s.
The factors of change that were defining the decade came together to position the war in Vietnam at the forefront of world affairs.
The superpower confrontation, a decolonisation that took the form there of a brutal war for national liberation, the dominance of television, which brought into the sitting rooms of families the reality of US soldiers killing and getting killed, the search for a lasting worldwide peace – these, and other factors, underwrote the swings which many people, especially youth, experienced in their attitudes and beliefs.
Vietnam
Issues of right and wrong became a matter for genuine, bitter debate that gripped whole societies. Nowhere was this more evident as in the US, where a president known by his initials, LBJ, started his term of office with a resounding victory in the wake of his predecessor’s assassination.
He ended it amid civil strife and in quasi-ignominy. LBJ decided not to run for a second term, despite having launched social welfare programmes, unprecedented since the thirties, which genuinely targeted help for the poor and those suffering from discrimination.
Vietnam illustrated the contradictions defining global developments underpinned by economic growth and the spread of political liberties, but within which people felt defenceless against a concentrated surge of military and financial forces, that were consolidating and widening their power. The reaction to this, particularly among the young, was two-fold.
Movements of protest swirled around US campuses and the centres of cities.
They then reached Western Europe. Riots and even insurrection (as in Paris) provided potent TV newscasts.
On another tack, young people copped out through drugs and an escape into hedonism. That phenomenon was encapsulated in the hippy movement which publicised the casual adoption of anti-conformist values, attitudes and ways of life. Apart from being drug-fuelled, they ranged from the Franciscan to the orgiastic.
It seems to me, looking back, that many of these factors changed the behaviour of the 1960s generation and those following, in permanent ways that are still with us. True, consumerism has become more blatant. The idealism that not infrequently defined how people thought and behaved in the 1960s seems now to be less apparent, as official ideologies have coalesced around a watery consensus based on free market theory, mobilisation around single issues, and a dismantling of the welfare state. True, hedonism has become part of the background, not an exercise in casual defiance addressed at the “square” society. But does this mean anything much?
Interconnecting
What to say then by way of conclusion?
Perhaps the legacy of the 1960s consists of this: for the first time, peoples around the world were connecting to the big political and social changes happening on a world basis, without there having to be a world war.
They did so on an ongoing daily basis, vicariously through the media or more directly through personal experience, while their societies became less and less closed in on themselves. Because of this new interconnectedness, mentalities changed, as did lifestyles and behaviour.
The changes became permanent and even though in modified form, are still with us today.
While checking the proofs of Silg fuq Kemmuna – partly to cheat on the monotony of the task – these reflections would dart in and out of my mind.
I hope that there will not be too many typos in the final product, because of the distraction. It surely would have been safer to block the distraction out and only let it flow when listening to Rita Pavone’s oldies.