Last week, Adrian Grima launched his second collection of poetry in Maltese called Rakkmu, published by Klabb Kotba Maltin, at St James Cavalier Theatre.
Actors Ray Calleja and Marcelle Teuma, percussionist Renzo Spiteri, artist Pierre Portelli, cultural activists Noora Baker and Khaled Katamish, sociologist Dr Josann Cutajar, and a singer from Eritrea, took part in the launch. The book cover was designed by Pierre Portelli.
Adrian Grima teaches Maltese Literature at the University of Malta. He is the coordinator of Inizjamed, the Maltese correspondent of the Babelmed.net website about culture in the Mediterranean, and head of the Technical Committee for Literature in the National Council for the Maltese Language.
He is the prize-winning author of the book of poetry It-Trumbettier (1999). His poetry has appeared in anthologies in Italy, Germany, Cyprus, The Netherlands, Israel, Austria, France and Corsica, and he has read his works in Belfast, Catania, Cyprus, Delphi, Israel, Rome, and The Netherlands.
The name Rakkmu is inspired by a poem in the book, which tells the true story of a Palestinian mother who was killed by an Israeli soldier who shot her repeatedly while she sat doing embroidery on her front porch in Nablus. But the name also symbolises the richness of different cultures, the vitality of colour and texture, the variety of threads that together form a single design. In this book, Adrian Grima sees embroidery as the struggle between, and perhaps the triumph of art and understanding over the logic of fear and hatred.
The 62 poems in the book are divided into seven sections that deal with love; the ambiguities and magic of childhood; our inability to understand and come to terms with life and its absurdities; politics and the environment in Malta; immigration and Europe; the January 2005 incidents at Hal Safi; and true stories from different parts of the world. Although Adrian Grima is not afraid to take a position on various, often controversial issues, he does so by telling the stories of people who are the real protagonists of these big, seemingly impersonal issues.
The Mediterranean features prominently in Rakkmu. Prof. Stephanos Stephanides, Dean of Humanities at the University of Cyprus and a well-known poet and academic, says, “Adrian Grima speaks with a contemplative voice crossing a fragmented Mediterranean – north south, half here half there. He hears and feels the cadences and contours of its ambiguous faces, touches the scars of failed promises and the violence of its cultures inner borders, seeks poetic salvage in the pungency of its life, the largesse of its heart, in the swell of the sea or the dream of a child in its tremulous waters usurping the slyness of the moon.”
The Israeli translator and cultural activist Jack Arbib, sees Adrian Grima as “a lighthouse casting a beacon of compassionate despair over the troubled water of the Mediterranean, this mare nostrum turned into mare monstrum”. Arbib describes him as a “contemporary troubadour singing words of an ancient and magic vernacular, as he painfully tries to unroll the mystery of the brotherly hate of us Cains and Abels, here and now”.
The independent Palestinian researcher Omar Barghouti argues that “Adrian Grima has mastered the power of intense brevity, of reducing a complex space to a cage, a crutch, a dance, a boat, only to blow it up in the reader's imagination in its full colors, nuances and textures. Adrian extracts hope from the dark abyss of despair, to inspire, to protest ... to rekindle our dreams”.