The creation of a Maltese patois proceeds apace. I was reading a magazine interview with the owner of a boutique some days ago when I saw that she was quoted as saying: “I try to get original work.” I couldn’t understand what she meant. Owning a boutique is not original work. Then it clicked: the interview probably took place in Maltese, and the quotes were translated into ‘English’ by the writer, who was unaware that the colloquial Maltese for “goods” is xoghol, as in “Nizzel ix-xoghol fix-showroom” (Take the goods down to the showroom) or “Tat-truck gab ix-xoghol dalghodu.” (The goods were delivered this morning.) Nor did the writer know – but then, this is a very common error – that the Maltese colloquialism for the act of importation – iggib – cannot be translated literally into English as ‘get’. This is one of my biggest bug-bears, and I hear people say it all the time, even those who should know better: “He gets Lux soap”; “Who gets Dettol?” “They’ve been getting Cadbury’s for years.” Read my lips, friends: the word ‘gets’ does not exist in English as a substitute for ‘imports’. You’re speaking patois.
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The anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain creates a stir when he speaks to the press, or when he addresses the public at a rare gathering.
He is seen as a specialist on Malta and the Maltese, and his comments are interesting. Yet the disproportionate importance given to his views seems infected with the lingering malaise of a sense of inferiority that some Maltese feel in respect of foreigners from the north. Maltese anthropologists, whose perception of Maltese society is often far more acute, have been saying the same things for years in the context of the university lecture-room, in Malta and elsewhere, and nobody makes a fuss about their considered opinions. Indeed, the sub-text of the fuss about Jeremy Boissevain’s views on Maltese society is not “Look what an anthropologist said about us” but “Look what a Dutch anthropologist said about us.” I’ve specified his nationality because it is not any foreigner who will do. A Moroccan anthropologist, saying the same things, would produce a quite different reaction.
Yes, it does take an outsider to point out things, but Maltese people who have been ‘outside’ their own culture for years have remarked on the same things. These Maltese might be ‘outside’ because of their academic training in anthropology or sociology, literally outside through living in another country, or they may just have a different attitude because of their temperament and upbringing. They are able to stand outside Maltese society, as it were, and notice things about attitudes and behaviour that those on the inside are unable to see. It does not take an anthropologist to notice, as Professor Boissevain has done, that the Maltese are brought up not to ask questions. The evidence of this is all around us, blinking in large pink neon letters. It is why change – for which the original catalyst is questions – is so slow to take place in Malta, perhaps never happening at all. We remain, as the playground game of my childhood described it, stuck in the mud.
The natural curiosity of Maltese children is squashed so quickly that, by the age of five or six, they are oddly passive. I am not the only one who has remarked on having had the very odd (to me) experience of being in the company of a small child who seemed completely uninterested in what was happening around him.
Some years ago, I went on board a Greenpeace vessel that was in harbour. The preceding day, there had been a stream of visits by schoolchildren led by teachers. In conversation, the Greenpeace official told me how astonished he was that none of the children asked questions, and that the teachers did all of the talking. By the time they leave primary school, Maltese children have lost all inclination to ask questions, and on the rare occasions when the sight of something pricks their curiosity enough to make them want to know more about it, they will ask their parents hesitantly, and promptly be brushed off with a nonsense answer or a “don’t bother me now”. I really believe that this is the root cause of Maltese children’s abject failure to perform academically. They have been trained out of their natural thirst for knowledge. This also handicaps their linguistic development. Language skills develop on the back of curiosity and hunger for knowledge. Children learn how to speak because they want to find things out.
Their linguistic development freezes at the point where they stop wanting to learn new things. That is why so many Maltese adults speak in the language of the schoolyard, with women of 40 using the sentence structure and terminology of the convent classroom, and men in their 50s talking as though they are still on the school-bus to St Edward’s or St Aloysius.
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Children should always be told the facts, because even from a very young age, they can understand them. If a young child wants an explanation of how birds fly, never say “Because that’s how God made them”, or some such inane rubbish, or worse, “Because it has feathers and wings”. The child knows that it has feathers and wings; he or she wants to know how those feathers and wings work to generate flight. Normal children who haven’t had their curiosity wiped out of them will want to know such things: why fish can breathe underwater but people can’t; why you bleed when you cut yourself; why you can see yourself reflected in clear puddles. If young children are not asking questions like these, then parents and teachers should be worried because there is something wrong. Squash a child’s curiosity at that stage, and you cause permanent damage to his or her intellectual development.
There are those who argue that intelligent children will ask questions no matter how much this is discouraged, while children who are not bright will never ask questions, no matter how much they are encouraged to do so. This is not the whole truth. To ask questions in an atmosphere that discourages it requires strength of character and determination, as well as intelligence. Not all children, intelligent or otherwise, have these qualities.
Very intelligent children are often also very quiet, or by dint of that very same intelligence will understand that it would be folly to ask. Not-so-bright children will also have plenty of questions, possibly even more questions because they understand things less easily. To compound the problem, cultures that discourage curiosity in children usually also discourage strength of character and determination in girls and women (think of those cultures under the stranglehold of Islam and Roman Catholicism). The girl-child with a strong character who asks lots of questions is in serious trouble, and so Maltese girls with these natural inclinations rapidly ‘unlearn’ them, either of their own accord or because they are trained to do so by their parents. This is the reason why most Maltese women are passive, and why most Maltese men think in clichés while at the same time being so astonishingly self-assured, with little or no reason to be so. Fortunately, there are many exceptions to brighten up the day.
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As Professor Boissevain said in a press interview: “It’s all part of a hierarchy, in which authority doesn’t want to be questioned. Government doesn’t like being questioned, the church doesn’t like being questioned, fathers don’t like being questioned by their children, and men don’t want to be questioned by women.” Yes, but nobody likes being questioned, anywhere in the world, in any culture or society. The difference between Maltese society and more advanced societies, like the one Professor Boissevain comes from, is in the understanding, in those more highly developed societies, that there are times when others have the right to ask you questions, and you have the duty to answer them. This is not because you are obliged to do so by law, but because it is a way of according respect to the questioner, and to the questioner’s right to question. It is not a coincidence that this attitude has taken root most deeply in those northern European societies with a long history of religious questioning (Protestantism, Calvinism, and so on) and political questioning, through democratic structures. This is has all been alien to us until fairly recently. And here lies the very reason for the discouragement of questions in Malta: little or no respect is accorded to those who would question, and thus, their right to question is not respected either.
The government doesn’t like being questioned by the citizens because Maltese governments have scant respect for Maltese citizens. The church doesn’t like being questioned by its flock because it is not concerned with respecting the flock, but only with ensuring that it is respected by the flock. Its primary concern is that people follow the rules of the Church, even when they don’t want to – as in the withholding of divorce legislation, where the government colludes with the church to disrespect the citizens, or with the banning of books on the Vatican’s blacklist in the recent past. Fathers – and I would add, mothers – don’t like being questioned by their children because Maltese society grants children the status of chattels, and this is how their parents regard them, literally as their possessions.
To see this thinking in action, you have to remember how the consensus in Malta was that the Maltese parents of the conjoined twins born some years ago had the right to decide that no operation would take place and that both twins would be allowed to die. This thinking was so alien to the British way (the twins were born there) that the doctors felt obliged to fight the parents in court. Children are seen as extensions of their parents in Maltese society, but as individuals, with individual rights, in British society. That the parents could not be allowed to condemn their child to death was obvious to me, but to my great astonishment, it was not obvious to the larger part of the Maltese population, which became embroiled in what I could only call a “let them both die because that’s what God wants” campaign.
And finally, men don’t like being questioned by women because – well we all know the answer to that one, don’t we? Women are not respected. That is why our questions are not tolerated, and why our questioning marks us out to be irksome, “difficult”, or just plain old nags.