It is funny, isn’t it? This is a country, like most other countries, incidentally, where almost everyone is a bit of a racist, although the degree of racism varies enormously – an unsavoury truth that most admit in private, but few would do so in writing or in public.
To be racist or, more specifically, to incite racial hatred, is rightfully a crime, but no state can police against people’s thoughts and people do remain stubbornly tribal, whatever their colour, religion, band club or whatever orientation and allegiance.
Of course, the evidence of this racism, and the comments about it, only really became clear when boatloads of people started arriving, but we have been mumbling and grumbling about Arabs, Libyans and others for many years now.
And yet we are so blindly proud of our Arab-Semitic – the experts can call it whatever they like – language, that the minute anyone reminds us that we have two official languages, you know, Maltese and English, heckles start
rising.
We become all blindly nationalistic, defending something, our language, that is definitely more North African than European, definitely more of a brown language than a white one.
The consequence of this is that, due to our Arab-rooted language, we are one of the very few Catholic nations to call our God “Alla”, (I think it was Lawrence Durrel who commented about this in one of his masterpieces) not quite “Allah”, but remarkably close.
Not that I mind at all. Maltese is our language, sort of... It was also the sort of language of the sort of Arabs who colonised us many years ago.
English (and increasingly “Minglish”) is now our language too and, to be equally precise again, the language of those who colonised us more recently.
Malta was not even a country when we adopted Maltese (or a form of it – languages evolve enormously over time), it was part of someone else’s empire as it was when the English arrived. But, at the same time, the English occupation is perhaps when our sense of nationalism most started to develop, as it started to do all over Europe in the mid-nineteenth century when even countries like Germany and Italy were not countries at all.
We don’t own languages. They are ours to use, but both languages, both Maltese and English, are, or were, the languages of our colonisers – many moons ago, or relatively recently.
Perhaps a sense of history would help some of these diehard nationalists (not the blue ones, although they are more often deep blue types – Labour voters tend to be more relaxed and cooler about our English heritage and more likely to support English footie as I do, but I digress.)
Why should I be prouder of an Arab language, that is now Maltese, that probably came to us from Arab colonisers, than I am of English, that came to us from English colonisers more recently?
Why is one more native than the other? The principal communications officer of our university recently took me to task (why is this person a principal communications officer, I wonder? Is it a case of too many words and the local love of Italian-style job titles, or is there a whole team of communications officers that this person leads?) over my University of Life article. Like so many others before, now and in the future, this office, a product of our very limiting education system, cannot understand what I am on about.
Our Matsec exams are too tough, I say. She says we must not lower standards. Groan.
Let’s allow people to study and enter university with either English or Maltese I say. No, she says, other countries only allow their – wait for the tribal remark – their “native language”.
Do we really have to go native in this debate? Other countries allow divorce. We don’t. Other countries, such as Switzerland, have more than one language. Why can’t we?
In Malta, things do not always change because of a policy principle or for the good of all. They sometimes change because someone well-connected needs this change, and then we work backwards, while at the same time hoping to go forwards.
Well, obviously the University of Malta cannot prepare people for the university of life with that kind of limited thinking, although I know the new Rector is trying to introduce more imagination, creativity and flexibility in what has been for years a very
fossilised institution.
Surely a communications officer of a thinking institution like a university should have been able to respond positively to my suggestions, while of course agreeing to differ? Surely she should have been a cut above the other communications officers who just spout official gobbledegook?
Anyway, I’m in a good mood about one thing this Sunday morning. Developing more bungalows at Ta’ Cenc is off the cards for now. Thank you and well done to the powers-that-be for thinking about the good of the whole nation – whether it speaks English or Maltese, or, as I’ve said before, Minglish…
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