Celebrating with friends and colleagues Lino Cassar’s 50 golden years of writing, editing and publishing in the left-wing media last week, quite obviously helped unearth a treasure chest of memories to be shared and cherished by all those present. Love him or hate him, and both schools of sentiment have existed to judge him since he first put pen to paper, there was no avoiding Lino in print. Most of us can only say thank goodness for that.
My first encounters with Lino took place in a very indirect way exactly 40 years ago when he was running Malta’s most popular ever satirical newspaper, Ix-Xewka, at which moment in time I was a teenager busily involved in the local literary scene. We were a group of young men and hardly any women, some of us angrier than the others, intent on making the new Movement for the Promotion of Literature, better known in Maltese as il-Moviment Qawmien Letterarju, reach out to the people in that refreshing spirit of the sixties.
Even though his paper was mostly loaded with political fodder that often had you in stitches, Lino Cassar could hardly overlook the reality of those young people trying, sometimes far too immodestly, to introduce a touch of modern poetry and prose into the Maltese literature of the day. He had his skilful stringers who apparently knew many of us rather too closely and suddenly the best of humorous verse was being thrown at us from the anonymous pages of Ix-Xewka.
Victor Fenech became Victor Rabbit, Mario Azzopardi became Mario l-Mulej, Raymond Mahoney turned into Raymond Myhoney while I had my surname jovially twisted into Florist. Remember it was the flower-power generation. There were other twists and turns with people like Albert Marshall, Frans Sammut, Charles Coleiro, Joe A. Grima and Oliver Friggieri, but it was mainly fun and good-natured all the time, which is why we wallowed in it as it still helped to project further the new movement’s work. Whatever we did or presented, there was always a poem or a commentary dedicated to us, which baffled us a bit and there were times when we even started unsportingly accusing one another of actually being the perpetrator behind the scenes!
So much water has passed under the bridge since then. Sadly, Ix-Xewka, like many of its predecessors, had to fold up. Labour was back in power after the turmoil of the politico-religious dispute of the sixties and the newspaper all too naturally had lost most of its political punch. This was Malta, not the UK where such publications of political satire and humour like Private Eye survives, even if only just, successive changes of government. Lino did have another go at it, but in the end it was clear that as a nation we simply did not have the political temperament to withstand the siege mentality of being in power.
Lino did many other things after, however. At different periods during the 1970s, he both censored (ironically that’s when films finally stopped being massacred and mutilated) and imported films, and he later also put his Hollywood expertise to good use at the Malta Film Facilities, as it was known then, but it was his writing and his commitment to left-wing causes that continued to highlight his career in a fast-changing journalistic scene.
Gradually, but surely maturing into the top-quality columnist that we know today, Lino Cassar has often been misinterpreted and portrayed as some vindictive adjectival machine, which he certainly is not. I know of no other journalist of any generation in the Maltese media with his heart of gold, but of course there will always be adversaries who talk in “enemies” terms and many an axe to grind against the rock of obvious vulnerability.
Lino has an infernal vocabulary, often bloated, misused and abused, but it is like a surrealistic weapon he uses to have his message understood, then he simply forgets all about it. You would think he has just insulted you in the presumed presence of his thousands of readers, only to see him, the following day, crossing the street in Valletta and coming over to you to say hello, crack a couple of jokes in his unique, familiar stammer and then leave as quickly to talk to the next friend or foe he happens to spot walking past.
People who have known him all along will vouch for this, which is why the small crowd of good wishers at last week’s do had a dash of spontaneity about it. It was, of course, largely a left-wing gathering of relatives, ex-colleagues and friends, but it also had its colourful sprinkling of media people and politicians from a good mixture of inspirations. Labour leader Alfred Sant was there, but so was President Emeritus Guido de Marco. It-Torca editor, Alfred Briffa, Lino’s current wailing wall of patience, was there, but so were the editors of the Sunday Times and this newspaper.
His speech on the occasion, quite predictably, provided a heart-warming moment of entertainment. Lino is no longer the physically energetic Lino we once knew, alas, but intellectually he is still as engaging as he was 50 years ago, and the anecdotes he recalled in his long and winding speech, and the manner in which he recalled them, will remain with those present for many years to come.
Maltese journalism has had and still has its many stalwarts. People like Tom Hedley, Tony Montanaro, Paul Carachi, Anton Cassar, Charles Mizzi, Godfrey Grima, John A. Mizzi, Lino Spiteri and several others writing in both Maltese and English have given it credibility when it least deserved it. There have also been those who wilfully or not had it marooned, caught as it is and as it has always been in the straightjacket of political manipulation and sheer proprietorial interference.
Lino Cassar belongs to that exclusive club of Maltese journalists who were never afraid to poke fun at politicians and personalities, which was always done minus the venom that had other pretenders in the same field left unsold and one even condemned to a spell in prison. His has been a career that coincided with extreme, often historic circumstances in the development of Maltese society in general, and he chose to rejoice in it rather than despair. That he’s still at it when others of his age and even younger have long become silent, proves the staying power of both his guile and style. May it long continue.