Certain factors have forcefully contributed towards the definition of Malta, at least that Malta which is immediately identifiable in terms of its objective characteristics: the unique geographical position midway between two distinct continents and constituting part of the frontier of one of them, the long colonial experience, the composite character of its history and culture, the strong and uninterrupted religious tradition which is as old as its exceptionally early free standing stone buildings. Simply the oldest of this type, and yet pertaining to an unpretentious tiny rock. All this contained within a very small space, which is also complete. Smallness and entirety: that is the paradox. And that is where the idea of a novel creeps in. Perhaps the past can be narrated also through intuition, and not only through reasoning. The heart is indeed more knowledgeable than the mind.
Historical research has successfully sought to identify and to describe in detail what makes such a minute stretch of land a nation, and eventually an autonomous state, as any other. An exception to the rule, to the point of claiming to be a full member of a Unified Europe, an EU which will soon be simply known as Europe. Its smallness is already an indication of something peculiar which has managed to stand the test of time, to outwit the dictates of history and to finally arrive at the point which defines a nation as fully accomplished. The fact that Malta is now the smallest member of the European Union is a significant indication of the persistency with which the Maltese have traditionally stuck to the conviction that their nationhood should be finally rewarded by all. That is Malta, the nation and the state. A will to be.
A story about survival
But what about the inhabitants, those few thousands of people who have persistently built themselves up into what they are today? Survival is the ultimate name of the complex game, and continuity is the sort of process which made them reach their destination. A history of Malta may be substantially distinct from a history of the Maltese. Where were they, all along, so productive - through their highly creative spoken word and finely constructed stone - and yet so distinctly absent, unacknowledged? The land and the inhabitants: they are or have been for quite a long time two diverse entities, since history has put the people in a situation wherein they had to spend most of their life asking who they were, what right they actually had to exist, what sort of relationship could be the most convenient for them to establish with their foreign landlords.
Religion (pre-Christian and Christian) and language (pre-Maltese and Maltese) have actually moulded their condition, giving shape to their frame of mind (grammar amply testifies this). Both are intimately intertwined in a manner rarely found in the chronicles of much bigger countries which did not have to face the most elementary among problems: survival.
The challenge of overcoming extinction went hand in hand with striving to construct nationhood, to keep alive that degree of ethnic coherence which is necessary for a community to be defined as something unique and compact. For a long time it all seemed to be important to guarantee existence at least in terms of the primeval notion of common social conviviality. In any case, whichever the complex implications of such premises, one can safely consider Malta as a very old nation, endowed with a civilisation of at least seven thousand uninterrupted years. Being Maltese, therefore, is equally a source of authentic pride and a question of self-investigation.
In my opinion that question can be answered both scientifically, through conclusions reached methodically, and literarily, through the creative, imaginative reconstruction of a novel. If both efforts could be associated so as to form one unique process of discovery, then that is quite fine. Academic research provides conclusions which literary perception can then reconstruct into a system.
The fundamental issue beckons: what does it actually mean to be able to survive and to define yourself as Maltese in the process? To me it has instinctively been an equally existential and historical query, and has gone a very long way in providing me with material of various sorts for my narrative works. In the field of academic research things could not be substantially different, but in that field matters have to be dealt with and analysed clinically, with complete detachment. In creative literature, imagination and memory, personal and collective, have to play a simultaneous double role, and results are unpredictable since individuals do not easily fall within the predefined patterns. Even structural criticism makes an allowance for such divergences.
The essence of the Maltese soul
I have sought to explore the close quarters of the Maltese soul (Mediterranean, Southern European, insular, small, peripheral) in my poetry, novels and short stories. Such remote and shaded territories are normally unsung, unacknowledged, perhaps disowned, only to be considered as mere aspects of outdated, irrelevant folk life. On the contrary, there is much to prove that such residues of the past, especially as may be rediscovered by a novelist, betray traits of archetypal modes of perception and behaviour still enduring in the modern inhabitant.
All this I have learned continuously in the process of constructing seven novels over a period of about thirty eight years. The period of actual writing is much shorter, but the thinking course is incessant and occupies the whole range of time. A novel takes much longer to be felt and thought, digested, than to be designed on paper and then written down. Then revision comes next.
The central point is the reality of someone living on a land surrounded by the ocean. The inhabitant is hard-working, determined, unrecognized, and has two constant points of reference: his God and his stretch of land. Both have never failed him/her. The land is tiny, and the sea is infinite; both contradict the inhabitant's sense of space and preciseness. An island is thus seen as an open secret, an exception to the rule of the much broader spaces, a peculiar reality worth exploring which is quite different, perhaps more intriguing and inspiring, from the one a visitor may get on the mainland, the so-called 'terra ferma'. In the specific case of Malta, things are perhaps much more engaging. Here a whole continent has its boundary. The periphery begets a special feeling. That is what can be sought within oneself and consequently through the depiction of characters and situations in a novel.
In Fil-Parlament ma Jikbrux Fjuri an average Maltese citizen, ironically named Karlu Manju, questions all, talks to himself and to everybody, and eventually seeks his origins in the old temples. He must have been born in the whereabouts of Mnajdra, Hagar Qim, Tarxien Temples, he who lives now. He goes on a walk all alone on that day, preceding elections, when Partit Nazzjonalista and Malta Labour Party organize their own final mass, massive meeting, a real show of strength, a tug of war, then followed by a day of reflection... or revision of choices already made. The novel seeks to discover whether Karlu Manju is actually a member of the group. There he goes, through utterly desolate streets as both mass meetings unfold, on his way toward the ancient temples. Is he a member of a third hypothetical party, or an undercurrent within the two mainstreams? The concept of unity (‘ghaqda’, ‘ahna maghqudin’) is fundamental to both major parties.
This is the essential list of elements constituting this unique exception, a diminutive island which is equally a city and a nation, a geographical dot and a formidable fortress of history, standing midway between two continents, belonging to the South of Europe and so close to North Africa, looking very far ahead from herself. A dynamic paradox? Perhaps that is what makes it worth narrating. I have tried to do so in my novels Fil-Parlament ma Jikbrux Fjuri (In Parliament no Flowers Grow, 1986), Gizimin li Qatt ma Jiftah (Jasmines Blossoms for all Time, 1998) It-Tfal Jigu bil-Vapuri (Children come by Ship, 2000), and Koranta and Other Short Stories from Malta (1994), all issued by Mireva Publications. I have tried to delve even further into this matter in the sequel I have written to It-Tfal Jigu bil-Vapuri, namely La Jibbnazza Nigi Lura (Let Fair Weather Bring me Home, 2006), as well as in the third novel in the series, still unpublished, Dik id-Dghajsa f’Nofs il-Port (That Boat in the Middle of the Harbour). Whilst narrating through fiction the ‘history’ of a country in my own way, I found myself coming to grips with what makes it worth discovering.
Gizimin li Qatt ma Jiftah is set in the late fifties, whereas It-Tfal Jigu bil-Vapuri and La Jibbnazza Nigi Lura reconstruct the early decades of the twentieth century and years later. Everything is meant to depict a sort of Malta which is no more, but which will presumably reside in the memory of various generations, enticing the younger ones to imagine and to dream of a future resembling the past. Perhaps globalisation is heading towards something of this sort. So the island of these novels may actually be somewhere within us, timeless. Is it possible that tourists choose to visit such a remote rock mainly to discover a feeling islanders inevitably live all time? The situation in Malta during the British period may be a fitting setting to evoke such a perception.
A tentative answer only begets questions, at least in literature. All these novels, I now come to understand, are inherently related to each other, based on my knowledge and experience of the British period in Malta, so fascinating, so intriguing, so colourful in the way it was lived by our forefathers and by us who can recall at least its final phase. It has been quite alluring to draw on dear memory and to enliven it with imagination.
A novel going beyond history
Archaeological evidence pertaining to Malta goes back to seven thousand years. Here are the oldest free standing stone buildings in the world. Its megalithic temples are a marvel, the earliest "churches" which have actually established the major feature of Maltese identity: the unity between religious faith and national culture, predating our ancient Christianity itself. Both belief in the Lord and love towards the land have uninterruptedly flourished together in partial isolation, indeed a splendid one which has not deprived any of what is essential and common to any other anywhere else.
It then had to be St. Paul, shipwrecked and welcomed, to give a different and much more distinctive shape to that pre-existing conviction that heaven and earth must meet somewhere in the human soul, if both are to be understood. They do meet in the Maltese spirit, and that is quite interesting for anybody who would like to look at Malta from the inside.
The inner aspect of the island resembles an unlocked mystery, whereas the outer one seems to exemplify just another segment of the complexity of the South. Regionality provides a complete definition of a country. Characters in It-Tfal Jigu bil-Vapuri and La Jibbnazza Nigi Lura are all, including victims, the product of a long, uninterrupted tradition, within which they recognize themselves. An unmarried mother, a rigidly traditionalist father and an utterly submissive mother, a saintly priest whose holiness knows no bounds, and a distant, though vigilant, crowd: perhaps these are the constituent elements of a conventional Southern European village, as typified in a local one. In such a corner, “it-tarf tad-dinja’’, all the predicaments of life are equally present: peace and disorder, love and hatred, life and death. Indeed, the village includes both the cradle and the cemetery, and is therefore self-sufficient.
Either directly or in disguise, from festivity to cuisine, that connection is always there. It has caused much joy to the Maltese, and it has sometimes heightened their bitter conflicts (Strickland, Mintoff, the Church-State relationship, post-modernism), but to date never to disagreeable degrees. Maltese conflicts somehow reach a point and then come to a halt so as to calm down and lead back to normality. The Church-State encounters have normally illustrated this tendency. Life on an island must in any case look like a family event, an unpredictable story in itself which must then have a happy ending. Celebrations of any sort are frequent, church village festas are a continuous occurrence, whereas politics is indeed an entertainingly controversial commitment to most inhabitants. When all these ingredients are put together, the product must be contextualised isolation.
In these novels I have sought to explain events and feelings through the sense of belonging, perhaps the one underlying all. The family, the parish, the district (conventionally known as either a city or a village or a suburb), the parish, etc. are aspects of how belonging is organised, structured, transformed into conviviality. In the light of a whole spate of unwritten rules, such characters constitute a sort of autonomous state long before political awareness reached that stage. Malta lacked leaders of its own for a long time simply because it failed to look for them in the average person. A question of roots, unacknowledged, even despised.
The distinctive identity of islanders
Islanders are a special breed. They tend to be inward looking and yet are always in search of the outer world. Tourism, Malta’s major industry, largely depends on the hospitality of the average people. The Maltese instinctively greet the foreigner and would go out of their way to make him/her feel at home during his/her stay. That verdict is unanimous and the Maltese trace their virtue back to Biblical times (The Acts of the Apostles, 28:1). In St. Luke’s account the key-word is perhaps ‘courtesy’, ‘hlewwa’. In actual fact, this may be due to what seems to make the Maltese consistent in their perception of themselves and the universe at large. The entrenched feeling of duality, namely a world view inevitably divisible into two is, in my opinion, essential to the whole interpretation. I and the other, ‘ta’ Malta’ and ‘ta’ barra’, namely here and whatever else remains).
I have repeatedly found myself facing this interpretation in the process of writing. A character in a novel, a general social background, an argument, all characters when put together as a group, the choice of the literary word as opposed to the more frequently used one: this sort of ‘twoness’ has largely determined my way of thinking and constructing written works.
The major political parties have for many decades shared power and support between themselves. Most Maltese belong from their early years to their party, since "belonging" is equivalent to "being". One is born within a group, and different choices may only be made within that decisive perspective. An islander cannot easily afford to be capriciously exposed to the whims of the other. And "the other" is the sea, that huge expanse larger than one’s own, different and challenging. It recalls the past, when sieges have occurred, and it ushers the future, when the wide world comes closer with its dictates. Globalisation is indeed the new form of centralisation, typical in different ways of any era, now determined by a non-political force: technology. In novels formally evoking the past (namely such periods as pre-war, post-war, post-independence), the present is indirectly implied, and comparisons and contrasts are immediately drawn.
An island resembling a boat
The Maltese are quite proud of their identity and therefore they will not find it very difficult to recognize the more important truth that their party only constitutes a half, and that the sense of incompleteness must be overcome. There they are: partisan in all respects, critical of the opposing party, and yet ready to acknowledge that they are survivors. Otherness, as represented by the opposite group, is necessary for the islander to be sure of his/her completeness.
Otherness is not what it is in a different context, namely where the sea is not so close and does not constitute a boundary. Hence the islander is tied to the sea as much as to the fields. I have tried to explore this dichotomy in the novels La Jibbnazza Nigi Lura and Dik id-Dghajsa f’Nofs il-Port where a large segment of the story occurs in the Harbour area, the fanciful place of decades ago. I must confess I have made great efforts to describe and to relive through words that environment where land and sea met and made the Maltese what they actually were and will always be: people related to the ocean. ‘Vapuri’ used to bring babies as much as they will always carry adults to other countries.
Much of the pride of the Maltese is derived from their profound attachment to the land and from the fact that they have an ancient language, rich, resourceful, recognized by so many foreign scholars as uniquely interesting for its ‘intercontinentality’.
Another stage in the process of modernised isolation is normalisation. That only involves the adoption of international criteria. The fact that the Maltese tend to be divisive on most issues is only indicative of their need to discover otherness. They are aware that the ocean is a ‘wall’, and the land a sort of open harbour. The fortress image which Malta had for so long has been assimilated as part of the people's mental apparatus. Our collective unconscious is that of a sailor, retired, remindful, nostalgic. At least this is what I had in mind when constructing La Jibbnazza Nigi Lura and Dik id-Dghajsa f’Nofs il-Port where the Grand Harbour area is thoroughly explored in its varied aspects. The protagonist of Fil-Parlament ma Jikbrux Fjuri, ironically named Karlu Manju, considers himself a full person, an example of unified duality, embodying the completeness and self-sufficiency of the emerging Maltese citizen.
But even this is partly elusive since things, ideas and people in Malta must be conceived in terms of to whom they belong. Such an illusion is necessary, a sign of the times, indicating an urge which is fast gaining ground among the younger generation, even though the traditional structure will still be there for a long time to come. The predominance of the genitive case in surnames and nicknames is, for instance, only an indication of a profounder characteristic of the islander: immobility. Mobility, however, is equally decisive. In these narratives a villager moves towards the harbour, there to start life afresh, eventually to understand that ‘ships’ also move outwards. This is a lesson which Furjana and Isla, two Maltese cities of historical importance both facing the sea amongst other places, impose on all. Children used to arrive by ship, as much as adults then used to leave their abode by ships. The cruel irony of islanders.
An island of this sort is quite unique: exceptionally small and remarkably rich in culture and traditions, an age-long colony which in the past few decades has managed to rebuilt itself psychologically and structurally. The process of self-reconstruction goes on, assuming a different nature as times change and as globalisation takes its cruel toll on whatever survives and flourishes through relative isolation. There came the need, throughout the twentieth century, for Malta to rediscover itself, to evaluate its heritage and to present it to the outer world. There lies its justification for being accepted in all normal terms within the European family of nations. The fact that such an island has built itself into a state is indicative of the great amount of self-confidence the inhabitants have always had in their homeland and in themselves.
A future residing in the past
The territory as well as the mental frame are closely related to each other in the average life of an islander, especially so when the island is tiny. Tourism has turned self-recognition into an economical necessity. As this industry assumes greater importance, it becomes more obvious that an island can only survive through going on being itself: its future somehow resides in its past.
Narrating all this and much more in poetry and in novels has proved to me quite an inspiring experience, a labour of love and much more, a sort of duty towards that unknown compartment of our psyche which still has to discuss itself in the light of both tradition and modernity. The two have to go on hand in hand, embodying continuity. Without its past, well preserved and venerated, Malta will not enjoy any future at all. The Maltese character must embody this compromise between what appear to be extremes. The Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, have all contributed towards the formation of modern man. The Knights of Malta have left an indelible mark in most sectors of culture, mainly in architecture. Napoleon took Malta within days but he said the right thing, or partly so, in the wrong way, and the uprising of the Maltese soon led to the British period. Perhaps a novel is the best medium for putting all this into meaningful shape.
The attainment of independence and the self-proclamation of Malta as a republic are the results of a whole process. So, finally, the small community was in a position to decide for itself. It had been a long and weary way, during which culture was enriched, and morale wandered through varying degrees.
The South is permanent
Polarisation has very deep roots. The overwhelming dualism may be looked at as a set of variations on a theme: the ruler and the ruled, the land (stability) and the sea (fluctuation), the enormous outer world and the minute inner territory, ancient tradition (static) and modernity (speedy, relentless), continuity and mobility, the regional and the continental aspect. The list may go on and on, but to my mind it will only prove the same point: islanders descend from fish.
Malta, the Southernmost part of the South (about 100 kilometres south of Sicily), an epitome of Mediterranean culture, a point of reference to the whole history of the region, the abode of a well-meaning people always ready to know itself better and to welcome visitors: this is perhaps the best way how to cut a very long story short. It has a happy ending. One hopes that Malta will eventually inspire Brussels to adopt a specific policy involving members states which constitute a category determined by size and regionality. But then that is another matter, and no novel can do it.
Oliver Friggieri was born in Floriana in 1947. Many of his works have been translated into various languages. He addressed about seventy international congresses in various countries, and his poetry was included in some of the major poetry recitals held throughout Europe. Author of numerous books of poetry, criticism, novels, short stories, about 30 of which have been published in various countries. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles published in many international academic journals. Winner of international prizes, including Premio Mediterraneo Internazionale (Palermo, 1988), Malta Government Literary Award (1988, 1996, 1997), Premio Faber 2004 (Campidoglio, Roma). Professor of Literature at the University of Malta. He writes in Maltese, English and Italian.