The component books of this Oliver Friggieri trilogy had come out singly – It-Tfal jigu bil-vapuri; La jibbnazza nigi lura and Dik id-dghajsa f’nofs il-port. They had also been translated into a TV series of some success.
Nevertheless, reading them again as one book leads a reader with a more panoramic view of the Friggieri opus.
Oliver Friggieri is more known as a poet and as a professor of Maltese literature, apart from other works by him. But in this trilogy he has poured out his love for Malta and its people and also his underlying concern that change and modern times will ruin the precious heritage of a small but unbowed people.
The trilogy is not anchored in time; nevertheless, one may hypothesise somewhere between the mid-19th century and the beginning of the 20th. There are no historical references except for slight references to the karozzin being the main means of transport and that people who live in the villages rarely travelled to Valletta and the Grand Harbour.
Society in the villages is centred around the fields and the church, with for males the humble wine bar where they gather at the end of the day.
That rural society is determinedly patriarchal, where a man’s word is the law and it is inflexible and immutable. The women are there and they do have a mind of their own but their feelings, desires and advice count for nothing: the man’s word is the law.
Life in these villages has always been the same – eking a hard living from the hard soil, and bound to an inflexible code of morals. Those who obey can live in the village, but those who do not want to, have to move out.
Was it like that, I ask myself. Our social historians, to my limited knowledge, have not yet delved into the patriarchal society of the mid-19th century.
Anyway, this set and settled society is about to be undermined and the agents of change are a young girl and her lover, who seek refuge for their effusions in the valley that bisects the village. Predictably, the girl gets pregnant; predictably too, the boy leaves her and equally predictably her father kicks her out of the house.
This is where Friggieri’s novel adds the X factor, the agent of change, who, in the trilogy is none other than a priest from the village. In despair at her predicament and having been kicked out of her home, the girl, turns to the priest, an almost forlorn hope. And, to her big surprise, he not only opens the door to her but also allows her to stay, chastely, the night.
For this he is savaged, the next day, by the father and, later, the bishop gets to hear about this and orders the priest out of Malta. The girl is locked up in an orphanage until the end of her pregnancy. Once the child is born, it is whisked away on the orders of the father and locked in an orphanage.
So far, so bad. The male might has triumphed, the sinner locked away and the male sinner runs away. But when all seems settled, the girl returns to her paternal home and, again through the intercession of her patron-priest finds employment as a maid in an old house in the next village, inhabited by an old lady and her son.
Predictably, the son falls in love with the girl and, after his mother dies, they get married. It is an unhappy marriage, maybe because of the man’s upbringing and a character he inherited from his father. The girl falls pregnant, then loses the baby.
Crazed with all that was happening to her, she wanders all around the island looking for the priest but cannot find him since he has been sent abroad as a punishment.
The girl’s father has meanwhile died, refusing till the very end to tell his daughter where her child is. Her mother, however, finds the child and brings him to his mother who has left the marital home and is living with her mother.
The following years are idyllic between mother and child. But the child is also the child of his father and he begins to unconsciously imitate him. Then he desires to get to know his father.
That is where the trilogy moves from the countryside to the harbour, a very different world. The countryside is built on certainties but in the harbour everything floats. People come from all over the world and leave to go to other parts of the world. There he finds his father and realises he is his father’s son.
The last scene of the book portrays the girl’s mother, now really old, looking back at the entire story and comforting herself that the story, with its various ramifications, seems about to end well. That would make a good story to tell her late husband when she dies and meets her late husband once again.
I have taken some time to describe the trilogy’s development (maybe with some slight mistakes) since the development of the story is essential for the work. More than the development of the story, the book is made up of speeches, long and long-winded. Friggieri’s Maltese is Maltese as it is spoken and written, with a calm atmosphere even at the most stressful of times.
My question(s) are otherwise. The trilogy is undated, there are no clear references to a particular time, except the contrast between the countryside and the harbour (in British times). People travel from one village to the other by means of a karozzin. So the story antedates motor cars.
The author wants to do otherwise than telling a story with all the details which would render the case too particular and his aim is thus more general. Here then is the paradox at the core of the trilogy: the story is about marriage, an essential element in rural Malta of all times, but then it includes youthful sex, premarital pregnancy, yet another relationship which includes the couple living together and a woman torn between her former lover and her present husband, ending up with neither and with a third person. One may say this is life and it cannot be categorised according to formulae.
Another beef I have regards the girl at the time she was married to the husband she later ended up separating from: marriage is an adventure in any case and a helpless, fatalistic, approach kills off any small hope.
There has been already some scientific analysis of this book, one at least from a structuralist background. I speak in general terms: the theme of the trilogy is about the passage from a rural environment to the harbour environment. The rural environment is based on certainties, on male domination but already it is creaking and shaking. Life, love, youngsters filled with adrenalin are too much to fit in a pre-ordained structure.
The real hero of the trilogy is the priest – a rural, untutored priest who was born in the village and intended to spend his life there. He is miles away from the polished priests at the Curia, around the bishop. But he is far greater than all of them in his uprightness, his courage and his readiness to take punishment for what he felt was the right thing to do. He is punished, removed, sent away but he remains steadfast.
The small minds, in the village as well as at the Curia, would have criticised him for taking in a girl and allowing her to sleep under his roof, but for the priest not helping the girl could have been the last straw for her.
This remains one of the best recent examples of Maltese fiction. It needs to be set in a widened context hopefully dealing with today’s Malta rather than the pre-industrial Malta, but it repays the time and effort spent in reading it.
Oliver Friggieri
Hekk Thabbat il-Qalb Maltija
Trilogy
Klabb Kotba Maltin
2011
733 pp