Should we consider that a community – whether big or little – has its own personality, as if it were a real person? Clearly we refer to it in these terms for we talk about the character of a place and/or of the people who live there, in the same way we discuss the character of an individual.
Indeed we do the same when referring to whole nations and chatter bout how Germans are like so, the English otherwise and Americans completely different. Some say, perhaps correctly, that this kind of discussion is hardly about identity or character but about stereotypes.
On the other hand, travellers accept that the experience of visiting different places varies from one to the other. And it is not just a question of the language that is spoken or of the architectural sites on show making the difference. So what is it: atmosphere, character...?
I gave some thought to this recently while planning an essay on Gozo which I was invited to prepare. Does Gozo have a distinct identity to that of Malta? If yes, how are their two identities different? Both questions assume that an identity exists; but even if this is not the case, one would still need to inquire what is it that makes Gozo different from Malta.
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ST PETER AND ST PAUL
The festa of St Peter and St Paul (which will soon be with us) is one of the few “traditional” celebrations that have stayed in the popular calendar. It brings back memories of when our people were mainly villagers – living in a reality where what was hatched and reared, what was sown and ploughed up provided the main living resources.
Today’s society is totally at the other extreme from that model of an isolated life. But possibly, in how we live our lives now, there still exist remnants of what our ancestors felt in those days, not least in how they perceived foreigners.
I sometimes suspect that the disquiet felt by some people at the big increase in the number of foreigners living here, reflects more than just the simple apprehension about how too many inhabitants could end up piled into a small island. Could there not also be in this disquiet a carry over from the deep feelings that accumulated in villagers who lived for centuries in isolation?
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SUMMER
The fear is that this will be a terrible summer for Europe. Early heatwaves have been experienced. Forest fires started in dry brush have become an “everyday” occurrence from Greece to Portugal, from France to North Germany.
In addition, there have been difficulties with water suplies. Some rivers are drying up. Fields that were habitually flush with water now need to be irrigated with water brought up from aquifers. Supplies from there are dipping to worrying levels.
All these are problems we in Malta have been familiar with since long ago, and which we have “solved”, if that is the right word, by extracting potable water from the sea. Here two questions remain open: how can our way of doing things be implemented in the centre of France or Germany? – and whether that solution will anyway remain sustainable over the long term even for our own situation?