Literary and refugee voices

The next in the Works in Progress Seminar series at the University of Malta, now in its eighth year, will be held on Wednesday at 6 p.m. in Room 122, Mediterranean Institute, behind HSBC on campus.

This ninth session, "Articulating the Klandestini experience: Literary and Refugee Voices," will be chaired by Dr Adrian Grima and will take the form of a round table with two short presentations by Popol Mubetsambila and Norbert Bugeja followed by a discussion with all those present.

This session is inspired both by the theme of "Understanding Cultural Diversity" of this year's series of seminars and by the "Klandestini international creative writing project for Emerging Mediterranean Writers" run by Inizjamed and the British Council.

Popol Mubetsambila is president of the Congolese community in Malta. He left the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2001 when war broke out and has been in Malta for almost two years. Before he left Congo he studied medicine at the University of Kinshasa. Mr Mubetsambila is now an interpreter with the UNHCR in Malta. At the seminar he will be sharing his experience and that of many other refugees in Malta.

Mr Bugeja is currently reading for an MA in English Literature at the University of Malta, his academic interests lie in contemporary critical theory and postcolonial fiction. He is one of the writers participating in the multilateral creative writing project Klandestini.

For the up and coming Maltese, Italian, Greek and Cypriot writers taking part in the Klandestini project, he writes, "the notion of klandestini beckons from out there, leaving, above all, much to be narrated. What does it mean to say that the 'emergent' writer today is, after his or her own way, 'clandestine'?

"Should today's aspiring writer be taking up such thorny issues as immigration, clandestinity and asylum seeking as a driving concern of their writing? Or should a 'non-established' writer assert their right of asylum precisely by taking stock of their very bereavement, vis-à-vis a dumped homeland, in the face of a literary 'tradition' that cannot, if it ever could, provide them with a shelter any longer?

"How does it feel to live in the lingering shade of the Romantics with the roving metaphor of homelessness as a guiding star? Should the klandestini writers belong anywhere, after all, or is it their itinerant, ironic, even reckless verve that can mark, hands-on, the current preoccupations of a literature in Maltese? And, after all, why not a Maltese literature in English?"

Entrance to these seminars is free and everyone is welcome to attend and take active part in the discussion. The full programme of the 2004 Work in Progress Seminar Series can be found at www.um. edu.mt/pressreleases/2004/wipss.html