A Quixotic cultural hero?

A cousin of mine who was brought up in Canada and who has, for the past four years, been studying in Istanbul University, sent me an e-mail to ask who Malta's cultural hero is. By cultural hero he meant the equivalent of Don Quixote for Spain and, possibly, Cyrano de Bergerac, D'Artagnan or Scaramouche for France. The only character that came to mind where Malta is concerned is Gahan.

I am afraid that I personally don't know much about Gahan apart from his penchant for unhinging doors and was unable to explain why Gahan is such a popular hero; if he is at all. By the time we were taught Maltese at college we were way past the age that would have appreciated Gahan's ingenuous exploits and this area of my education is therefore a complete blank.

I then started thinking about the cultural heroes for ex-geographical expressions like Italy and Germany and came up with Orlando Furioso and Siegfried while for the UK, with its steadily flowing literary river of Amazonian proportions, one is simply faced by l'embarasse de la richesse! Would it be Falstaff or Tom Jones? Could it be Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple? King Arthur, Robin Hood or Ivanhoe? I wonder.

Is having a national cultural hero in this day and age when Europe has not been so united since the fall of the Roman Empire so important? I believe it is. Many fear that the EU's homogeneity in as far as the economy and standards are concerned will extend to culture and language. As far as I know the EU purposely promotes a "strength in diversity" campaign to offset that very fear. A cultural hero such as the quixotic don is very hard to find. So gigantic is the international success of Cervantes's novel that the English language actually coined a word to describe someone as incomprehensibly and eccentrically romantic as the man from La Mancha.

Would we, on an individual basis, be as willing to identify ourselves with Gahan as an Englishman would be with King Arthur? I, for one, would not. Many of my contemporaries, people with similar educational and cultural backgrounds, were brought up on a diet of Enid Blyton, who, despite the fact that she is now considered to be politically incorrect by many, still epitomises all that was quintessentially English at the time. Her flawless prose only lapsed into the vernacular when either Mr Goon or Mr Plod spoke; hence her political incorrectness today. Apart from that, her Secret Seven and Famous Five, not to mention Noddy, were all grist to our mill.

When later on we graduated to Ivanhoe, Merlin and Robin Hood, we took to it like a duck to water; and yet here we were, young boys, being educated in a college run on British public school lines, punished if we spoke Maltese, christened with names like Kenneth, Brian, Gerald, Thomas and Edgar and surnamed Zammit, Gulia, Abela, Borg, Agius etc. Pure colonialism at its best. It therefore stands to reason that, for Maltese like me, cultural and literary heroes in the true sense of the word are and will always be the Merlins, Robin Hoods and Ivanhoes of our childhood.

We have foolishly transmogrified our colonial past into something to be ashamed of and there are those who actually attempt to rewrite history to assuage the shame and guilt that being ruled by someone else has instilled in us. I do not feel any less Maltese simply because my cultural background has strong Anglo-Saxon foundations. Far from it. I am actually proud to have had a fine education, which enables me to lift my head high anywhere in the world, while, at the same time, I am part of a nation whose history is as unique, diverse, colourful and eventful as ours.

This eschewing of all things Anglo-Saxon was a reaction of the excessive strain of so-called nationalism of the 1980s that was mostly fomented by former Rhodes Scholar Dom Mintoff's chagrin at not having had his seat in Westminster after all. I wonder what the situation would have been like today had he had his way and Malta became an integral part of Great Britain like Scotland, Wales and Ireland. I suppose, to start with, we would all be speaking English excellently and exclusively without a qualm. That must remain one of the big ifs of history.

Instead, Malta pursued the road to independence. We have been a sovereign nation for almost half a century, which, in historical terms, is a mere twinkling of an eye. We simply cannot escape from our history. The majority of Maltese whose names glorify our history books did not speak Maltese but Italian though I did read somewhere that Grandmaster de Rohan spoke Maltese. Why and how true this is I really don't know and very much doubt. Our very nationhood was dependent on a steady influx of Europeans who for one reason or another decided to make Malta their home. A quick perusal of our telephone directory will produce surnames that originate from the wilds of Estremadura to the far-flung steppes of Siberia, the sand dunes of Morocco to the downs of Sussex and, yet, today, we all happily call ourselves Maltese; which poses the question whether it is a common language that makes us so or having lived here for so many generations.

The nigger in the woodpile has always been this politicised competition between Maltese and English; this puerile struggle for supremacy that has sadly resulted in producing no Maltese international literary figures. It is physically impossible for a Maltese novel or anthology of poems to become an international bestseller unless it is translated while there seems to be a total dearth of novelists writing in the English language. On the obverse side, despite the fact that a number of major works of literature have been translated into Maltese it would take light-years to get up to date. When translations of Harold Pinter's 1960 play The Caretaker is merely travestied into Il-Kertejker I give up completely. What is the point of it anyway when most people who read do so in English? Life is too short to peel mushrooms.

With Smart City on our doorstep it is of paramount importance that proper fluency in the world's premier international language is to be achieved and maintained. To start with, all use of Minglish is to be actively discouraged. The complete mishmash of both languages, a patois that is used and abused but understood by at least 98 per cent of us cannot be allowed to survive. It is pure self-indulgence. One must speak both perfect Maltese and perfect English just as our forefathers spoke perfect Italian, perfect Maltese and perfect English without ever mixing them up. This was only possible because in those days schools were very strict indeed about which language was spoken and when. Maltese in public schools then was non-existent.

We have had two national languages living alongside each other for the past half century and they must both be given the equal and individual importance they deserve. Perfect Maltese to preserve our national identity and perfect English, the world's lingua franca, to ensure that Malta will always be an integral part of the evolving global village that the world has become.

kzt@onvol.net