The outsider within

Erin Serracino-Inglott (1904-1983), author of Il-Miklem Malti, died 25 years ago tomorrow. Thinking of my grandfather, I recently re-read his second play, Il-Barrani (The Outsider). What started as an exercise in pietas shook my understanding of the meaning of the Pauline year for Malta.

In place of the popular understanding of what Malta's conversion to Christianity must have involved - wet clothes for St Paul, no stress for the Maltese, not even while queuing at the "Paul-y-clinic" - Serracino-Inglott offers a powerful literary myth: Real conversion was not possible without a profound crisis that paralleled that of Golgotha.

St Paul has already left when the play begins. But a man washed ashore with him has remained behind. This man with no name has cured the sick of the area and made the land fruitful after many years of drought.

The Maltese characters, under the village headman Nadir, have still not converted. They worship at Mnajdra. But they are attracted by Christianity's magical power. And the headman's daughter, Safja, is attracted by the stranger.

Nadir offers him his daughter in marriage. He replies that he must first tell his story.

It horrifies the audience. The stranger was the son of a king ruling one of the city-states in the Hellenistic world. When a grave crisis threatening annihilation, the city decided to offer a human sacrifice, the king's niece, to avert its fate. As the king raised his knife to slaughter the scapegoat, his son leapt forward and in the struggle killed his own father.

On the run, he finishes up on the same ship as Paul. He recognises in Paul's preaching a strange but intimate voice that he calls the Newsgiver, il-ħabar, which, paradoxically, he hears within but that calls him out of himself. He converts, or as he says, half-converts, during the storm that threw the ship onto Malta.

On hearing the story, the Maltese demand justice on behalf of the dead father. The law calls for an execution. Nadir gives a suspended sentence: the stranger has until dawn to get away; if found later, he will be dealt death by stoning.

The night resembles that of Gethsamane. The stranger is afraid but cannot bear to run away again. The strange outsider's voice within, il-ħabar is silent. The stranger panics when he is joined by Safja, who wants to run away with him. The exchange suggests that the Newsgiver is speaking through their dialogue.

The sun rises. The lovers are caught. The stranger tries to take all the blame but Safja defies the crowd and declares her love and her new religion. They are stoned to death.

As they die, in the scorching sun, their weakness exerts a new power, while the crowd, falling onto its knees, appears to die unto itself.

The simplicity of the story is deceptive. For its artistic relevance to be apparent it would need to be performed.

First, it is a matter of language. More an oratorio than a play, Serracino-Inglott chose to imagine what Maltese spoken in the first century might have sounded like - and fashioned a poetic language to suit it in unrhymed hendecasyllables.

There are passages reminiscent of Milton's Paradise Lost: the procession of priests of various gods and men of state, filing up to participate in the human sacrifice, is reminiscent of Milton's description of the demons filing up before Lucifer after the Fall. One critic famously heard in Milton the sound of Nazi jackboots; I do not exclude that my grandfather, writing the play in an air-raid shelter in 1942, may have been hearing the same.

But certainly he was familiar with Chesterton's description of the events leading to Golgotha: they showed, Chesterton wrote, all that was best in the world - the Roman empire - at its worst. And this is the horror of all the civilised finery of the Grecian world, assembled to perform a judicial murder, while its compassionate king feels he can do no other.

Second, there is dramatic perspective. Is il-barrani an "outsider" or a "foreigner"? Two thousand years of history have overturned our usage of "outsider". Colonialism made it a derogatory word, with undertones of envy. Twentieth-century alienation made it denote heroic internal exile - famously, in the works of Albert Camus, and, in Maltese literature, in Frans Sammut's Samuraj and Oliver Friggieri's L-Istramb.

But Erin Serracino-Inglott's outsider is none of these. A barrani is not a wild man or a barbarian; he is to be treated with dignity and hospitality. It is an outsider understood in terms of the Semitic religions, rather than of the Greek. But then events within the play challenge the characters' understanding of what is "in" and "out".

The play does not just tease our contemporary understanding of outsider. On its own terms, we see how true inner transformation takes place only when we are stretched beyond ourselves.

Finally, the truly striking insight. For Malta to become truly Christian, its world must shake.

And perhaps it must shake every generation. Reading the play over 60 years after it was written, I see in it a true literary myth. As my world faces a new encounter between East and West, as new questions face the relationship between religion and state, the play suggests the universality of the questions, while pointing out that the answers cannot be discovered unless we are ready to kill off our certainties.

ranierfsadni@europe.com