Unfamiliarity breeds contempt

Iseem to be in scant company, but I do not believe that immigrants in detention burn mattresses because they are 'savages from the jungle'. I rather think that, rightly or not, they feel they have a point to make. As long as the State persists in keeping them invisible and silent, they can be expected to indulge in a spot of lateral thinking.

I also feel the mayhem at Safi is justified. When words are not possible, people will legitimately resort to fireworks. Jan Palach did, and no one would call him a self-loathing savage. I probably wouldn't have the guts to burn myself, but I know what I would if I were staring at a long period of imposed silence with a box of matches and a mattress at my disposal.

What is more, it works, especially coupled with the mass arrivals we have been seeing lately. The two-act spectacle of crowded boats and violence at the detention centres seems to have catapulted immigration to a higher level of the national public agenda, and this I think is for the better. In the sense that it may well serve to shift the issue to a new and more productive conceptual and discursive ballpark.

There are two things I would particularly like to see the last of. First, the apparent inconsistencies. For example, the official rhetoric has it that, say, Sudanese immigrants cannot be repatriated because they would be tortured, imprisoned, and so on - because Sudan, in other words, is no place for returned migrants. Until we woke up one fine day to read about five Sudanese migrants who chose, encouraged by the prospect of pocketing a wad of cash, voluntarily to return home.

Is Sudan safe or not? I am ill-qualified to answer this question, which is why my point is about apparent rather than actual logic, and about the fact that the apparent inconsistency breeds contempt - for the many Sudanese who have chosen to stay on.

The second issue is more endemically Maltese, and concerns the sermonising we are constantly bombarded with. The island is levitating with pundits telling us that 'St Paul was also an immigrant', that 'Jesus was probably quite dark-complexioned', that 'Joseph and Mary were refugees', and, most originally, that immigrants are 'humans like us'.

I am not trying to poke fun at religion here. My point is that we do not have to justify solidarity and civil rights by referring to some pseudo-religious narrative.

In the unlikely event of coming across a burning bush, the reasonable thing to do is to walk away holding one's nose, not move closer cupping one's ear. Quite apart from the facts that St Paul was not an immigrant, that there are fair people in the Middle East, and that Joseph and Mary were not refugees, the effect of this sermonising is the stifling of mature and solid discussion.

And, by the way, saying that Africans are humans is as racist as declaring that women have brains is sexist.

Something else that irks me no end is the lack of accurate terminology. 'Refugees', 'illegal', 'irregular', 'klandestini' - these and other terms are bandied about erratically, depending on whether or not one has slept well and without a care for the implications that each of them carries.

I was having a coffee in a bar the other day when a chap walked in and ordered a 'toast klandestin'. Unfunny for a number of reasons, not least that his idiocy with words was not too different from that at large in the public sphere.

How does one go about changing all of this? Politics seems to me to be a good start, which is why I'm delighted to see that the parties that really matter (PN, PL, and AD) seem to have decided that the time has come for some serious discussion, including in Parliament.

True, there will always be individuals like Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando who, with his reported talk of 'we're full up', sounds like he's confusing asylum with restaurants and buses.

By and large, however, I trust our politicians will at the very least clarify and apply the right terminology, avoid silly sanctimonious prattle, and look at the issue rationally in the light of civil rights.

The last point is particularly important. As it is, immigrants are condemned to sit and suffer in silence, take a match to the bedroom, or couch their situation in terms of disaster narratives which they are then accused of making up anyway. There is a desperate need for us to engage with them politically, irrespective of whether or not their wives were raped and their children murdered back in Africa, or the validity of St Paul's passport.

I am not necessarily arguing against the principle of detention. What I'm saying is that it is unacceptable to ostracise hundreds of people from the public sphere by denying them a voice and making them invisible to the media. In part because this makes for abuse, ignorance, and contempt (and the last two at least are increasingly palpable in Malta), and also because our handling of the situation can only benefit from treating immigrants as political actors in their own right - rather than a faceless crowd to be pitied or pilloried at will.

As the online commentators like to say, charity and pity have their limits. Civil rights, however, do not.

mafalzon@hotmail.com