Providing for the diaspora

The Gonzi administration has been winning some Brownie points this week in the wake of the Prime Minister's exhortations in favour of Maltese authors and publishers on at least three separate occasions in recent months. At long last, a considered provision to help sustain Greater Malta - by deeds not words - has begun to emerge. For decades, during countless visits abroad, Maltese leaders from all parties had counted on nostalgic emotional and honeyed rhetoric, thinking that was enough to satisfy the migrant hunger for solace, sustenance and support. It wasn't.

This occasion was a decorous one. As the third World Convention of Maltese Living Abroad kicked off last Sunday at the Borsa, in Valletta, Foreign Minister Tonio Borg, whose ministry has been organising and hosting it, announced at least one major salutary measure. If properly set up with due attention paid to real credentials and live contacts in this challenging domain, the Borg initiative, which has the blessing of Cabinet, could indeed be a great help in practice to meet long-standing unfulfilled aspirations and needs among Maltese communities around the world.

It consists of the setting up of a Maltese national cultural institute or agency, such as so many other countries, admittedly usually much larger countries, including EU member states, already possess. The Leader of the Opposition, Joseph Muscat, wholeheartedly supports it. This is a break that augurs well for this country's future locally as well as beyond its shores in an increasingly inter-connected and inter-dependent world where ethnicity, culture and networking matter more than many might realise.

For its size, Malta, an archipelago of sea-farers and survivors, has had arguably the largest per capita migration anywhere. In my keynote speech on the convention's opening day I referred to a recently-discovered manuscript in Italian dated 1657 listing several young Maltese, from 14 years upwards, on their way to the Terra Nova. To think that, in researching about 18th century Maltese settlement while a Fulbright Scholar in New Orleans, I had assumed that I was dealing with pioneers of the Deep South.

These Terra Nova Farrugias, Tonnas, Gafas, Ciantars, Gambins, Grechs, have been followed if not also preceded by so many thousands of others throughout the Mediterranean and the English-speaking worlds and, indeed, the Spanish-speaking and the French-speaking worlds, a whole progeny of settlers who strove to come to terms with new demands in initially alien environments across seas and continents. Several such specimens have been participants of the three world migrant conventions so far held here, in 1969, 2000 and now: the published 2000 proceedings bear eloquent testimony to that.

A national cultural institute acting as a focal point and as an ongoing nexus with this still or eventual Malta-conscious diaspora could also utilise embassies and consulates, as well as clubs and parishes, in its dissemination and appreciation of Maltese language, culture and identity in all directions keeping in mind inter-generational memories and aptitudes.

On the second day of the convention we had another dose of support from the Minister of Education, Dolores Cristina, as well as an encounter with Parliamentary Secretary Mario de Marco, now responsible for culture.

The ministry's proposed nine-point programme comprises five annual University scholarships for would-be Maltese language teachers overseas and related provisions for the furtherance of such teaching in countries where there is a demand for it in multi-lingual, multi-cultural contexts or otherwise.

It also mentions such initiatives as audio-visual productions, distance learning and the promotion of high-standard books in Maltese for learning or leisure purposes, including transport costs for the sending of Maltese books from Maltese publishers abroad or vice-versa. Some attention to Malta's migrant history - a whole chapter - is, of course, already being given in a secondary school Maltese history textbook in Maltese (KKM, 2004) as well as at the University at both under-graduate and post-graduate levels; but more recognition and support for such already established innovative directions would be in order.

All told, this third convention promises to be a more historic one than its predecessors if such measures are implemented with due diligence and adequate resource funding. This Valletta-based national cultural institute in particular would require a suitable operational budget, a small full-time qualified staff and a credibly empathising intellectual management in order satisfactorily to deliver the goods in fulfillment of a truly worthy vision and commitment. It probably should be an autonomous entity propped up by the government bodies responsible for foreign affairs, education and culture, possibly in liaison with the embassies of the various "host" countries including a few European ones.

Although the emphasis understandably seems to be on language retention, as one participant pointed out "there is no culture without language and no nation without either". Obviously, language is not solely and simply a matter of grammar or syntax in vacuo. One of the most endearing participants has been an 85-year-old from Toulouse whose sense of humour expressed in a pre-war French-accented Nadur Maltese brought the house down. But the diversity beggars belief. One participant, a graduate in classical languages, is as fluent in Maltese as she is in Welsh - and in French; she also had a stint in Australia although she has been living for many years in Wales, a hidden "hiding place" region whose ports were so familiar to thousands of Maltese in times gone by.

The wealth of experience and talent to draw upon and learn from is awesome; nor is it just of the financial kind, although there is that too. Although I have visited Maltese clubs and communities in all the main countries of settlement or re-settlement and spent years living and working in three of them - Britain, Egypt and Australia - I keep discovering it.

For instance, a contact during this convention with a young recent émigré to Australia led me to works by his aunt, a Suor Emma Camilleri, of whom and of which I had been unaware - two volumes of her experiences in Kenya (Jiemi fil-Kenja), another two volumes on African folk tales (Ħrejjef Afrikani), another book on her experiences in India (Jiemi fl-India). Her Kwiekeb Afrikani (CFCJ, Malta, 1992) carries a comment by Fr Alphonse Camilleri, whom I had interviewed recently about his 30 odd years in Turkey, which had Maltese communities in Constantinople (Istanbul) and Smryna (Izmir) especially but not only until 1922.

As the written works by, among others, the reverend Mizzi brothers, Fortunato and Angelico, have shown, the missions too have been - and are - very much a part of the Maltese diaspora. When I was in Zimbabwe for UNHCR in 1980 my Amhara chief of mission had proudly revealed to me at the then casino in Bulawayo that he had been raised by Maltese sisters in Addis.

After a talk about Maltese settlement in the Ionian Islands given on the island of Kythera, years later, the chairman of my session, a dignified high-placed Orthodox prelate in full garb, took me aside and revealed a secret: his great-grand parents hailed from Ħamrun.

What an enriching dissipated world to be tapped and discovered for the benefit of all. Never say die.

A former lecturer in ethnic studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Prof. Frendo coordinates the unit on Maltese emigration and migrant settlement in the Institute of Maltese Studies at the University of Malta.