I was in court the other day, waiting for a client I had never seen or met before. The only thing I had to go by was his name which was actually a rather big clue. He had about four. And when you are not entirely sure which is the first, the last and which is the middle name, you are usually in a pretty strong position to make an accurate nationality guess.

A man with a slight limp, who looked like he was destined to meet someone, materialised.Perhaps in hindsight he was more Mario than Mohammed, but I took a chance and asked him whether he was the man with four names because I willed him to be my one o’clock.

He wasn’t having any of it and had I not made a very alacritous escape, he may well have beaten me to a pulp with his stick. He was incensed that I dared mistake him for someone with a string of names that included Gunna and Mohammed. You should have heard the abuse he flung my way. I chose to find it funny, because it was actually quite hilarious once you got past and ignored the racial implications.

I find the Maltese aversion to everything ‘Arab’ so incredibly rich. You see, I don’t believe the hatred stems from some strong moral sense of right and wrong. If you asked a man in the street what his quarrel with Libya is, I don’t think he’s likely to cite as reasons its refusal to sign the 1951 Geneva Convention and its dubious human rights track record.

The Maltese generally feel they are terribly superior to the Arabs. Perhaps not to all Arabs, and admittedly it may not be allMaltese, but a lot of us do. I find it quite amazing because we are so like the Arabs, in the good, the bad and the ugly. And perhaps the sooner we accept this, the better for us all.

In 1996, I flew to the US for a three-month student exchange. Within a week I had made a bunch of friends – most of them Middle Eastern. There were students from all over the world but I deliberately chose to hang out with the Arab contingent for a number of reasons, not least because it felt like I had come home.

It was like slipping into old pyjamas. The Germans traipsed around campus with Birkenstocks and socks. When it came to the Asians, I’d talk to them and get a sense that I was under the water. Things just seemed to echo and you were never sure any real communication was taking place. They’d smile and you’d smile back and nothing else seemed to happen.

And although I had lots of time for, not to mention fun with, the Americans, after a while, the culture divide does start to tell. Words like ‘awesome’ start to grate on you and because the Americans invented equality of the sexes, they are very scrupulous about making sure they don’t make you feel anything but equal.

I don’t like equality at all. I liked that the Arabs were generous, threw money around and were very old school about not letting women pay their way. For all the grief they get about not treating women right, I don’t think I have ever felt better looked after.

When most students turned up to class on bicycles, the Arabs would roll up in their Audis. Yes, there is something very Maltese about that too – that ostentation, where people feel the need to flash their Rolexes and take their Porsches, BMWs, and Maseratis out for a walk.

Of course, these were spoiled rich childrenwho could afford privileged educations. Apart from being generous, good-looking and serious fun to be with, they had an edge over everybody else.

You travel all that way to find yourself inside an elevator with someone who is engaged in a heated mobile conversation and you suddenly hear what sounds unmistakeably like ‘ibgħatli iktar flus’ (send me more money).

There is something quite intriguing and irresistible about meeting someone overseas who speaks your language – literally and metaphorically. They were passionate, hot blooded show-offs who gesticulated madly and shouted when they were angry. Give me a shouter any day over a Japanese lost in translation moment.

I sometimes wonder whether our disavowal of our unequivocal Arabic roots is perhaps a highly concentrated form of the way we often consciously and unconsciously dissociate ourselves from our own kind. We may not like to admit it but coming across the Maltese abroad, at an airport for instance, can and does fill one with a sense of dread.

I wonder whether the British and French feel the same way about coming across each other in the departure lounge. Weare noisier than our European counterparts.

We are made like our buildings. We literally echo – at the cinema, the theatre, at restaurants, airports, on buses and beaches. We don’t know how to stand in queues. We ignore signs. We buy in bulk and we also wave off and receive relatives and friends in bulk and en masse.

The Maltese saying about hygiene extending only to our doorstep is alive and very well. We are a nation of litterers with absolutely no regard for anything or anyone past ourfront doors.

We may feel superior to and more civilised than our Arabic frenemies because we don’t cut people’s hands off, we’re cool with public displays of affection and miniskirts but when the Arabs were busy inventing algebra and the zero, we were probablymaking bigilla.

We cling onto our Roman alphabet and Roman Catholicism for dear life because it sets us apart from them or so we like to think. Perhaps what we need is a holiday away from ourselves.

Far away from Malta andeach other, our objective lens is less distorted, affording us a much clearer perspective on what’s what.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com