I always think that when you dig yourself into a hole, it’s always better to step away from the shovel instead of digging yourself in deeper. So when you land yourself into an embarrassing or untenable position, it’s advisable to beat a quiet retreat instead of making the situation worse.

Unfortunately, the Attorney General doesn’t seem to be of the same mind, and has persevered in going further down the road to ridicule by appealing against the judgment where Alex Vella Gera was cleared of writing obscene material. The appeal application is a lengthy 32-pager, and it is – in equal parts – nonsensical, worrying, and inadvertently amusing.

The great legal battle for which the Attorney General is girding his loins was brought about because Vella Gera’s short story Li Tkisser Sewwi was published in Ir-Realtà – a newspaper which is distributed for free on the University campus and outside Junior College.

The University rector filed a police report and they proceeded with the alacrity which we wish they would show on less trivial matters. One prosecution and several expert witnesses later, and both writer of the piece and editor of the paper in which it appeared were acquitted of obscenity charges. We thought common sense had prevailed. Then came the appeal.

One of the Attorney General’s major beefs is that there was nothing to indicate that Li Tkisser Sewwi was a fictional piece and that it was not an autobiographical account of the author’s experiences.

I can’t get over the asininity of such a statement. Books do not come with the words ‘Fiction’ or ‘Non-Fiction’ branded across their covers. It is left up to the reader to figure out whether the work they’re reading is a description of real-life events, one which is the fruit of the author’s imagination, or a combination of the two.

In either case, it has little bearing on whether the content can be obscene or not. The Attorney General’s appeal seems to imply that an explicit account of Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga bunga nights would be acceptable – as long as we were given very clear warning that it was a factual account of the Italian Prime Minister’s night-time proclivities. However, a fictional account about a 70-something politician’s Viagra-fuelled seedy nights with gold-digging teenage girls would probably fall foul of the law, and have the University rector hotfooting it to the nearest police station with another police report.

The appeal document goes on to state that the writer and editor did nothing to disassociate themselves from the main character described in the short story. They did not condemn the actions of the main character or do anything that shows they disapproved of him. Rather, Vella Gera’s depiction of him is so true-to-life that perverse sexual activity is portrayed as the norm and so impressionable young readers may run away with the idea that everybody is humping away in much the same manner as the misogynist protagonist of Li Tkisser Sewwi.

Again, this reveals a complete misunderstanding as to the role of authors. Writers are not obliged to pass moral judgment on the characters they write about. It is absurd to expect Vella Gera to preface his story by telling us that he is going to write about a man who does not respect women very much and to tell us that he does not approve of this sort of behaviour. It is up to the reader to make out whether the fictitious character’s moral code is acceptable.

Even if it isn’t, and he is a totally despicable person, it is still irrelevant to the charges of obscenity. The character so aptly described by Vella Gera may be disgusting and off-putting – but as recent events have shown us he is representative of a cohort of men who regard women with contempt, and who can only engage with them on a physical level.

Describing such a character can never be a crime, simply because it highlights his distasteful behaviour. It is a reflection of the grim reality which surrounds us. Following the censorship of his books, Thomas Hardy wrote an essay about the censorship of fiction.

He said that “presenting morally imperfect characters who work out their destinies in a natural manner might result in a novel that contains cruelty, envy or other evils, but that is merely reality”, and that any “honest portrayal must be largely concerned with, for one thing, the relations of the sexes”.

Now Vella Gera’s piece may not be comfortable or pleasing reading. It may not present the heavy-handed moralising expected by his detractors.

But at least it is a raw and honest piece of writing. If it manages to jolt at least one student out of their comfort zone and to think about the world outside the confines of Tal-Qroqq, it would have achieved a great deal.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt