Discovering contemporary Malta through its past

The recently published novels – It-Tfal Jiġu bil-Vapuri, La Jibbnazza Niġi Lura and Dik id-Dgħajsa f’Nofs il-Port – form a trilogy in which Oliver Friggieri tries to definecontemporary Malta through a reconstruction of the past. These novels, narrating one single story, delve into the problems of marriage in Malta, the social and political roleof the Catholic Church and the conflict between parents and their children. The author outlines his political and moral aims in composing these novels.

The fact that Malta is the smallest member of the European Union is an indication of the persistency with which the Maltese have traditionally stuck to the conviction that their nationhood had to be finally rewarded by all. That is Malta, the nation and the state, made up of three solid components: faith, language and stone. A will to be.

Through novels I have sought to explore the close quarters of the Maltese spirit (Mediterranean, southern European, insular, small, peripheral).

Old traditions are normally unsung, unacknowledged, perhaps disowned, only to be considered as mere aspects of outdated, irrelevant folk life. On the contrary, there is much to prove that such residues, especially as may be rediscovered through fiction, betray traits of archetypal modes of perception and behaviour still surviving in the modern inhabitant.

The central point is the reality of someone living on a land surrounded by the ocean. The inhabitants are hard-working, determined, and have two constant points of reference: their God and their stretch of land.

Both have never failed them. The land is tiny, and the sea infinite; both contradict the inhabitants’ sense of space. An island is thus seen as an open secret, an exception to the rule of the much broader territories.

Archaelogical evidence pertaining to Malta goes back 7,000 years. Here are the oldest free standing stone buildings in the world. Its megalithic temples are a marvel, the earliest ‘churches’ which have established the main feature of Maltese identity: the unity between religious faith and national culture, predating the uninterrupted Christian tradition itself. Both belief in the Lord and love towards the land have flourished together.

It then had to be St Paul, shipwrecked and venerated, to give a much more distinctive shape to the pre-existing conviction that heaven and earth must meet somewhere in the human soul, if both are to be understood and make sense. They do meet in the Maltese spirit.

The inner nature of the island resembles an unlocked mystery, whereas the outer one exemplifies just another segment of the complexity of the south. Regionality provides a complete definition of a country.

The characters in It-Tfal Jiġu bil-Vapuri, La Jibbnazza Niġi Lura and Dik id-Dgħajsa f’Nofs il-Port are all, including the victims, the product of a long, unbroken tradition, within which they recognise themselves.

An unmarried mother, a rigidly traditionalist father and an utterly submissive mother, a saintly priest whose holiness knows no bounds, and a detached, though vigilant, crowd: these are here considered as the constituent elements of a conventional southern European ‘village’.

In such a corner all the predicaments of life are equally present: peace and disorder, love and hatred, life and death. The ‘village’ includes both the cradle and the tomb. It is self-sufficient.

Either directly or indirectly, from religious festivity to cuisine, the body-soul connection is always there

It has caused much joy to the Maltese, and has sometimes heightened their bitter conflicts (Gerald Strickland, Dom Mintoff, the Church-state relationship, post-Modernism), but to date rarely to disagreeable degrees.

Maltese clashes somehow reach a point and then come to a halt so as to calm down and lead back to normality.

The Church-state encounters have amply illustrated this tendency.

These novels seek to explain experience as the sense of belonging. The family, the parish, the district, and so forth, are aspects of how belonging is transformed into conviviality. In adhering to a whole spate of unwritten rules, such characters constitute a sort of autonomous state established long before political awareness formally reached that stage.

Malta lacked leaders of its own for a long time simply because it failed to look for them within itself. A question of roots, unacknowledged, even despised – a major Maltese paradox which even in our post-literary era may be well explored through a novel.

Tourism turned self-recognition into an economic necessity.

As this industry assumes greater importance, it becomes more obvious that an island can only survive through going on being itself: its future somehow resides in its past.

Narrating all this in novels has proved quite an inspiring task, a sort of duty towards that unknown compartment of our psyche which has to be evaluated in the light of both tradition and modernity.

The two have to go hand in hand, embodying continuity. The Maltese character has to embody this compromise between what appear to be extremes.

The Phoenicians, the Cartha­ginians, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, have all contributed towards the formation of modern man.

The Knights have left an indelible mark on most sectors of culture in Malta.

Napoleon took Malta in a matter of days but said the right thing, or partly so, in the wrong way, and the uprising of the Maltese against the French soon led to the British period.

Perhaps a novel is the best medium for putting all this into meaningful shape.

A historical novel can define the present better than the direct observation of the present itself.

Polarisation has far-reaching roots. The overwhelming dualism may be looked at as a set of variations on a theme: the ruler and the ruled, the land (stability) and the sea (fluctuation), the enormous outer world and the minute inner territory, ancient tradition (static) and modernity (speedy, relentless), continuity and mobility, the regional and the continental aspect. Islanders can be best understood through an appraisal of history.

Malta, the southernmost part of the south (about 100 kilometres south of Sicily), an epitome of Mediterranean culture, a point of reference to the whole history of the region, the abode of a well-meaning people always ready to know itself better and to welcome visitors: it resembles a novel with a happy ending.

One hopes Malta will eventually inspire Brussels to adopt a specific policy involving member states which constitute a category determined by size and regionality.