Simone Galea: Xi Drabi Mqar Persuna, Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2011, 64 pp.
The appearance of a new poet is always an event to celebrate, especially today in a world that seems to have lost touch with its poets and with the dimensions to life that reading poetry brings.
Simone Galea is a new poet in the galaxy of Maltese poets not exactly rich in women poets. This renders her first volume of works, Xi Drabi Mqar Persuna, a title which does not submit easily to translation into English, but very loosely indeed: At times at least a person, even the more welcome.
Galea is a feminist philosopher who brings to her poetry the self-consciousness of being a woman in our society in all its dimensions – social, political, and cultural – in the feminist sense:
“Qaluli/jekk tmur taħdem/bintek titla’ mgħawġa/jew b’ħofra fonda f’qalbha” (“They told me/if you work/your daughter will grow bent/or with a deep hole in her heart”).
As Immanuel Mifsud observes in his excellent commentary at the end of the book, which the reader is invited to read after the poems are read – contrary to the custom of writing a critical introduction which few tend to read – Galea’s feminism conditions her political approach to her womanhood while the feminist philosopher, writer, playwright and poet, Helene Cixous, influences her politics of writing.
One of the dangers of reading her poems without this bit of information is that one loses sight of the subtly political nature of her verses, in the broad meaning of the word as being about power. Indeed, much of the subtle allusion that underpins Galea’s poetry is lost without this reference point to Cixous. “Censor the body,” Cixous said in her most famous essay ‘The Laugh of Medusa’, “and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
“Write yourself” is an existentialist injunction that Galea obeys and that reverberates throughout this book.
The written self is her woman’s body, that is the text on which she inscribes herself, that is aware of herself, as woman, as a site of contestation (given the ways popular media presents us with the body of the woman as object; aesthetic, medical and so on), and therefore combat, just as the poems are, reciprocally, sites of everything she inscribes into them as a woman whose body ‘suffers’; love, maternity, illness, solitude, frustration, violation, combat and so on.
A third related element of Galea’s writing, which also owes itself to the poststucturalist philosophical influences (Foucault also, like Cixous, enjoins us to write ourselves, as did Nietzsche earlier with his emphasis on style) on her thinking, is its self-conscious literariness, its self-awareness of being ‘written’, of itself as a literary body, a collection of words, of metaphors that are constantly moving, of it being a part of the world of literature, of textual bodies, books, that is also very much her world on a daily basis – a world she shares, even in its intimacy, with her partner.
The poems are, technically, Galea’s self-construction through the production of metaphors, images, and spaces that are also metaphors:
“L-ispazji/jinfetħu u jingħalqu ta’ bejnietna/l-infinit ta’ bejn il-ktieb u l-qoxra tiegħu/l-arja ċċaqlaq sentenzi twal/li għad iridu jiġu” (“The spaces/between us open and close/the infinite spaces between book and cover/the air moves long sentences/that are yet to come”).
At the same time as it creates spaces pregnant with meaning the poem reaches out, seeks to build bridges with the other seeking to obliterate space:
“Insiġt triq twila li tasal sa ħdejk” (“I spun a long road that reaches to your side”), often frustrated “indur it-toroq tar-raħal tiegħek fil-vojt” (“I roam the streets of your village in vain”), or “Il-wesgħat imsaħħra tiegħek/ma nista’ nirfes fuqhom qatt” (“I can never walk/your magical spaces”).
Walls and bastions, enigmatic spaces that separate, protect, and define, are other recurring metaphors. Shores, seas and coastlines that await arrival, sometimes tragically; there are frequent references in the poems to the plight of other women (signs of feminist solidarity), particularly the other who are immigrant arrivals at our shores:
“Riflessi ta’ kuluri jgħajtu/ilbies ta’ nisa Afrikani/id-dgħajjes tagħhom mgħarqin fil-fond” (“Reflections of bright colours/the clothes of African women/their boats sunk in the deep”).
Intervals that serve the same purpose:
“Meta tasal s’għandi/ nħallik taqra/l-intervalli bojod tiegħi” (“When you reach me/I will let you read/my white intervals”).
The unsaid, the pregnant voids, the spaces within and between the lines of text and outside, the white spaces that are part of the whole of the poem, the text or body of the poem, real (in its structure in the page), and metaphorical – the poem being, in this case, a metaphor for the poet herself.
The spaces within which she ‘swims’, invariably gently, or ‘floats’ (other metaphors that recur in the poems), or ‘patters’ down like drops of falling rain. Lines cast out into the world, the poet’s offering of herself that fails to reach, easily goes astray or is misunderstood, or remains unnoticed.
In the last poems Galea engages with the lines of five male poets that, she says, inspired her as a reader to respond with poems of her own in a kind of imagined repartee or reply from the addressee of the poem: Achille Mizzi, Gorg Borg, Marjanu Vella, Ruzar Briffa and Victor Fenech.
These poems, particularly Oasi fid-Deżert tal-Ariżona, inspired by Mizzi’s Ariżona are some of the finest in the whole collection; mixtures of tender playfulness and irony, with not a little political innuendo mixed in – but this is the nature of most of the poems throughout this very worth reading book.