Green and pleasant land

This week was the 50th anniversary of the death of our national poet. Much as I respect Dun Karm’s work – there really is a generous helping of literary sophistication and depth of feeling among the mind-bending boredom of scores of odes to this and that saint and such and such centenary – I would like to suggest that we should consider having more than one national poet. Five would be a good start.

We should consider having more than one national poet.Five would be a good start- Mark-Anthony Falzon

It’s worth comparing Dun Karm to his near-contemporary, Manwel Dimech. Dimech chose (well, so to say) to live his life outside the gilded confines of institutions.

There is ample evidence that he courted respectability: He called himself ‘Prof.’ for example, and was only too happy to marry up and move to Sliema. But his genteel cravings seldom got in the way of his reforming zeal.

He was a real visionary who argued for what we would today call gender equality. At a time when the British had muscle enough to hold spectacular durbars in India to the music of Wagner and the adulation of crowds of Indian princes, Dimech was busy suggesting that the British presence in Malta was perhapsnot entirely a mission of imperial benevolence.

As almost always happens when guts match foresight (Dimech thought different when ‘apple’ was a fruit that made nice pies), he got into trouble and ended up in a hole far away from home, quite where exactly nobody knows.

The juicy bit is how he got out of it. Following early and largely unsuccessful efforts by Mamo and others to keep his legacy alive, Dimech was largely forgotten. The ship was finally raised by Henry Frendo in the late 1960s. No wreck this one, the feat got the young historian into a fine spot of trouble with the Church.

What happened next is well known. The Labour Party moved quickly to appropriate Dimech. Roads and bridges were named after him, Union Press published a number of books on his work, and in 1976 he finally found himself cast right in front of Castille.

The point is that Dimech lived, died, and has lived on as a political animal. To some extent ironically – because he was in fact a nationalist of sorts – the Nationalist Partyhas never really bought hisrehabilitation.

Dimech is roughly the flesh-and-bronze equivalent of Freedom Day. That is, officially ‘respected’ by both camps but liked by only one of them.

Not so Dun Karm. As far as I can tell, the name evokes little political passions, least of all partisan ones. Dun Karm has been elevated to a sort of benign and clinical sainthood. Like the canary he kept at home and wrote a haunting poem to, his has been a rather contained existence.

The argument to be made concerns literature and politics. Approaching the topic as anything but an expert, it seems to me that Maltese poets and writers generally have tended to steer their art well clear of politics.

They’re happy writing about Gaza and Darfur, less so Pietà. Rather odd in an island where people spend a good chunk of their daily waking lives breathing and talking politics.

Dun Karm’s transcendence was remarkable even by these standards. His silence may in fact have been of the deafening type. In 1993, Mario Azzopardi published a little piece of iconoclasm which went by the cheeky name of Dun Karm: Between Vatican, Duce and Crown.

Azzopardi’s drift is that we could do worse than spare a thought for what Dun Karm did not say. His poems are bursting with the sounds and smells of an idealised Maltese countryside and rustic images of simple country folk living a serene timelessness. Urban themes are strangely absent, and this at a time of considerable working-class ferment in the harbour area in particular.

It may be that, cooped up in a gloomy house in Valletta, the gentle priest (and I’m not being sarcastic) found himself missing the Żebbuġ countryside of his childhood. Azzopardi, however, suggests something rather more sinister.

Dun Karm may in fact have been playing a clever fence-sitting game. The memory of Dimech’s exile was probably still fresh in people’s minds. Or perhaps unlike Dimech, Dun Karm proved susceptible to the seductions of the establishment. (He was made Assistant Librarian and his portrait painted by Caruana Dingli among other appointments and honours.)

In any case, as Azzopardi puts it, “for the colonial government, sentiments of provinciality coupled with the bucolic disposition of a well-known poet and member of the clergy who sang praises in the vernacular to an idealised nation, made for a trouble-free rule”.

In other words, Dun Karm’s non-alignment served the British well. It also helped keep him out of harm’s way among his closer kin. Somehow, largely by not-saying, he managed to be the ultimate paradox – the apolitical nationalist.

I’m not too surprised that we seem to overlook the contradiction. Our model of ‘true’ nationalism is of something that’s perfectly balanced, neither here nor there, enjoyed equally by all Maltese irrespective of their colour.

That’s exactly why we have five national days. One would be war and two a tad in-your-face, five make a nice party. I propose we should have five national poets. We would thus bring politics, and therefore much relevance, to Maltese literature. As for Dun Karm, the demotion from saint- to personhood would only do his legacy good.

Its very real literary qualities can easily withstand the step down from the pedestal.

mafalzon@hotmail.com