Marco Galea (Ed.): Ta’ Barra minn Hawn: ir-Razza u r-Radika fil-Letteratura Maltija. Special issue of the journal Il-Malti 83, 2011, Reissued as a book by Klabb Kotba Maltin.
Paul Pace is troubled by our seeming inability to find a prejudice-free phrase to describe African and Middle Eastern people who cast themselves in boatloads on our shores- Paul Xuereb
When Marco Galea, who teaches at the University of Malta, was president of Akkademja tal-Malti in 2005-2007, he was responsible for organising a conference on the subject stated in this volume’s title.
The seven authors whose papers were read and discussed examined the way in which Maltese literature can reveal how Maltese people perceive their identity as a community and how they view the people with whom they come or have come in contact with as their rulers, as their enemies, as tourists, and, most recently, as immigrants who try to put down their roots in this country.
Anna Zammit, one of the authors, provides a useful and intelligent summary of the other papers. Those many University students in the past whose study of Maltese literary texts included Gużé Aquilina’s novel Taħt Tliet Saltniet or the narrative poem Il-Ġifen Tork by 19th century author Ġananton Vassallo most probably rarely bothered at the time to think of those texts in the way Marco Galea and Adrian Grima suggest.
Galea looks at the situation in Malta in the first century of British rule when Maltese literature really took off.
This was a time when anthropologists ranked races by the shapes of people’s skulls, with whites at the top of the pyramid and blacks at the bottom.
Irish people were judged similar to Africans, so the Maltese, with their North African racial element, did not impress their rulers who all too often judged them unable to rule themselves. Maltese intellectuals tried to combat this viewpoint by writing and speaking in Italian as a proof of their European credentials.
Ironically, it was the Italian refugees from the troubles of the Risorgimento who then persuaded them that to become a nation they needed to have a literature written in their language.
Thus it was that the author, lawyer and lecturer Ġananton Vassallo, who wrote and published successfully in Italian, also wrote some memorable poetry in Maltese, of which Il-Ġifen Tork was the most substantial.
Like other authors of the time, Vassallo still thought of the Order of St John as an admirable defender of Christianity and of its Islamic enemies as detestable villains, and the Turks overcome by the Maltese slaves in the poem are both wicked and black whereas the Maltese are both heroic and white.
Galea suggests this contempt of the Turks in this poem and in other contemporary works was meant to neutralise British contempt of the Maltese as an inferior people.
The distinguished historian Carmel Cassar sees St Paul’s stay in Malta as narrated in Acts, Count Roger the Norman’s brief invasion of Malta in 1090, and the Great Siege of 1565 in which the Maltese played a substantial role in the defeat of the Ottoman besieging army, as forming a tripod on which Maltese consciousness of their Catholic Christianity was sustained.
He writes at some length about the growth of the Pauline cult in Malta and follows authors like Anthony Luttrell in thinking that the cult became strong following the efforts of the 16th century Jesuit Gerolamo Manduca and the writings of Giovanni Francesco Abela, the 17th century ‘father of Maltese historiography’.
Cassar rightly regards the Great Siege as having cemented the unity of the Maltese as co-defenders with the Order of St John of Christian belief and values against the Islamic foe.
This consciousness was made even stronger long after the event, in 1885, when the September 8 date of the raising of the siege, became a day of national celebration, as it remains down to this day, at the urging of the Maltese nationalist Fortunato Mizzi.
Grima writes at length about the very negative image of Jews in Aquilina’s Taħt Tliet Saltniet. Ebenezer is depicted not only as unscrupulous but also as physically ugly as contrasted with his beautiful and gentle daughter Ester who becomes a Catholic convert by the end of the book.
Aquilina was clearly influenced by the characters Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, but goes even further than Scott in his disapproving portrayal of the character.
The novel was written in the mid-1930s at a time when the German Nazis’ abusive treatment of Jews was becoming clearer. In fact, it was only after 1945, when the full horror of the Holocaust became evident, that Aquilina’s views on Jews changed altogether.
Another writer, the minor novelist Emilio Lombardi, was also guilty of caricaturing the Jews in novels like L-Għamja ta’ Lourdes, and here again it is conversion to Catholicism that redeems the Jewish Rebekka, while a more important writer, Gużé Bonnici, in his novel Lejn ix-Xemx, depicts a Muslim slave as a person much inferior to the Maltese hero.
Grima’s discussion of Maltese attitudes to Jews and North Africans, on the one hand, and English people on the other, is subtle, and repays close study.
The favourable picture given in Taħt Tliet Saltniet of the British as the new rulers finds a great contrast in the hostile views of Britain expressed again and again by the Maltese journalist and patriot Manwel Dimech in his newspaper Il-Bandiera tal-Maltin.
Oddly enough, says Michael Grech in his article about him, Dimech was not against all colonists, and had praise for the French colonies in Africa.
He was not hostile to people from the Arab countries and praised them for learning from Europeans how to move forward, and seems to have been unaware of the great cultural and intellectual achievements of Arabs in the Middle Ages. Without being overly critical of them, he is never enthusiastic.
Dimech believed in enlightenment and strongly felt that without it, Malta could never move forward- Paul Xuereb
Like the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, by whom we are told he was influenced, Dimech believed in enlightenment, and strongly felt that without it, Malta could never move forward.
In a short but very interesting paper, the artist and art critic Raphael Vella looks at the commercial art created for tourist spots, depicting episodes from Malta’s history which sometimes give a confusing and confused picture of that history.
The trouble is, he says, that this kind of picture can influence the way Maltese people think of their history. Moreover, Vella disapproves of those who look at this commercial art as something superior, quoting as an example the acquisition by the National Museum of Fine Arts of a large work painted by the well-known artist Frank Portelli in 1968 for a hotel.
In an even shorter paper, the Jesuit Paul Pace looks sadly at the way in which most Maltese look at African and Middle Eastern people who cast themselves in boatloads on our shores. He is troubled by our seeming inability to find a prejudice-free phrase to describe these people, and even more troubled by the fact that many of us are so silent about these people’s often truly wretched plight.
He appeals to journalists and media people to break what he sees as a taboo of silence, and start discussing seriously how to deal with these people as the human beings they are.
This volume deserves to be widely read not just by students but by all thinking people in this country.