The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival in August is being held against a backdrop of tragedies. While contemporary writers are highlighting the issue, they are not abandoning the image of the Mediterranean as an ideal common space of human and cultural exchange, says Adrian Grima.
The tragedies that continue to traumatise the Mediterranean are a stark reminder that we live in a profoundly unjust world in which the divide between the haves and the have-nots seems, once again, to be growing.
It is a world which seems to have got so much smaller for some of us, so much more within our reach. And yet it is also a world in which even the most basic rights of millions of human beings are well beyond their reach.
For political, historical and geographical reasons, the Mediterranean is one of those focal points in which the human tragedies that are the direct result of global phenomena converge. In the early 20th century, the Mediterranean-ists talked about this region as the natural meeting point of the East and West, of South and North.
In the early 19th century, the St Simonian writer Michel Chevalier had talked about the Mediterranean as the ‘nuptial bed’ of the East and West, confronting the perception of an ancient divide between the two in European minds.
The work of contemporary writers like the novel N’zid by French-Algerian novelist Malika Mokeddem, the poems in Solo andata by Italian writer Erri de Luca, and Antoine Cassar’s long poem, Mappa tal-Mediterran, highlight the tragedies of the Mediterranean without abandoning the image that it represents an ideal common space of human and cultural exchange.
Nora, the protagonist of Mokeddem’s novel, is a contemporary female Ulysses, who sails across the Mediterranean and feels at home precisely between borders, beyond borders. She is most at ease when she allows her sailing boat to drift, without trying to impose her will on her destiny. But Nora is also, quite literally, a wounded protagonist. And eventually, as her memory returns after the traumatic experience that caused her to lose it, she has to come to terms with her own complex reality which is closely knit with the conflicts that are plaguing the region.
Every story that is told is a vindication of the right to humanity
Literature allows Malika Mokeddem, as it does Erri de Luca and Antoine Cassar, the possibility of dealing with the increasingly intricate experiences of life in the 21st century Mediterranean without the superficiality of two-minute features of news networks, or what is often the sloganeering of article headlines and tweets.
We are overwhelmed by information, by content, but we have so little time and patience to sift through it, to process, to see through or even confute it. Literature allows a different relation with words and with time. It allows us to bury ourselves in one story, to drown in its murky waters.
No amount of literature will do justice to the human beings that are dying every day in the murky waters of the ditch beneath the walls of fortress Europe. No amount of literature can tell their individual stories, their fears and aspirations. But every story that is told is a vindication of the right to humanity. Every time we talk about the people of the Mediterranean, the people who live in or travel across the Mediterranean, we are acknowledging their humanity. And our own.
This is the backdrop against which Inizjamed will be organising the 10th edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival between August 27 and 29.
The venue, thanks to the support of Heritage Malta, will be the beautifully renovated Fort St Elmo in Valletta, overlooking the Grand Harbour and the Mediterranean Sea.
The invited writers this year are John Bonello (Malta), Norbert Bugeja (Malta), Efe Duyan (Turkey), Rodolfo Häsler (Cuba/Spain), Moëz Majed (Tunisia), Hisham Matar (Libya/UK), Nadia Mifsud (Malta/France), James Vella (UK/Malta), Marina Warner (UK), Tamim Barghouti (Palestine) and Trevor Zahra (Malta).
Entrance to all events is free. Readings will start at 8pm. Short poetry films from Reel Festivals will be shown.
The writers will be in Malta throughout the first week of September to take part in the LAF Malta Literary Translation Workshop. They will be translating each other’s works into their languages, and reading some of these translations during the three nights of the festival.
The festival and literary translation workshop are part of the Literature Across Frontiers initiative, which has played a crucial role in the setting up and development of the annual workshop and festival which are now in their eighth year.
The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival 2015 is being held with the support of the Organisation Support Grant of the Malta Arts Fund and Valletta 2018.
Adrian Grima is the coordinator of Inizjamed.