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J.W. Psaila: Il-Purgatorju 360º. Self-published. 2014.
J.W. Psaila is an author whose name is unfamiliar to me, though I see he has published four volumes before the present one. With this new book I suspect he is now making his mark in Maltese literature.
It is a critical, occasionally satirical, survey of Maltese politics since 1964, written ambitiously and often with some success, in a Maltese terza rima, the verse form used by Dante in his Divina Commedia.
The whole poem is modelled to some extent on the purgatory part of Dante’s magnificent work, but there are 30 cantos plus a prologue and an epilogue as against Dante’s 33 cantos and they are of greatly varying lengths.
The most important way in which Psaila has departed from Dante’s design, as one will certainly expect, is that those whom the poet meets during his journey through purgatory include both the living and the dead: Dom Mintoff, Ċensu Tabone and Lorry Sant and others on the one hand and Eddie Fenech Adami, Richard Cachia Caruana and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and others on the other hand.
Most readers, I imagine, will be surprised by Psaila’s choice of his guide in the first part of his journey, this being the journalist Saviour Balzan, who is still very much among the living.
Alternattiva Demokratika, surprisingly, plays no role in this book, considering its support for reforms like the introduction of divorce and of gay marriages, topics which the author clearly does not favour.
At one point, Balzan is re-placed much more satisfactorily as guide by Peter Serracino Inglott (PSI) – priest, philosopher and a powerful politician in the wings – whose death a few years ago makes him a fit personage to be in purgatory.
A brilliant intellectual and a good priest, he was in some ways a very worldly man and, since he was fond of being a leader, his being Psaila’s guide in purgatory fits his personality.
PSI could speak at length at a moment’s notice and Psaila makes him address more than one soul. But he is most interesting in his encounter with Cachia Caruana, a person very powerful at the court of Fenech Adami and therefore a rival for the title of king maker, bestowed on PSI a couple of years ago in Daniel Massa’s massive biography of the former University rector.
The Psaila who still lives in Gozo appears to be philo-Nationalist, but the Psaila exploring purgatory tries to sit on the wall, depicting Labour and Nationalist politicians warts and all.
Thus, Mintoff, the great know-all of Maltese politics, is depicted playing his favourite game of boċċi, but always unable to hit the jack.
The book finely expresses his disappointment that no amount of national celebrations will bridge the chasm between the two great parties
His fellow-players, his erstwhile faithful dockyard followers, whom he grossly insulted on one infamous occasion by claiming they had no testicles, win all the time.
His great opponent in the late 1970s and 1980s, Fenech Adami (EFA) is depicted much more favourably, but even he gets criticised for having lined himself up as president at the end of his career as prime minister.
Psaila, however, does not mince his criticism of such shameful events as the sacking of Allied Newspapers and the invasion of EFA’s home in October 1979 by Labour thugs, when Mintoff was prime minister, or the killing of Raymond Caruana, a young Nationalist supporter, a few years later, or even the attacks on the law courts and the archbishop’s curia, when Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was party leader.
Lorry Sant, hateful to many Nationalists, is depicted as repentant for his misdeeds.
A fairly recent Labour Party leader and short-lived prime minister, Alfred Sant, is depicted in one of the book’s finest cantos, which is in a way a tribute to a man whose high intellect was not matched by political shrewdness.
Psaila depicts Sant, for long one of our foremost writers, as suffering from writer’s block, a true penance for someone as prolific as he has always shown himself to be.
Psaila, perhaps grudgingly, likes Sant and makes it clear that Sant is suffering in Purgatory not for true misdeeds but for his one great inconsistency when, forgetting his strong opposition to Malta’s becoming an EU member, he recently allowed himself to get elected to a seat in the European Parliament.
Sant, a lifelong non-believer, will no doubt smile ironically when he reads this canto.
Other characters Psaila clearly admires are Guido de Marco and Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, both of whom are depicted affectionately. I like de Marco’s penance (for misdeeds not made clear by Psaila) in his delivering long talks and lectures to empty halls.
Psaila does Mifsud Bonnici proud by making him deliver a strong defence of his baby during his ministerial years: the teaching of Systems of Knowledge.
Stylistically, Psaila rarely aims at the nobility so often achieved by Alfred Palma in his remarkable version of Dante, but he is a skilful versifier.
His use of an impressively wide Maltese vocabulary may be impressive, but in his search for rhymes – for instance with words like ‘wrecks’ and ‘decks’ – there are quite a few times when the style gets so tortured as to make his meaning less than clear.
On the other hand, there are times when his use of an English/Maltese word is effective.
One example of this is in the humorous verse about Lawrence Gonzi, a political goalkeeper (a metaphor sustained in this picture of a much-suffering prime minister) victim of his men’s fouls.
The author creates the unpleasant atmosphere of purgatory impressively. This work was written to be published in 2014, a year of important political anniversaries for Malta.
His epilogue, however, finely expresses his disappointment that no amount of national celebrations will bridge the chasm between the two great parties.