A convention for Maltese living abroad aims at bringing together Maltese who, though living in a different environment for a variable length of time, still have common interests and feel connected with the mother country.
One unusual feature of the convention for Maltese living abroad held recently in Valletta was a literary symposium organised by the University of Malta in conjunction with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. This is the first time such a symposium has featured the writing of Maltese living abroad.
Appropriately enough, it was held at the Old University and attracted an audience of about 80 interested persons.
This symposium brought together two distinct elements that reflect the writings of Maltese living abroad.
The first part consisted of writers of prose in Maltese. Three participants took part in this discussion, namely, Karl Schembri, Mark Vella and Alex Vella Gera, under the able chairmanship of Adrian Grima, from the university’s Department of Maltese.
The main issues that were discussed revolved around sources of inspiration that fire the imagination of these authors, all of whom write in Maltese. What these writers share in common is the fact that they have left Malta only recently (in the last 12 years) and have settled in countries which are relatively close to Malta, in Europe and the Middle East.
This has facilitated their continued contact with the Maltese language and culture and, indeed, they hardly think of themselves as migrants but, as emphasised by one participant, as ‘expatriates’, which, in fact, enables them to hang on to their right to a Maltese identity which includes residents’ rights and voting rights.
Their works are published in Malta and they contribute regularly to social media in Maltese that deal with Maltese cultural issues.
The second part of the symposium was devoted to writers of English prose.
Chaired by Stella Borg-Barthet, from the Department of English, the participants were Lou Drofenik and Anna Maria Weldon from Australia, Aline P’nina Tayar from Belgium and Josephine Burden currently living in Malta. The majority of these authors felt estranged from the Maltese cultural influences but were still very affected by their historical baggage, which often inspired their stories.
In contrast to the participants of writers in Maltese, the writers in English were completely integrated in the country where they live and, while they still visit Malta regularly and find inspiration in anything Maltese, they do not feel they belong there. They have settled elsewhere and look on Malta as a place to visit rather than one to live on.
Literature helps to clarify issues which may not be so readily dealt with through any other medium
It is curious to see that all the writers in Maltese were male while those writing in English were all women. This was not planned – it just happened. It is rather remarkable also that there are a greater number of Maltese women novelists outside Malta than in Malta itself. The reason for this is certainly not obvious.
Another puzzling situation is the complete absence of writers in Maltese in persons of the second generation living overseas. This applies both to prose and to poetry and it presumably results from the fact that the degree of facility in a language is expected to be much higher for writers in a particular language – a facility lacked by the majority of persons from the second generation.
A language which might be sufficient for ordinary day-to-day communication, or even for high level communication at a professional level, might not be sufficiently polished to reach the level required for producing literature.
This, unfortunately, spells the death knell for the preservation of Maltese language writers among the second generation of Maltese living abroad.
It is not really surprising that two major issues common to most authors relate to exile and identity.
Drofenik says: “Maltese migrants came to Australia with a culture and language which defined their identity as Maltese. This identity developed over the years of settlement into a Maltese /Australian identity.”
Her novels emphasise the isolation association with loss of roots: “The first years of settlement when everything – landscape, language, cultural expectations, work – are alien to the migrant are the hardest to endure.”
And, yet, her characters seem to have changed to the extent that they find their old homeland also foreign. When they return to Malta, they might find that they cannot cope with the mentality of the locals which they find “insular and inward looking, they had a cultural identity which looked and rejoiced in its smallness and was based on such things as family values, male domination and female submission”. They realised that although returning migrants “still felt they were intrinsically Maltese, the years of migration changed them irrevocably”.
Weldon discovered a deep attachment to her new environment, with particular empathy with aboriginal links of the country where she lives.
She finds parallels between her life as a new settler and the lives of the indigenous communities of West Australia and writes about a “love for the knowledge of ancestors, country and language, a yearning for deeper appreciation of those relationships which endure between them and sustain us all”. She remarks: “We are complex beings, each with stories of our own by which we navigate place”.
Burden’s prose also deals with topics of migration and identity: “...our identity as a woman or as a man is also shaped by the culture in which we live”. And this changes with time. She hears “the sounds of place more clearly as I grow old, as though the earth is calling me home”.
Interestingly, she admits to her difficulty to define her identity: “People sometimes ask me to declare if I feel more Maltese or Australian or British, to say where I feel most at home. I find this an impossible question to answer.”
Most complex of all is the state of P’nina Tayar: “Born a Jew into arguably the smallest Jewish community in the world, that of the predominantly Catholic island of Malta, I appear unable to let go of the clear red thread of uncertainty that can be picked out in all my writing and which has been exacerbated by the fact that I’ve lived in many countries including Israel, Australia, France, Italy, England and Belgium.”
And she asks: “So, how many generations does it take to make someone Maltese? This was a question that dogged me for years and it was why I began compiling vignettes and life stories with a view to writing a family history or rather family histories.”
One might likewise ask: How many generations does it take to make a Maltese person become an Australian or Canadian or whatever? Often, more than one generation and sometimes several or never.
She concludes that she carries multiple identities: “This theme of loss and exile is Malta’s legacy to me as a Maltese Jewish Australian English writer. I doubt I will ever be able to let it go completely.”
Literature helps to clarify issues which may not be so readily dealt with through any other medium. A symposium of this nature highlights particular issues that ‘expatriate’, ‘migrant’ or otherwise displaced writers may face and, hopefully, resolve in the process of integration.
The literature produced by persons of Maltese background who no longer consider Malta to be their homeland is bound to inject new insights and produce a new genre of work which, hopefully, would be of interest to Maltese wherever they happen to be.