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After a week in daze, shock and devastation, I took to the garden. I pottered about and watered the trees and did some weeding. And thought about Daphne. She loves gardens. Loved. I still cannot believe that I have to use the past tense.
She told me once how she believes that “real gardens shape the senses”. Some of the most delightful conversations I’ve had with Daphne over the years, whenever we bumped into each other, were about our common eagerness for beauty and good taste, both of which are fast disappearing on this island of ours.
She was a broadsheet and a tabloid rolled in one. As the BBC described her, she was the anti-corruption voice; she also penned many a scathing post on her blog; but she also wrote pieces – in her magazine Taste and Flair or sometimes hidden in between political arguments – which celebrated beauty and gave an insight into her soul. Only recently she wrote a piece about public gardens, which I urge you to look up and read.
“I love gardens: mysterious, magical gardens full of nooks and crannies, the equivalent of rambling old houses packed with rickety furniture and old curios brought back by antecedents from their peregrinations, gardens that are collections of plants of all kinds, tall and small, wild and tame, big-leafed and spiked, tangle-branched and swooping,” she wrote in her typical evocative manner.
She wrote how the last time she visited San Anton Gardens, she wanted to weep: the gardens of her and of her sons’ childhood had lost their magical “plant collection of the empire” qualities “and now look just like an oversized traffic roundabout on a public road, with many of the same pointless annual flowering plants, which are shipped out here in bulk and planted everywhere, from a centre-strip to a palace garden, whether they are appropriate or not”.
As I am typing out her words, I am the one who wants to weep. Daphne did not write with her pen; she painted. Sometimes she painted horrific images of a rotten society; sometimes crude graphic pictures; sometimes like this one, beautiful masterpieces. We spoke after she wrote that blog post, and she told me how much she loved Sa Maison Gardens – protected by neglect, and by lack of funds and by the fact that luckily, so far, no one has come up with the brainwave to ‘embellish’ it with roundabout plants. “They still have this wonderful air of mystery and secrecy,” she told me.
She was deeply preoccupied with the uglification of Malta. “With the exception of some pockets of visual harmony and interest, Malta has been highly offensive aesthetically for many years,” she wrote recently. Malta isn’t turning into a European city she said, but into Tel Aviv, as she urged everyone to: “Let the scales fall from your eyes. Look around with the eyes of a stranger, rather than those of a loving beholder who sees beauty where there is none.”
And now she is gone. Gone in the most horrendous and atrocious way
The first time I met Daphne I was 17 years old, attending my first lecture at university. We were both reading Archaeology; she, a confident, mature student with three exemplary, well-mannered, young sons; I, a self-conscious teenager with mullet hair.
At 28, she was already the main columnist for The Sunday Times of Malta and already her pen was very loud and compelling. The minute she had entered the lecture room, I’d braced myself. I’d imagined she’d be argumentative, controversial and an attention seeker; instead she turned out to be soft-spoken, always taking notes, in her round handwriting, and only occasionally asking the odd question for clarification’s sake. As we both learnt, archaeology is very similar to journalism in the sense that you have to toothcomb evidence to come up with answers.
Much later, I got to know her as a journalist. Now, most journalists I know want to talk about themselves, even when they’re interviewing you. Daphne would sit there and ask questions and would simply listen, giving you all the attention in the world. In 15 minutes she could elicit the autobiography not just of your life but of your parents and grandparents. In my lifetime I’ve only come across one other journalist as good as her, and she’s a former editor of the UK Cosmopolitan magazine.
Journalistically, we mostly discussed gender issues. She campaigned relentlessly for women to be financially independent and forge their own careers. She often made appeals for donations to Dar Merħba Bik; or gave donations herself, such as when earlier this year her bank account was frozen with not one, but four, precautionary warrants, and €69,500 were spontaneously crowd-funded to deposit in the Courts of Justice and unfreeze her bank account.
“The surplus, after court fees and the rest of the myriad complications are sorted, will be donated to Dar Merħba Bik, the women’s shelter,” she wrote. “Given that my gender is a significant factor in the moral violence I experience on a daily basis as a critic of male politicians in the southern Mediterranean, I think this appropriate. It is also a cause close to my heart.”
And now she is gone. Gone in the most horrendous and atrocious way. She was assassinated in a perfectly planned, chilling attack, meant to silence her anti-corruption crusade forever.
Her fearless voice is gone, her way of seeing things “with the eyes of a stranger” is no more. Our choice whether to read her posts or not, has vanished. We refresh her blog in vain. But we cannot ever read her again. The only thing we are left with is helplessness.
This political assassination marks the darkest period in the history of our country since independence. Nothing after this will be the same again. Perhaps now we realise how important it was to never stop talking about corruption these past three years. Perhaps now people who want to talk only about ‘positive’ things will “let the scales fall from their eyes”. Nothing will ever be positive about corruption, and this is the devastating result.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti