It has not been a good week for Jason Micallef and his wisecracks. Last Wednesday, representatives of the Dutch city that shares the European Capital of Culture title with Valletta decided not to send any official representatives to Malta “as long as the organisation Malta-Valletta2018 (V18) does not distance itself from their offensive tone which refers, most notably, to the relatives of the murdered journalist, Daphne Caruana Galazia” (The name was consistently misspelt in the press release, in both Dutch and English.)
The news rehearsed a key contradiction in the assessment of Caruana Galizia’s lifework and death. On the one hand, the foreign press and international human rights organisations are falling over each other to present awards and honours, and to pay general homage. In Malta, on the other, things are rather more complicated: For every person lighting a candle in Valletta, there’s a Jason Micallef lighting a fuse. It’s a sharp contrast that deserves some attempt at understanding.
But first, we need to discard three false theories. The first holds that the reaction abroad is a conspiracy born of envy. Malta is doing well, the story goes, so well that it has become the envy of much bigger countries who have vowed to put it in its place. The foreign press are being drip-fed venom by the Caruana Galizia family and their sympathisers, and they also find themselves egged on by their own politicians – who, we must keep in mind, are highly envious of Malta.
The last time I came across such a fanciful species of envy, I was reading Freud. Or maybe I was listening (for research purposes) to Norman Lowell, who has often said that, envious of Malta’s genetic purity, the international Jewry has sworn to destroy Malta through its press influence.
Certainly the international press, like most things, comes with strings attached. But to believe that the world’s leading news organisations are simply the minions of green-eyed politicians involves a flowering of imagination irrigated by a stream of bubbling ignorance.
The second false theory is that Malta is not a normal country; presumably, the countries the foreign journalists come from are normal. This would explain why valuations of Caruana Galizia are mixed in Malta, straightforward abroad.
Thing is, I’ve lived in India, Switzerland and Britain, and in none of these places did people think themselves normal. I’m sure that, were I to move to Uruguay, and then to Sri Lanka, I’d add two names to that list. That’s because this abnormality business is one of the characteristics of nationalism, which holds that each country is uniquely this and distinctively that. Let’s just say that Malta is as abnormal as all the others.
The third theory holds that Jason Micallef, and the thousands of Maltese people whose assessment of Caruana Galizia is not quite flattering, are simply stupid and over-fired with partisan zeal. As opposed to the ones lighting candles and the foreign press, whose level of enlightenment helps them transcend the pettiness of the bipartisan seesaw.
This is a harder line of reasoning to attack, and I think I’ll just let it demolish itself. All forms of Manichaeism tend to oblige very effectively indeed.
For every person lighting a candle in Valletta, there’s a Jason Micallef lighting a fuse
It is possible in principle that none of the foreigners who are punting for Daphne Caruana Galizia have ever read a word of what she wrote. (Certainly that seems to be the case with the people at the Leeuwarden-Fryslân 2018 Foundation, who can’t even spell her name properly.) Or perhaps it’s all a matter of 600 journalists in search of a story, and a pretty sensational one at that.
I don’t think it’s the case. There’s no shortage of bombings in the world, and it’s unlikely that the organisations who heaped honours on Caruana Galizia will have done so without bothering to read at least some of her writings. In any case, we also need to explain why her work was so well-received in Malta, by very many people who obviously knew it well. Speaking for myself, my view is that the problem with Daphne Caruana Galizia is that she was not three people, or 30.
The clue, I think, is in the language. To outsiders, Caruana Galizia is the murdered journalist. That summons the image of someone who stood by their stories, and who did their job regardless of the risks. In Caruana Galizia’s case, that image is accurate. It is also, however, simplistic. A richer understanding of her work would require a look into the ways it was located within a number of local – by which I mean Maltese – contexts.
Class is one of them. Caruana Galizia’s writing invariably latched on to local renditions of class and its deep fault lines. At times, it was a debate on whether one should say rikotta or irkotta (the former, apparently, if your pedigree’s up to it), at others a scathing attack on Labourite – and Adrian Delia’s – ħamallaġni. Little wonder the foreign press are clueless, given that ħamalli is scarcely translatable.
Another, closely related, context is that of Caruana Galizia’s real or imagined social connections. Many people in Malta felt she simply was not one of them. Nor do I blame them, given that she rubbed it in at every turn.
The third context is, of course, that of partisan division. I doubt there has ever been a single Labourite among the crowds at the Great Siege memorial – or, for that matter, a single member of Delia’s inner circle. Trite though it may be, it seems to be worth saying that journalists do not work in a political vacuum.
Have the foreign press suddenly become insensitive to the obvious truth of local context, then? That’s a tricky one to answer, but it may have something to do with the fact that Malta is small and, in the bigger picture, insignificant. There are few, if any, international ‘Malta observers’ or resident Malta correspondents, which means that the foreign media are condemned to overlook the nuances of Maltese party politics, class divisions and such.
The point is not that the international awards, honours and attention are unjustified, but that I can see why Jason Micallef is unimpressed.
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