One lucky Sunday morning a few years ago I took a stroll by the nature reserve in Għadira. As if in some kind of parable, I came across a local who claimed he was just shy of 100 years old and who proceeded to tell me all about the history of the place.
It hadn’t always been a safe berth for birds. In fact, he said, he well remembered a knight who used to make the trip in his carriage to hunt there.
A century is a lot of sweat, but knights are knights and time is time. Still, the man appeared lucid enough for me to point out that 100-odd years of discrepancy meant he couldn’t possibly remember anything of the sort.
He explained I was being foolish to take the word ‘remember’ literally. What he meant was that he remembered his grandfather’s stories, and that his grandfather in turn remembered his own grandfather’s.
“It’s like cogs in a machine,” he said, “the cog at one end turns that at the other, even if the two never actually make contact.”
An anthropologist’s dream, in other words. Anthropologists love to talk about memory and to draw lines around its various forms. Take Jon Mitchell, who studied that native tribe known as the Pawlini of Valletta.
Mitchell describes autobiographical memory, as in the things that individuals actually remember. He also talks about collective and social memory. The first refers to personal memories shared by a number of people, the second to memories carried across the generations – as in the case of the knightly hunter at Għadira.
So far so bland, but things begin to get interesting when one type of memory transforms itself into another, and when history makes its grand entrance. History, in fact, tends to shape autobiographical, collective, and especially social memory.
Readers will have noticed I’m actually talking about something the Prime Minister said a week ago.
As quoted by The Times, “the government will not allow Labour to rewrite history by painting the 1970s and 1980s as the ‘glory days’ when they were, in fact, shameful years for the country”.
The cue apparently was “statements about the social reforms undertaken by successive Labour administrations made at the PL’s general conference”.
It’s not every day that prime ministers talk about the sanctioning of history and memory. I also find it immensely telling, in many ways.
I think it’s beginning to dawn on the PN that memory cannot be relied on. So far the ploy has been to let the autobiographical and collective types do their trick.
Not that there is a single version of events. I’m always struck at how Labourites and Nationalists lived – or at least remember they did – the 1970s and 1980s differently.
Nationalists will talk of how they were cheated of an electoral win in 1981; for Labourites it was a case of ‘maggoranza kollha fniek’ (many will remember the ditty, set to the tune of the daft Chicken Dance) and constitutional right.
Confectionery and dental products of questionable quality may also be remembered as valiant efforts by Maltese manufacturers, and clubs got their fair share of bullets as well as bombs.
That said, it’s probably fair to add that collective memories of the period have since enjoyed pride of place in the PN’s arsenal. Now, however, the prospect of social memory is slowly creeping in – thanks not least to the swelling ranks of youngish voters for whom ancient history means Web 1.0.
Autobiographical or group memories of actual lived experience simply can no longer be relied on.
This is exactly where written history comes in. The other day someone sent me a link to a 12-minute documentary film on the history of Labour. Produced to commemorate the party’s 90th and brought in monochrome (save for the last bit which shows Joseph Muscat looking to the future), it really talks the talk.
The main storylines are innovation and reform, the road to self-determination, the fight against injustice of all sorts, the setting up of the welfare state, and the efforts (throughout the 1970s) to give Malta a solid social and industrial infrastructure. The various leaders are presented in a seamless genealogy in which Boffa and Mintoff figure prominently.
All of which is a major nightmare to Nationalists. In fact I think it’s luvvies like this which sparked Lawrence Gonzi’s outburst. Question is, was he justified?
Yes and no. Fact is no one has, or should have, a monopoly on history. Labour should be left free to ‘remember their glorious past’ if they will. At the same time one can well understand Gonzi’s exasperation. It seems he will not have ‘revisionist’ history roughen the transition from collective to social memory.
There’s another thing. “So how does he propose to ‘not allow’ it?” was historian Dominic Fenech’s short but unsweet comment on the online boards.
Fenech, I figure, had power in mind. Or, more precisely, the idea that control over the writing of history is essentially a form of power.
Take colonialism. One of the sure signs of colonial dominance is that the colonised never quite get the chance to write history in their own terms. Inasmuch as they write it at all, they are condemned to do so through the eyes of the colonisers.
Fenech was being especially cheeky in this case. That’s because not to allow, by whatever means, the history of the abuse of power to be ‘rewritten’, is itself a power trip.
‘We will not allow Labour to rewrite history’ comes dangerously close to ‘We will not allow Labour to write history’. Tear gas and police batons it ain’t but it’s jaws unmuzzled nonetheless. In this sense, Fenech’s comment turned Gonzi’s remark on its head. No wonder timesofmalta.com went ballistic.
My guess is we’ll be seeing much more of this remembering and rewriting warfare as the elections draw near. Much like Proust’s tisane, colour has a funny way of jogging memories at the very last moment, when it matters most. Written history is very much part of that smell.
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