George Vella’s inaugural speech as President was obviously well pondered, revealing a lifetime of political thought, but in one of the delicate passages there was a detail that might well have been written spontaneously, without overthinking, simply because it seemed right. And it was. It struck exactly the right note.

The President referred to dark stains on the national conscience: the atrocious murders of Karen Grech, Raymond Caruana and “Mrs Daphne Caruana Galizia”. Caruana Galizia was mentioned with her formal status title; the other two were not.

The difference is not a matter of a difference of respect. It’s something else.

The youthful Caruana and the adolescent Grech became public figures as a result of their murders. Their death was a symptom of a deeply disturbed society. It is because they were killed – so brutally – that these private citizens became public personas.

Their names, shorn of titles, are how we know them. The labour of memory is needed not just to remember them, as individuals, but also to remember that these were not accidental private murders. These private citizens died, in the broadest sense, political deaths; their senselessness and aftermath was a sign of a larger violence shaking society.

The Caruana Galizia case is different on several counts. Before she died, Malta’s most talked about journalist was obviously already a public persona for over a quarter of a century. The last time she was widely referred to as Mrs Caruana Galizia was at the very beginning of her career as a columnist. For much of her public life she was, as we know, just Daphne.

But for most people that was the name of a persona, like Boadicea or Belzebub, not of a person they knew.

She sometimes felt that she had to draw attention to the difference between her person and her writing persona. I myself only met her perhaps a dozen times over 24 years, usually in passing, and the difference was evident.

When Daphne Caruana Galizia died, a part of Malta died with her

I don’t mean that she wasn’t true to herself when she wrote. But she tended to write one or two degrees over the top, in the manner of a professional contrarian, aware that her critical voice was a brand, not just a point of view. And she was fetished by many fans, who saw in her a kind of local Margaret Thatcher or Christopher Hitchens, and demonised by the Labour-connected media, who called her a witch and a harlot.

So in her case the task of memory is different. It is to strip away the mask of the public persona – whether the one she adopted or another she was assigned – and see the human face beneath.

It is to remember that the fetish of fan and enemy alike was a person. For the President to call her Mrs Caruana Galizia was to remember her like this, embedded in a family. Just simply, one of us.

If the President was deliberate in his rhetoric, it is remarkable not least because he was sometimes the butt of Caruana Galizia’s sharp criticism. If the writing was spontaneous, it says a lot about Vella’s social intuition.

In either case, his rhetoric is dramatically different from the way she’s still being treated on the social media, very likely by organised trolls, and in some sections of the press. The President has his work cut out for him not least because the very subject of a public inquiry into her death is now a matter of dispute between the Caruana Galizia family and the government.

It’s all very well for me to say that the family is obviously in the right, but the President has to keep controversy at arm’s length. There is, however, an approach that does avoid controversy, and which the President in his speech has indicated.

It is to focus on the dead as ours. They belong to us. Their deaths stain our collective conscience.

There is no controversy in saying that when Caruana Galizia died, a part of Malta died with her. Even those who detested her, unless still suffering from Daphne Derangement Syndrome, can see that when a bomb that blows up a public figure, it rips apart the public sphere. The guarantees of the Constitution become that much weaker. Justice recedes more into the distance.

All that is true irrespective of your evaluation of how things have been handled – by the State and by political parties – since her assassination.

At the heart of our Constitution – what pulls it all together, whatever its weaknesses – is a value explicitly preached by Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike: when one person dies, the whole of humanity dies too. And every assassination and murder is a potentially fatal wound the entire body politic receives. It’s a civic disaster.

It’s an offence against all of us. Which is why the place where it happens is a site of civic desecration. It needs reconsecration. That’s the reason why places struck by disaster are visited by heads of state. It’s not just an act of solidarity. It’s a secular sacrament of the State’s comforting presence. Order drives out disorder.

We need a new language – of words and gestures – in which to talk about and symbolise the Republic of Malta. Vella spoke of a renewed respect for flag, national language and symbols of nationhood.

But we also need a new vocabulary to clean our consciences of perverted patriotism and fetish tribalism.

One for all. And when there’s a victim: all for one.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

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