Of accents, governments and oppositions

In her article “Wrong medium, wrong message” Josanne Cassar wrote fairly and eloquently about the matter of the Prime Minister’s wife’s (in)famous speech to which many homebred Maltese Shakespeares dutifully objected.

So I am not going there again. But beyond the specific case of one person or another who, in haste, fell flat on their vowels because they could not come to terms with speaking with a plum in their mouth while keeping their upper lip as stiff as it should be, I would just say that this prompted me to reflect on how in Malta class, politics and language continue to play a brutal and often cruel game.

As the late British sociologist Basil Bernstein has shown in his comprehensive study of language and learning, what he regarded as a degree of coding in one’s spoken language plays a central role in how education is socialised and therefore accessed or barred. By means of language people are let in or left out. Through language we shape our democracy.

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière reminds us that, since its inception in Ancient Greece, democracy emerged right from the discrimination between those who can speak and those who cannot. We all remember how St Paul considered the natives of Malta as bábaroi, barbarians – meaning that they spoke neither Greek nor Latin. To the author of the Acts of the Apostles this had a strong political import in that speaking was then – as it remains now – the measure of who is in and who is left out of the polis, or the city-state.

To date we still squabble over the use of Maltese. Some take umbrage to those who speak mostly English. They call them “tal-pepé”. Others might feel left out when the village notary indulges in Italianate legalese (“You lost me there Dott!”). We also know how before Vatican II many churchmen insisted on using Latin as a tool of social distinction. Yet as in other countries, Malta was also blessed by notable radicals like the Reverend Pietru Pawl Saydon and St Gorg Preca, who insisted on prioritising the language of their people in matters of faith with the specific intent of wider inclusion into the church and society.

The politics of language retains huge relevance; which is why, tragically, it is still used as an expedient tool to trade insults at one’s opponent, to leave people out, to hit under the belt by being obnoxious and try to show how much one knows in an attempt to decry the others as being “baxxi” and therefore not good enough to participate in society’s political life.

Indeed we should learn from those we claim to revere. As I mentioned Dun Gorg Preca, we know how much his Society has done for the Maltese language. However people forget that the MUSEUM could only strengthen the use of Maltese across board and through its pedagogical mission because it was socially and pedagogically inclusive. Everyone knows that Dun Gorg built the MUSEUM from the bottom up. He preached and evangelised manual workers, he went to the people and inspired women and men to dedicate their life to the education of the young, both in religious and social matters.

This is just one example of inclusion that we have easily taken for granted. It is a model of participation to which many only pay lip service. We speak of democracy a lot, but when it comes to seeing it as a form of associated living we soon forget what that looks like.

As the insults continue to be traded on the basis of national identity, passports, immigrants, gas, power stations, accents and what not, a year on from the last General Elections the business of tribalism never stopped trading. In his insightful “365 days of Joseph”, James Debono draws very detailed lists of what he regards as Challenges, Accomplishments and Controversial decisions taken by Dr Muscat’s one-year-old Labour government. In this respect, one does not need to go back to argue for or against what may be considered as successes or blunders. Perhaps we should also throw in the effects of the Nationalist Party’s first political year in Opposition.

As it finds itself in much leaner numbers on the Opposition benches, the Nationalist Party has its own challenges, successes and blunders. To that effect, one balance sheet might call for another.

At this point, what I also want to know is not how well Labour and the Nationalists have done as government and opposition, but how far have they gone to lead their electorate into a new approach to democracy. Both Drs Muscat and Busuttil insist on the new style of politics they claim to have brought in. But I want to see the evidence. And the evidence is not found in their respective claims, but in what we see on the ground.

This is where the language question comes back to haunt us. This time it has nothing to do with Italian, English, or who sports the best accent in the public sphere, but with how far a democratic language is sustaining a politics of inclusion and whether it has started to take root in the approaches taken in Parliament.

At this stage we rightly speak of a renewed social policy and of tangible inclusion, especially where it comes to poverty, education, civil rights, gender, race and sexuality. On this, Labour is delivering. We also greet a new Head of State who promises to make the fight against poverty the objective of her Presidency. We also hear talk of consensus politics coming from both Government and Opposition – though I am never sure who is being consensual and with whom, because from where I stand I see one squabble after another, followed by libel and counter-libel, scenes in parliament which remind us of a village farce, and a feeling that the tribal instinct is very much alive and kicking.

Here I want to draw out a concept that is often thrown at people like myself who always feel that the role of the critical friend is at best ignored and at worse misconstrued as being an act of treason. Recently a friend of mine declared on his Facebook page that now that he is retired he intends to be a full-time opponent—“Kontra kulħadd!” Against everyone! But as we get the joke, we also realize that he is not the only one who seems to be always in opposition.

Yet as one thinks about the state of being in “perpetual opposition” several questions spring to mind: Why is it necessary to oppose? Is it because we never like what Governments do? Or is it because Oppositions are ineffective? My quick reply is that those who claim to be on the Left tend to be seen in this perpetual opposition because the need to critique and oppose is not a luxury that a democracy can afford to lose.

Before someone begins to object to the notion of the Left by claiming the usual political ghosts of communism, it’s good to recall how Pope Francis puts himself on the Left in an interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro. The Pope does this while he engages in a degree of reflective self-criticism, saying: “To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.” To me this says that for one to be able to assert a critical position that is invariably reformist and therefore on the Left, he or she must always start with critically reflecting on one’s own position.

Those who do not see themselves appended to one of the political parties do so because they happen to strongly believe that politics is far more inclusive and at the same time wider than the narrow remits of a political party. This is why I have given a lot of time and attention to Dr Muscat’s claim that his objective was that of a political Movement that is much wider than a political party. I must say that one year into government, it seems that the weight of governance has somewhat frustrated Dr Muscat’s ambition to sustain such a Movement, and one hopes that with time this idea can be enacted beyond (and even against) the “localized” expectations that have evidently impinged on the PL in power.

So as I speak of a critique that comes from the Left, I also want to insist that this cannot escape one’s ability – indeed one’s duty – to begin with a continuous process of reflective self-criticism. Any position that claims to be on the Left cannot proscribe such a reflective practice because it would otherwise detract itself from the inherent democratic ambitions that it entertains.

To conclude, I would argue that the old argument of the PN being clearly on the Right and the PL neatly on the Left is radically flawed. If anything, many would tell you that both parties are centrist, and have become indistinguishable. Be that as it may, there is always a need to think across the PN-PL divide and urge both Government and Opposition to lead in developing a new kind of politics – which, incidentally both Dr Muscat and Dr Busuttil promised and for which we have a right to hold them accountable.