A 'sorry' identity?

Halfway through 2014, a commemorative year recalling several historical and political milestones of this nation state, little debate about national memory and identity has been forthcoming.

There are valid reasons for this, the foremost one being the recent elections which seem to have drained the public’s social engagement limit on issues concerning party duels, European aspirations and the political future of the island. That settled, 2015, with local elections looming in less than a year, will unfortunately consume any battery charge we may manage to accomplish before any other agenda is proposed.

On a small island, thankfully spared from natural disasters and extraordinary societal upheavals, little else happens if not somehow attached to politics and tourism. Hence the popular support for elections and touristic engagement.

At this time of year, most of Malta’s national feasts are still to come. In March, special activities marked 35 years of Freedom Day with adequate celebration. A programme of organised activities is planned for Victory, Independence and Republic days, which fall between the end of summer and Christmas.

The fifth national day, Sette Giugno, this year in its 95th year, is fading from public space with a routine commemoration secluded in a periphery garden after the monument lost its premier status from St George’s Square in Valletta.

Now our major historically significant square, embodying all national decisions taken in the magnificent palace that has been dominating it since the 16th century, is left vacant, bar artificial jets of water, to accommodate Carnival, markets and fairs of all sorts, fashion shows and legislators’ decisions taken in parliament.

Come September, when the national assembly sits in Piano’s project, it will only be at the President’s discretion to allow future victorious political leaders to use the impressive balcony.

Once Parliament moves to the futuristic bravura the square, mostly the domain of tourists and the president’s guards, will revert to 1814 complete with the colonizer’s blazon and a declaration to confirm it.

Malta’s membership in the EU, ten years forward, is less acknowledged publicly than Europe’s blessing to concede Malta to Britain two centuries ago.

Vis-à-vis Malta’s national identity, all this would appear less bizarre had the second most important square in our capital, appropriately called Republic Square, was not also dominated by the imperial colonial symbol of the 19th century. 

A public story

There is nothing wrong in preserving structures and monuments from previous epochs. Without them, Valletta would not boast of its superb bastions, palatial buildings, prominent temples and monuments. They do not only belong to our collective memory of the city, they also tell our public story.

But to conserve this narrative one needs to create a meaningful balance between what reminds us of our past and symbols that perpetuate our earlier, submissive, inferior status.

Artefacts that do not tell our story, if not a sorry one, should be the ones that are faded out and not, for example, our bloody fight for Malta’s first representative assembly.

Examples of non-meaningful symbols abound, from Spencer monument at the beginning of National Road that leads to the capital to several sepulchral monuments in our prime gardens, dedicated to persons who passed away distant from Malta with little or no connection whatsoever to our history. Such emblematic structures could easily be removed to other less symbolic public spaces and make space for more deserved native commemorations.

How this nation was cajoled into a submissive colonial position is not only marked by monuments; there are simpler signs. Our language, another feat of survival on its own steam, manifests some of our lost sites of memory. French knights, the majority of the Order’s members in Malta did business with the Maltese, respected their elite positions within the government and struck social relationships with 18th-century intellectuals.

Significant of equality, they used to greet the Maltese with ‘bonġu’ and ‘bonswa’. Italianate culture, in itself nurturing local artists in their Latin-refined civilization for a number of centuries, appreciated amicable transactions of any sort with ‘grazie’, rounding off their Maltese dealings with ‘ciao’, our Maltese word for ‘thank you’ and ‘hi/bye’ respectively.

On a different level, I guess the most wide-spread English word the Maltese populace learnt under British rule was ‘sorry’, notably badly used to mean ‘excuse me’. Were the majority of the Maltese, mostly poor and illiterate for most of their colonial years, so submissive as to have empowered themselves with the most common password that would please any foreign superior?

Today this simplistic reflection is not only manifested in local non-educated people but impressively so in the everyday jargon of thousands of non-English speaking foreigners who live in Malta. A casual bus ride will strike the message home more than all the anthropological arguments one could muster.

Dignified and reparative

Politicians normally come from a generous breed of people who enjoy parading their talents in public for the common good. It is thanks to them that progress is achieved in a country. When in government, they could strike a balance between development of their nation’s identity, nowadays often attached to material gain, and aesthetic and dignified pride.

Admittedly they cannot do this without the assistance of their executive administrative arms, several authoritative structures and people of merit taking important decisions at the right juncture of a state’s fate continuously challenged by global hegemony. To them we owe a lot. But there is another lot that very often is forgotten. Those are the researchers, the thinkers who are cautious to move without the necessary scientific instruments.

Only a few days ago, someone sitting on a committee was kind enough to state on the public media that 8 September might, from this year, also include the commemoration of the 2 September 1798 Maltese peasants’ revolt against ‘the French’, “as it happens to be close”.

One wonders how one never thought of celebrating Ash Wednesday on Carnival’s Mardi Gras when they sit side by side on the calendar. Victory Day is four and a half centuries old, as old as our capital city, and when the memory of WWII was added we assume the reason was to include all those who died for a national cause.

During the 1565 Great Siege and WWII, the Maltese fought a war provoked by aliens but defended their own territory from what was perceived at the time as malevolent threats. In 1798, countryside insurgents rose against 40% of the Maltese population who inhabited and worked in la Cité, spread around the harbour area, mostly made up of Maltese intellectuals, innovative administrators and a garrison of four thousand French soldiers.

The insurrection was organised by privileged ecclesiastics and traditional traders, who defended their diminished rights to continue to exploit the ignorant masses.

They fought against enlightened ‘democracy’ in its dawning European days; they rolled over those who wanted to secularise this little island into modernity.

It is good to remember the dead – all the victims of that era including the Jacobins led by Ransijat and Vassalli – but it is totally different from 8 September.

Before one decides to wake up after 216 years and remember forgotten heroes on both sides of that conflict, I believe one should study how it could be done in a dignified and reparative way within a national context of a past that continuously impinges on our present identity and future memory.