The elusive malaise

Discussions about Malta and Maltese identity, like the one on Lou Bondi’s programme last Monday, seem to have one thing in common. Whether it’s Oliver Friggieri, Brikkuni’s Mario Vella or Immanuel Mifsud being interviewed, a lingering malaise can always be felt but nobody seems capable of quite identifying what the problem is.

Now this might simply be due to the fact that identity is a famously slippery customer to deal with, or because we venture deep into the realm of subjectivity when we go down this path. As one overseas friend quipped after the programme, national identity is mainly important for those who pose questions about it. Perhaps.

But it remains an interesting super-structure, ever-present in opinion columns of all shapes, sizes and prejudices. It imbues our political discourse and when you boil it down to its basics, it is actually a very tangible thing.

Quite simply, the noises, sounds and vocabulary of a Valletta street are immediately recognisable as Maltese. So too is any talk-show one chooses to tune into on any given day: the tone of the discussion, the underlying tensions, the humour (or total lack of it), the attitudes. Even the scowls have a certain Maltese feel about them. As do the sentences punctuated with the trademark blasphemy - and the occasional hilarious vulgarity - of the workmen outside my office at university. In this, I disagree with the members of Bondi’s panel who said that there is nothing uniquely Maltese about us. Quite tangibly, there is.

But back to the elusive malaise. The other week, Martin Amis very much put his finger on his own country’s malaise in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur.

Bemoaning Britain’s “superficiality” and “moral decrepitude”, he chastised its “philistine royal family” and celebrity culture awash with “all these excited models and these rock stars in short shorts” (as The Guardian translated it) while simultaneously praising the English themselves and their “very advanced” political system. “One can have the impression that life in London is pretty pleasant”, Amis told the French magazine, “but all is rotten inside”.

The fall-out from that interview was not long in the coming. Amis’ opinions were given wide coverage in the British press and several spin-off opinion columns dissecting Amis’ views created a chain-reaction of debate. Countless reactions were outwardly hostile, a few were sympathetic but the overall unwritten understanding was that the author’s views were relevant.

In other words, Britain is a society which doesn’t just give token recognition to its writers during a drab annual prize-giving ceremony or rare television interview.

Anti-establishment writers, I think, face a double hurdle in Malta which may account for the elusive malaise which comes through these interviews - in the case of yesterday’s programme Mario Vella’s cynicism and frustration and Immanuel Mifsud’s despondency and fatalism.

In the final analysis, writers need to feel relevant to the society they write about, their realist literature is intended to strike a chord. This is the power of literature in advanced societies.

But what if nothing actually changes in that society? What if the dominant ideology and dominant voices continue to perpetuate themselves regardless, at most allowing for superficial shifts here and there? I reckon that the elusive malaise projected by artists and writers like Vella and Mifsud comes from the fact that they know that they will never be as relevant to Maltese society as - to pick one topical example - construction magnate Nazzareno Vassallo.

Just compare Vella and Mifsud on Bondi’s programme with the upbeat, beaming, calm and mega-confident Zaren Vassallo in The Times’ interview the other day to see what I mean.

Vassallo’s demeanour says it all. It doesn’t just say “I am successful”. More importantly it says “I am relevant , I am the guy people aspire to be”.