All entries for February 2008

A note of thanks

My heartfelt thanks to all fellow Commonwealth Scholars who have found the time to visit and contribute to the blog - much appreciated. Also, the number of emails you sent is encouraging! Please post freely and regularly. Feel free to suggest topics of your own, and to request a link to your own blogs/websites/online discussion fora through this one. Very best wishes in your research! N.

Norbert Bugeja : 21 Feb 2008 02:03 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Write Honourable Politics

LinoSpiteri, L-Onorevoli – Stejjer li ktibt jien u ghaddej fil-politika,(San Gwann: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2007) 292+ pp. ISBN No.978-99909-0-490-1 [Hardbound edition]

 

Several of our politicians are versed in many things but the solid labour they should be carrying out. Our island teems with this species and their antics – clearly, this is its blessing and also its curse. But I will make an exception for Lino Spiteri. To have trudged one’s way through forty years of local politics - ferocious and petty as it is – and wind up at the end of it with a writing that addresses that intimate knowledge upfront, with due rigour and complexity, and still remain believeable, is in itself an achievement.

 

Spiteri’s latest collection of twenty-five short stories, titled ‘L-Onorevoli – Stejjer li ktibt jien u ghaddej fil-politika’, is his fictional rendition of several experiences garnered through a lifetime of political involvement. It follows a collection of autobiographical stories – ‘Jien u Ghaddej fil-Politika’ - published earlier last year. In a brief foreword to ‘L-Onorevoli’, the author insists that the title itself is not inspired by local parliamentarians, but the common folks (‘nies zghar’) that people his stories.The latter, he insists, are the ‘Onorevoli’ throughout his work. Spiteri constructs his social narratives around mundane situations, vignettes and characters picked from everyday life and often expressed in a Dickensian slant. In ‘Il-Ktieb ta’ Zeza’,the eponymous protagonist focuses her attentions on the new telephone directory, expecting her name to show up. When she cannot identify herself in the directory, she turns to her local parliamentary deputy who finds the entry and gives her his own copy, duping her into believing that he is presenting her with his privileged edition. His narrative method here reminds one of the ‘magic realist’ techniques utilized by the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wherein reality is touched with hints of enchantment and fantasy. A purportedly dumb Cesarel-Ghannej in ‘Dfin fil-Mizbla’ breaks into hysterical cries and acquires speech during the murder scene at a local staging of Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’.The grotesque Ganpawl in ‘Jum il-Ministru’ is a loquacious giant with piercing eyes who barges into the narrative as he harangues a growing-and-hungry minister in the hope of landing a government job. Again, Ganpawl, with limbs resembling prickly pear and carob trees, is a cross between Babur, the hulking allegory of common man in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Fury’, and Dicken’s Magwitch, between whose legs Pip Pirrip could see the countryside for miles around. The first-person narrator of ‘Il-Kuntrattur’ is a thinly-veiled rendition of the local contractor grown to gargantuan proportions, who has to be admitted to the corridors of power. L-Azzarin and his way with firearms in the tragic ‘Omml-Azzarin’ illustrate the macabre measure to which political prerogative and expediency in the past were ready to forfeit even human lives in the name of hollow partisan credos.

 

On the other hand, Spiteri’s prose has a quality of adaptability to and endorsement of contrasting, often conflicting, perspectives. It straddles different subjectivities and realms ofexperience: l-Onorevoli, after all, is also a proper name for the politician who has ‘made it’ – more often than not, through wile, guile and Machiavellian tact. Faced with L-Imghallem, the obscure political leader in ‘F’Dell il-Muntanja’ (many of you will, I am sure, want to read him as a parable of Dom Mintoff), the young, idealistic newspaper editor outlines his ambivalent emotions towards the man. The youngster is disillusioned; the leader, immovable as a dark force in a Conradian drawing-room, is unaffected. Throughout the book, the lives of the common man in the street and the high and mighty cross each other – the bond is almost inextricable. The hoi polloi, the commoner, is attracted to, or constrained to identify with the politician and vice-versa, very often effecting one’s self-annihilation into an Other whom he would rather exorcise than incorporate. Typically, however, the ignis fatuus, the misleading light that herds the uneducated towards calamity in these stories, is politics and its big men. As the deputy tells old Zeza when he hands her the “magical” telephone directory with her name listed there, ‘[…]ara Nann, biex ma titfixkilx se nqeghedlek ritratt tieghi fil-ktieb. Meta trid issib lilek, kemm tfittex hawn biss fejn qieghed jien, imkien izjed’.

 

And finally, a word about Spiteri’s preoccupation with the political Sixties in this volume. A number of stories, but particularly ‘Zwieg fis-Sagristija’, ‘Dfin fil-Mizbla and Qniepenu Mqades’, extracted from his earlier novel ‘Rivoluzzjoni, Do Minore’ take on the stand-off between the Church and the Labour Party during those turbulent years. Spiteri’s writing about the epoch in this volume, however, is best represented in ‘Mikroskopju’. It may well be themost outstanding piece in the collection. By means of dialogue, conversation and direct speech, Spiteri recreates a scenario of idealistic, bohemian young artistes and budding writers killing time in what is presumably Piazza Regina in Valletta, as they debate the Establishment and its  champions who stand in the vicinity. The story, with its unidentified narrative voices interjecting and crossing each other, explores the dynamics of political and cultural change. Who will bring it about and who is inhibiting its course? A “decadent” bourgeois youth? The political establishment? ‘Mikroskopju’ is rich in vision and in cultural connotation.Through its poignant portrayal of another era, it achieves the signature effect of ‘L-Onorevoli’ – a politically charged portrayal of community, unassumingly pitched, but enormously relevant to the realities we inhabit today.

 

Norbert Bugeja : 21 Feb 2008 01:53 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem