I recently carried out a little experiment on Facebook. I put up a poll on The Salott (RUBS) and asked people who they thought was the greatest cultural influence on Maltese culture. The top three spots went to the British, the Arabs, and the Knights. What was even more interesting were the comments that accompanied the poll. The British influence rested mostly on collective memory (they were the most recent coloniser), and language. Similarly, Arabic influence boiled down mostly to language, whereas with the Knights it rested mostly on architecture. How accurate is this?
First and foremost it must be made clear that this was simply a Facebook poll, and that it was more an exercise in public perception than a gathering of empirical data. Factual accuracy is never a reliable measure of public perception. There were plenty of comments wherein the author veered off topic, contradicted themselves, changed point of view, or made unsupported sweeping statements. But the purpose of this little experiment was precisely that: observing online interactions as people grappled with the question: who are we?
Having actually lived in the United Kingdom, and having worked and having friendships with British people from various parts of the UK, I can assure you that they would find our concept of ‘Britishness’ alien if not downright risible. Since most who commented focused on language, it is only appropriate to look at language as a starting point.
English is the second official language of Malta, and is constantly present in our daily lives, from advertising, to signage, to everyday conversation. Indeed we have assimilated a lot English words into the Maltese language, often either respelling them (e.g. television become televixin) or even morphing them into new words (e.g. fajjar comes from the verb ‘to fire’). But I would not call our ‘spoken’ English ‘British’. On the contrary, it owes more to American English, brought to us through American pop culture. Oddly enough, no-one considered American pop culture an important influence.
But the British have left us much more than just language – things that we take for granted. We drive on the left like the UK, we use 3-pin electrical fittings, we still use red letter boxes, and our education system is modelled on the British one. And that is only to name a few. Added to that we have a lot of British era architecture that is still very much in use, particularly school buildings and hospital buildings.
And yet there is a discrepancy. The next on the poll were the Arabs, who held sway over the islands from around 870 till around 1091 when Norman influence gradually started to take over. The Arabs have left very little by way of material remains – a few coins, a few shards of pottery, and some beautifully sculpted tombstones. No buildings, no fortifications, no mosques. Nothing.
And yet, our language is at its root a form of Arabic, embellished over the centuries with Romance and English words. In its purer form, Maltese is intelligible to most Arabic speakers. Some would also argue that they have left us our mannerisms, and a not insubstantial mark on our DNA.
There was a time in the early 20th century when historians pushed a narrative of Maltese being a derivative of ancient Phoenician – a theory which has now been refuted. The early 20th century was a time of great national fervour, and many were keen to assert a Maltese identity that was both distinct (and thus meriting self-determination) and at the same time part of a European Christian narrative. Thus the Phoenician theory cleverly bypassed the ‘Arabic’ problem and legitimised Maltese culture as a product of Classical antiquity.
At the same time, it distanced us from the then ‘coloniser-oppressor’ British who were seen as an economic and political necessity, but a cultural pariah. The educated and artistic classes still turned to Italy for inspiration, and up until the 1930s our cultural spheres of influences rested mostly around Italy.
All of that would of course change with the Second World War. Once the Italians dropped the first bomb on Malta, our cultural ties with Italy started disintegrating. Television, dependent on ‘short range’ wave transmission up until the arrival of cable television, allowed cultural continuity. Some efforts at political ties with Italy were also maintained (e.g. the military training programmes, and the Italian archaeological missions that started in the 60s). But as Italy became politically more and more unstable, and as digital TV pretty much pushed Italian mainstream TV out of the picture, so our relationship with Italy became more distant.
It has however remained present in the spheres of football and gastronomy (the latter boosted through an influx of South Italian workers in recent years). But even so, competition from other platforms has greatly decreased the Italian influence. So where does this leave us?
The watershed moment was 2004, when Malta joined the European Union. All of a sudden we were faced with a series of fundamental questions that we never had to face before, namely: Who are we? Who are they? Following decades of post-Independence rhetoric which had asserted our uniqueness, we now found ourselves questioning that identity. Throughout the seventies we had also moved away Europe with Mintoff befriending states which were not only not European, but were positively anti-Western Europe (e.g. Libya and China).
Viewed in this light, our sense of identity is surprising. Our top two spots go to Britain (which has just voted itself out of the EU), and Arabic culture. In 2004 we all scrambled for our atlases to figure out where exactly was Slovakia, whether Slovenia was somehow related, and the precise position of the Baltic states which to our minds seemed like a poorer version of Scandinavia.
The closest we got to acknowledging European culture as an influence was the third spot given to the Knights Hospitaller. But that was a very disappointing third place – because it rested solely on Baroque art and architecture. The contribution and perception of the Knights merits its own investigation, but what matters here is our overall perception of who has influenced us most.
It is our understanding of ourselves that needs to be the starting point for the change that we desperately need, because it is our innate inability to understand and assimilate our influences that has led us down this self-destructive path. In a desperate attempt to assert our prowess, we imitate whatever comes across our path. In the end, instead of showing resilience and talent, we end up being mere mercenaries.
When Brexit hit, we still had politicians scrambling to try and salvage our dwindling British market rather than simply moving on to new pastures, and when lockdown was lifted back in June, we still obsessively tapped into the British market despite strong medical advice that that was not a terribly good idea because the UK was still a risky destination. Our sense of ‘Britishness’ made us instinctively gravitate towards Britain at a time when everyone else was distancing themselves from a very messy country on the verge of internal collapse. At the same time, Muscat’s investment plan relied heavily on Arab money (e.g. the infamous American University of Malta project). He spent his holidays in Dubai, lauded the Dubai model, and courted Arab nationals residing in Malta – once again even when the Dubai economic model had already started its slow inevitable decline. What matters was that the economy grows at whatever the cost.
We have defended dodgy tax haven mechanisms, citizenship schemes, transport infrastructures, etc etc simply because ‘other countries do it’. Our political discourse is still polluted with obsessively self-aggrandising rhetoric that labels us as ‘best in Europe’ or ‘best in whatever’. The result is a sweeping away of any form of identity and the formation of an amoral opportunistic one that has at the best of times made outsiders look at us with suspicion.
We are British or Arab or European according to what suits circumstances, but we are seldom Maltese. We seldom acknowledge the whole – only the component parts depending on need. Indeed, only one or two commentators on the poll (out of a thread that had over 600 poll choices and over a 100 comments) actually dared suggest ‘all of the above’.
And the tragic result is there for us to see. Our townscapes have been destroyed by bland (and often ugly) architecture and urban projects. Our historic centres have been sacrificed to tourism, rendering them mere amusement parks. Our buildings have been gutted and whole histories erased. Our eateries and retail outlets have lost any character and become bland exercises in corporate branding and gentrification. Our infrastructure has destroyed not only land, but also urban mobility in favour of vehicular mobility.
In the 90s people used to refer to Buġibba as the ultimate characterless (and ugly) location in Malta. What we are doing now is simply turning the whole country into one giant Buġibba – a hell hole for cheap tourism and easy money. But soon, very soon, we will have to face ourselves in the mirror of history, and when we ask that damn question ‘Who are we?’, we will be faced with nothing. And where there is nothing left, there is no way of saying what will replace it.
The poll in question seems to have been removed or at any rate could not be retrieved by the author.
MużiKartI 