Identity We hear so much about identity these days. It’s not just Malta’s intellectuals engagés who love to pore over who we are, what we have become and where we might be going in their anthropological, fatalistic or just plain disdainful articles.
No, I have detected a common thread in the comments which people leave beneath on-line newspaper articles. It is our constant, restless grappling with our Maltese identity. Every news story – whether it’s about a brawl outside a Birzebbugia club or Owen Bonnici’s objection to ‘being banned from’ speaking in the mother tongue in Brussels – generates a host of opinions on what that particular event reflects about our identity. A brawl is never just a brawl between a few drunk individuals: it tells us that ‘we have gone to the dogs’. An event is never simply an event: it is always something which shows us ‘who we are’.
Do you never get the feeling that all this talk about ‘Maltese identity’ verges on the obsessive? An English friend once observed that it’s the middle classes who endlessly agonise over their identity. The lower classes and the upper classes know exactly who they are, feel comfortable in their skin and simply get on with being themselves.
Brussels (limits of Valletta)
L-imħuħ ta’ ġenerazzjoni
Li mingħaliha ilsienha sabet
Fil-qiegħ ta’ kexxun fi Brussel
Fuq mejda t’uffiċju modern
Luxembourg
Probably my favourite song of the year is local band Brikkuni’s Brussel, which is dedicated to the hundreds of Maltese ex-pats who fled to Brussels and Luxembourg at the first opportunity when Europe’s doors swung open. It’s a well-written song – funny and angry in equal measure and it comes dripping with identity issues: the ungrateful native rejects the island where he was born and bred, trading it in for a grey – but lucrative – existence on the continent from where he can smugly contemplate his great escape from mediocrity.
Quarrelling with a songwriter is useless so I won’t go there. At any rate, I’m a fan of this band. But I think there is something more to several young people’s flight to this town. In many ways it is an escape from the suffocating categorization which life on the island entails. In our obsessive search for who we are, we have crushed individuality in favour of strong badges of identity: linguistic, religious and political. Brussels is the antithesis of all this: a post-national town which has no identity issues to solve because it doesn’t seem to have much of an identity in the first place. This makes living here a liberating experience. The closest I have come to locating the heart of this city is in an underground cellar in the Impasse de la Fidélité called Delirium Café where you can order beers called Delirium Christmas, Orval, Lupulus, Korsendonk and Cuvé e des Trolls to the sound of The Doors, Jacques Brel, Leftfield and Serge Gainsbourg.
The day Brikkuni’s Kollox Soġġettiv comes on at Delirium, I will lift my glass of Trappiste to them and fondly think of the homeland. Come to think of it, I will ask the blond rasta barman to play a few of their songs next time I drop in.
I know what you did last Christmas A combination of work and travel plans have conspired to turn this into an atypical Christmas. Three childhood friends who attended Stella Maris College, Gzira, will prepare a Swiss raclette in a Brussels flat, open presents under a miniature palm tree and talk about their post-Christmas holidays in Cuba and Laos. Good wine permitting they will contemplate how globalization and easy travel have shifted the sands of identity forever.
I wish the readers of MaltaToday an exciting New Year.
David Friggieri lives, works and enjoys listening to local band Brikkuni in Brussels
Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below. Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.
Search:
MALTATODAY
BUSINESSTODAY
All the interviews from Reporter on MaltaToday's YouTube channel.
