A year and a half since stepping down as Labour Party leader,
Alfred Sant has bounced back onto the literary scene with what some have called his best novel to date: ‘L-Ghalqa Ta’ L-Iskarjota’. Here he offers the other side of Malta’s most maligned politician
By Raphael Vassallo
Few figures elicit such mixed reactions as former Labour leader Alfred Sant: the man with the doctorate from Harvard, and whose face once loomed on billboards across the island under the ominous words “Ma’ Tistax Tafdah” (He can’t be trusted).
However, it seems the erstwhile Prime Minister can always be trusted to come up the occasional cracker of a novel: and his latest effort – ‘L-Ghalqa Ta’ L-Iskarjota’, published earlier this year by PEG – has since been hailed as among the most inventive and absorbing novels ever written in the Maltese language.
Nonetheless, literature comes in low on the agenda for this interview, when one considers that the same Alfred Sant has (for better or for worse) helped shape Malta’s entire political landscape over the past 15 years. Preparing for the encounter I am assailed by dozens of questions about his 10-year crusade against EU membership, culminating in the claim that “Partnership won” in 2003; or his promised crack-down on government corruption before the last election; or the more recent MITTS controversy, when over 20,000 government email accounts were compromised by an amateur hacker, with scandalous implications for national security...
But Sant – whose obstinacy is now the stuff of legend – puts his foot down: no interviews or comments about politics, other than in his regular deliveries in Parliament, or his weekly column in It-Torca.
“Yes, for the present and for some more time, that has been and will be my approach,” he affirms when I (once again) try sneaking a political question past him.
Not even if I ask really nicely? And in any case, why?
“I do not want by any means to appear to be in the way of Joseph Muscat, who is doing a very good job as PL leader and Leader of the Opposition...”
So be it. A deal is a deal, and in our case it is to talk only about a literary career spanning almost four decades. So let’s start with ‘L-Ghalqa Ta’ L-Iskarjota’, a novel hailed as among the most inventive ever written in Maltese. But in a recent interview with novelist Guzè Stagno, Sant hinted that for all its critical acclaim, the book originated as a bet with Prof. Joe Friggieri, who was tasked with writing three plays to his one novel. Is this true? And who won the bet in the end?
“The bet was two plays to one novel over three to four years,” he begins. “This goes back to 2003, during the wedding of Bertu Marshall’s daughter. As far as I know Joe Friggieri wrote only one play since then. I have now published ‘L-Għalqa tal-Iskarjota’ with a year’s delay, and there is another book of short stories due to be published soon. So by the law of averages, I guess I have won. Joe might consider things differently…”
At a glance this sort of literary “camaraderie” appears anomalous, in an island where artists of all kinds appear pitted in an unending circle of envy and spite. In Sant’s case it is doubly unusual, considering that the “antagonist” also enjoyed a fleeting stint as a Nationalist party candidate for the 2004 MEP elections...
“I’ve no idea whether this kind of approach is operative among Maltese authors,” Sant acknowledges. “I have always enjoyed Joe’s company and am still grateful for an initiative he took back in the 1970s, when I was away from Malta and he single-handedly undertook the production and direction of a play I had then written called ‘Fid-Dell tal-Katidral’...”
The play in question was the title-piece of one of Sant’s three published collections to date; the other two being ‘Min hu Evelyn Costa?’ (1979) and ‘Qabel Tiftah L-Inkjesta’ (1999). And yet, he has since drifted away from the theatre altogether, despite an early success for which he is still remembered, alongside Francis Ebejer and Oreste Calleja, as among the seminal playwrights of the 1960s and 1970s.
What happened?
“Back in the mid-1970s, I got fed up with writing plays that could never be performed. I believed, and still do, in literary drama as one of the forms of theatre. But if what you write cannot be performed, you’re stuck by way of artistic development. So I docketed the plays I had written by then under the generic title of ‘Plays for the Drawer’, and gave up on writing for the theatre. Possibly I might try my hand in the coming months at the genre, as a way of saying a final goodbye...”
It is perhaps no coincidence that Sant found it hard to get his plays produced back then. The decade to which he refers to was in fact notorious for the heavy-handedness of its censors, with famous examples including (theatre) Mario Philip Azzopardi’s ‘Sulari Fuq Strada Stretta’, and (film) Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.
But Sant himself corrects me when I seize on his apparent reference to censorship, to ask him his views about the recent ban on Andrew Neil’s Stitching.
“No, I was not alluding to censorship, but to the lack of a theatrical infrastructure that put forward productions by new writers having new themes and new ways of doing things,” he points out. “Of course, such a lack served sometimes as a screen behind which to implement subtle forms of censorship that left no audit trail. The wider issue, however, is that from a writer’s perspective there’s no point in writing new plays which have little to no chance of being performed.”
Regarding the Stitching controversy in itself, Sant comes across as ambivalent... though it is not exactly hard to tell where his sympathies lie. “Both sides in the controversy made some very good arguments,” he replies somewhat evasively. “However, the testimony in court, as reported in the media, of Rev. Joe Abela (whom I do not know at all) was the most impressive statement to date on the matter, and really sums it all up. I’m really surprised that (if it actually happened as reported) Rev Abela was sanctioned by his superiors instead of being endorsed.”
Fr Abela was on the Church’s diocesan film commission, and media reports suggest he was fired after testifying against the ban in a Constitutional case brought forward by drama company Unifaun Productions. Under scrutiny it turns out that “following cordial discussions” with Archbishop Cremona, Fr Abela was “persuaded” to resign.
Either way, the episode has underscored the precariousness of freedom of expression, in the only European member state which still possesses a theatrical censorship board.
Sant himself openly questions the necessity for censorship in this day and age. “No, I do not think we need a board to censor anything, subject to the existence of well drafted laws that protect society against such evils as incitement to racism, sexual and other abuse of children, and trafficking in human beings, among others.”
Returning to his new novel, Sant himself describes it as a ‘black comedy’ (or to be more linguistically precise, ‘kummiedja tal-wahx’). And yet, in his own public life he is not often associated with comedy or even light-heartedness... as he himself admitted in the aftermath of the notorious Birzebbuga mass meeting, with its ill-fated “joke”, before the 2008 election. So is his latest work a conscious departure from his usual style?
Sant, however, is not amused at my inference that he lacks a sense of humour.
“One of my earliest plays, which in spots I still like, entitled ‘Min Ma Jemminx Fl-Ispjuni?’, was a James Bond spoof based in Malta,” he counters. “I have frequently indulged in farce and/or comedy. Whether others considered such efforts funny or worthwhile is another matter. In my view, one can be most serious when one is in comic mode...”
Be as that as it may, there is no mistaking the serious undertones in ‘L-Iskarjota’. Ostensibly, the novel deals with a team of investigative journalists making a television programme... and considering the close echoes of Sant’s own experiences with the local media as Opposition leader, it is hard to resist the notion that he was taking a satirical pot-shot at certain prominent media celebrities.
“Yes, the theme deals partly with media manipulation, in which horror blends with satire,” he concedes. “That readers will try to make comparisons with media celebrities was perhaps inevitable, but one would probably have to venture outside the local scene to make resemblances and satirical intentions stick right through...”
Indeed it is hard to divorce Sant the politician from Sant the author, when dealing with any of his published works. For instance, many have identified characters in ‘Silg Fuq Kemmuna’ as thinly veiled parodies of well-known political personalities; and regarding ‘L-Iskarjota’, comparisons have also been made between the fictitious television discussion programme ‘Kwis Kwam’, and Where’s Everybody’s Xarabank (which Sant boycotted for years).
How does the author react to interpretations of his works in the light of his own political career?
“I understand it’s a hard job for many readers to make the distinction between writer and politician. I do not have this problem because I tried to be a writer well before I entered politics. I find no incompatibility between the two lines of endeavour. After all if you’re a lawyer, a teacher or an architect, nobody wonders in this small island of ours how you also manage to write creative fiction...”
Perhaps it is a coincidence, but Sant’s first novel ‘L-Ewwel Weraq tal-Bajtar’ was published in 1968: a year of intense political and social upheaval throughout Europe. It is often remarked that the wider implications of the 1968 “revolution” somehow passed Malta by... does Sant agree with this assessment? Was Malta really as cocooned from the rest of the world as is often made out?
“As a colonial outpost, Malta was cocooned from the rest of Europe, and this for long years. However, by the mid-1950s we were moving from a closed to an open society, as efforts were made to introduce while manufacturing and tourism, while the British military base started being wound down. Simultaneously, the overriding influence of the Catholic church was being eroded, not least due to the politico-religious dispute between the Malta Labour Party and the Curia. With the arrival of television and mass education up to secondary level, by the middle to late 1960s, young people were following events and fashions in Europe and the US. These did impact on events in Malta, subject of course to local conditions in a small, peripheral island society. One can recognize reflections of these developments in novels, poems, plays and short stories written by the ‘new’ wave writers of those years and later.”
If the 1960s marked Sant’s own formative years as a writer, they also coincided with an era of epochal, visceral division in Malta: perhaps best epitomised by the abovementioned politico-religious dispute. And yet it is rare to come across any direct references to these issues in contemporary literature. How would Sant respond to the charge of escapism, not just with regard to his own works, but Maltese literature of the 1960s and 1970s in general?
“I disagree with your statement that the events of the 1960s were ignored in contemporary literature,” he retorts. “A number of novels and short stories describe what happened then quite vividly. In my own case, ‘Silġ fuq Kemmuna’ did go into that area, as well as some of the plays. On the other hand, what I find more puzzling is that today, there is less treatment than one would expect of the social and economic changes that happened since the end of the 1980s. Perhaps one reason why ‘L-Għalqa tal-Iskarjota’ has had an impact on some people is because it does try to describe our world of today. To be fair, with the emergence of writers like (Immanuel) Mifsud and (Guzè) Stagno, among others, we have been moving into live and moving descriptions of the here and now...”
A quick question about language. The set-up in Malta appears to be as follows: on the one hand we have a TV/radio landscape which is all but exclusively Maltese, whereas a section of the printed media remains exclusively English. When it comes to novels, poetry and plays, language alone is generally taken to be the defining quality of “Maltese literature”. But would a novel written by a Maltese person in English qualify as “Maltese literature”? How much does language really impinge upon an individual’s cultural identity?
“I think each and every work needs to be considered on its merits, keeping in mind that the ‘Maltese literature’ qualification should be considered as an open-ended tag, not just for today but also for what was produced in the past. Take for instance the literary output produced in Italian during the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps that output needs to be revisited for what it says about some aspects of Maltese society and about literature in Malta. So while language does impinge in a big way on an individual’s cultural identity, with time I have become more flexible in judging whether the language you use to express yourself, predetermines the kind of output you will produce.”
Precisely the above identity issue is often at the forefront of Sant’s own published works. An obvious example would be ‘Confessions of a European Maltese’, but personally I find it more visible in ‘Min Hu Evelyn Costa?’ Are we still a nation with an identity crisis over 40 years since independence? If so, how does he account for this?
“Our island society is so small, so easily penetrated by ‘outside’ influences that a sense of identity and what it really means for us, will always remain an issue. One needs only recall how the Maltese are split over foreign football teams to see the point. In a way, ‘L-Għaqla tal-Iskarjota’ refers to this problem since one of the main characters actually goes through a personality change, even if this happens as part of the horror mechanics set in motion by the curse that applies to the Iscariot field...”
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