In its eighth issue, student newspaper Ir-Realtà achieved an enviable notoriety on account of a short story entitled ‘Li Tkisser Sewwi’ (“Fix what you break”).
Authored by Alex Vella Gera, the one-page feature is about as obscene and scatological as any conversation to be overheard anywhere in Malta. On that count, Ir-Realtà certainly does reflect reality.
With stunning effect, it also challenges the glass barrier between what we are exposed to in daily life, and what we can or cannot be exposed to in print. So stunning, in fact, that the University establishment reacted by sweeping up all copies of the publication left lying around on the University Campus, and the Police have questioned both the newspaper’s editor, and the author of the piece.
Has a crime been committed? And if so, should whatever it is be a crime?
‘Li Tkisser Sewwi’ gives voice to a Maltese male, expressing his uninhibited version of the Casanova ideology and practice in very great detail cadenced with logorrhoeic obscenity. The narrative is familiar to all Maltese males. If they cannot identify with the character in whole or in part, they will know someone who fits the bill. There is more than a ring of authenticity to it.
Despite its overwhelming verbal violence to literary decency, it is in effect a very able and outright condemnation of our omnipresent machismo... almost to the point of prudery. At once it smashes the Maltese archetypal, didactic and hypocritical attitudes, while ending with exactly that: an account of an inadvertent rape as a moral to the tale.
It is a literary version of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress: written, not painted, in Maltese and 300 years later.
The graphic, vulgar language is necessary to portray a character who is rendered more revolting in writing than when heard and dismissed in disgust or contempt in any public place in these islands. The nameless character becomes intolerable, and that, it must be assumed, is the point: a moral crusade by extraordinary means.
Unfortunately for the author and the publisher, the sheer obscenity of this character’s language, combined with the graphic details of his account, appear to have overwhelmed the authorities. Nor did it help that the story opens with what appears to be blasphemy – which is in itself illegal, even outside the Press Act which has been cited in defence of the newspaper’s suppression.
The University Chaplain has complained, the Rector has expunged and the Police have questioned. All that remains to be seen is whether the culprits will also be prosecuted, leaving us all to ponder once more where the line is to be drawn between art and censorship.
Should the innocent be protected from exposure to such creations? Can they be protected, once access to the Internet remains essentially uncontrollable? Should those who do not want to be exposed to such literature have the right to ban others from writing it? What exactly is so disturbing about a graphic account of soulless sex? What harm does it do, and to whom?
Unfortunately, however, the upshot of the Realta’ controversy is that instead of provoking critical debate among students (this is, at the end of the day, a university campus newspaper we are talking about here), the most the story managed to achieve is to once again expose the ruthlessness of the local censorship brigade.
It seems that our only reaction when faced with embarrassing, awkward or uncomfortable questions is not to attempt to answer them, but merely to silence the person doing the asking. In a curious reversal of roles, the University’s brash overreaction turns out to be as stupidly superficial as the character portrayed in the story itself... only at the opposite end of the morality scale.
Worse still, this attitude appears to be slowly taking the upper hand in virtually all aspects of public life. In the past two years alone we have witnessed the banning of a stage-play by the censorship board, despite the fact that the same play was critically acclaimed when it debuted at the Edinburgh Festival. People have been arrested, tried and - in one case - even convicted of ‘offending religious sentiment’, simply for attending a Carnival party dressed as religious figures.
Perhaps the most bizarre recent expression of over-zealous (and quite frankly misplaced) censorship involved ‘nude’ mannequins on display in a shop window. The display was intended to raise awareness of exploitation of women and children by the world sex trade. It resulted in a police raid to ‘cover-up’ the offending mannequins, at a time when ‘gentleman’s clubs’ have mushroomed all over Malta’s most frequented nightlife spots.
Meanwhile, as with the censorship of the stage play Stitching, the suppression of ir-Realta’ is also likely to end up in the Constitutional Court, and possibly also in the European Court of Human Rights.
Perhaps it is time Malta finally rid itself of archaisms within the law, and started taking its human rights obligations a little more seriously.
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