The recent ban of campus newspaper Ir-Realtà has exposed a worrying aspect of daily life in 21st century Malta.
Local authorities appear to be insensitive towards certain crucial rights and freedoms of the individual: many of which are taken for granted in other Western democracies, but appear to be still alien to our culture and mindset.
In fact, what ultimately lies at the heart of the ‘moral outrage’ provoked by the latest edition was nothing more than the umpteenth case of prejudice and ignorance. Prejudice, because while obscenity and vulgarity is readily accepted in film, on TV, and in foreign books and magazines, there appears to be an underlying bias that “different rules” ought to apply to local productions and/or publications.
This can easily be interpreted as an attempt to straitjacket Maltese literature, in that local writers are pre-conditioned and to a great extent discouraged from exploring ‘new’ avenues of expression... even those avenues which are standard fare in the works of established (foreign) contemporary writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk.
Ignorance also plays its part, in that the University administration responsible for this decision is evidently unaware of the rich case history regarding censorship in the European Court of Human Rights, which has painstakingly made it clear that article 10 of the Convention of Human Rights also includes the ‘freedom to offend’, as laid down in the Handyside ruling: “Freedom of expression... is applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no ‘democratic society’.” Besides, the University still has some explaining to do over precisely how and why this decision was taken. Last Thursday, Dr Juanito Camilleri, the university rector, finally issued a public (and long overdue) justification, arguing that the newspaper was banned because it ‘might’ have fallen into the hands of children (to whom the offending story in question is evidently unsuited).
But this is at best a feeble excuse to deny an author the right to freedom of expression. After all, using Dr Camilleri’s own logic, shouldn’t hunting also be banned, on the grounds that a hunter’s shotgun may accidentally fall into the hands of a young child (an eventuality which has often happened in the past, sometimes with tragic results)?
At a stretch one could extend the same principle to any number of unsafe appliances and practices, ranging from matches, to clothes irons, to liquidisers, to kerosene heaters... possibly even to cars.
But perhaps the most disappointing aspect in all this is that not a single voice has been raised against the ban on the part of University academics themselves. The University after all has a Faculty of Arts, complete with departments in most major European literary traditions: English, Italian, French, and so on. Lecturers in these departments have often been known to decry the censorship of such renowned world authors such as D.H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, Henry Miller and Anthony Burgess. And yet, when an entirely analogous case of censorship crops up right under their noses, the same academics suddenly appear to have no interest whatsoever in defending a Maltese author’s freedom of speech.
Lastly, it must also be said that no one – in or outside University – appears to have given the short story any form of attention from a literary angle. Like all works of fiction, Alex Vella Gera’s short story must also be taken in a context within which it was written. This context includes the fact that Malta has a visibly high rate of violent crimes perpetrated upon women by men: including numerous recent cases of domestic rape, grievous bodily harm, and even murder.
Vella Gera’s story, with its graphic induction into the mind of a recognisable local stereotype (the foul-mouthed ‘male chauvinist pig’) is clearly intended to shock. But it is not obscenity for obscenity’s sake; nor is it the type of gratuitous ‘shock factor’ we associate with mindless pulp or snuff videos. There is a purpose lurking behind the objectionable language – a point is being made with each new descent into verbal atrocity; and while it is perfectly possible to achieve the same effect using different means, it is patently illegal to prevent a writer from expressing himself in his own chosen fashion.
From this perspective, it is to say the least disappointing that of all Malta’s institutions, it had to be our University to so painfully misconstrue a work of literature, violating human rights in the process.
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