The latest onslaught in the ongoing moral crusade against art and freedom of speech has led the rector of our one and only university to ban a left-wing student newspaper from campus after it published a provocative short story by novelist and poet Alex Vella Gera. The rector, it turns out, was alerted by the university chaplain, who felt offended by the story’s language, so apart from banning it, the police interrogated the editor, a 21-year-old student called Mark Camilleri.
Breaking tradition of not involving police in university matters on campus – supposedly the modern day temple of enlightenment and freedom of thought – the rector’s action may lead to the editor and author facing criminal charges.
Shocking stuff, really, until you see it within the much wider actions of the censorship regime coming down on all of us, making us numb to the most serious of transgressions on our freedom. The list reads like the Vatican’s infamous mediaeval Index of prohibited books: From the Duchess of Malfi to Stitching, from the Mosta mannequins to Raphael Vella’s art installation, and now to Alex Vella Gera’s story.
Like Alex’s story, my novel Il-Manifest tal-Killer was also censored at university – by a priest, no less – when it was about to be read on its radio station, Campus FM. I know perfectly what censorship is. I can smell its acrid stench from a mile away, and I hate it. As an author and a journalist, it feels like part of you is being amputated.
Alex’s crime – as pointed by yet another priest – is that he has written an ‘obscene’ piece of literature degrading women. Funny how it had to be a priest – assumingly a celibate man and member of an institution that for 2,000 years has steadfastly refused to allow women among its ranks of power – to defend women.
Vella Gera uses rough and fiercely native prose in tradition of Irvine Welsh and Niall Griffiths – whose books are, incidentally and thankfully, freely available in Maltese bookshops without any international warrants of arrest for the authors issued by our diligent police corps.
In one of the scenes he narrates, Alex’s character speaks nonchalantly of a rape, bringing to the fore the protagonist’s complete disconnection from reality, as he doesn’t even realise the seriousness of his actions. Alex’s character captures the essential Maltese sex maniac whom I would call il-ħanżir Malti. It’s an excellent insight into the mind of this all too Maltese character.
The chaplain, the rector, and the police (this is sounding like an unholy trinity) do not care about any of this. They clearly do not see the merits of exploring our darker side which literature and art can bring out perfectly at the expense, perhaps, of the bigoted image we try to portray as being more Catholic than the Pope.
Offence, if that is the issue, is not a reason to censor. I, for one, feel offended by the Church’s patronising sermons, by its pervasive public discourse trying to control our everyday life, including our civil liberties. But I would be the last one to argue it should be shut up.
It was the European Court of Human Rights, after all, which ruled way back in 1976 that “the right to freedom of expression includes the right to offend, shock an disturb” and that “such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness without which there is no democratic society.”
Stripped of its power to provoke and disturb, literature will be reduced to a propaganda tool of the establishment or to the sanitised equivalent of Disneyland.
If the police – the state’s executive arm – is going to be allowed to criminally prosecute an author and a student editor on moral grounds, then the decision is totally on the Gonzi administration’s shoulder. For make no mistake, this is a political decision. It is not about drug dealing or murder – although the accused will appear in the same criminal court – but it is about what an author can or cannot write. On what we should be allowed to read. On whether we are a free country or not. Censorship – from book burning to the criminalisation of literature – has always been the political arm of oppressive regimes. For what is censorship but the suppression of voices by those who want to impose their worldview on everyone?
Time and again, we have treated censorship all too laxly, apologetically even. From theatre to literature to art, censorship is all over us, and this in European Malta 2009. It is not the Church, it is a pervasive confessional mentality that seeps through all the supposedly secular and civil institutions – from university to the police, to parliament – mocking the very European Union into believing that we are a free and modern country.
Our liberties – not just artistic – are all the time put subservient to the likes of the Archbishop, Gift of Life, Opus Dei and the Vatican. It is also the same regime which legitimises the gagging of the free press – MaltaToday on the frontline – through draconian libel laws.
It is time to wake up. A society that is laid back about its freedoms will lose them without noticing. This is a call to arms. It’s time to offend, shock and disturb.
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The rector, it turns out, was alerted by the university chaplain, who felt offended by the story’s language, so apart from banning it, the police interrogated the editor, a 21-year-old student called Mark Camilleri.
