Authors boycott women’s day poetry event on censorship stance
David Darmanin A group of female writers have decided to boycott a literary event at the Manoel Theatre organised by the National Council of Women (NCW) in protest against the organisation’s stand on author Alex Vella Gera’s controversial short story ‘Li Tkisser Sewwi’.
Authors Clare Azzopardi, Maria Grech Ganado and Simone Inguanez informed the organisers they were boycotting the event held last Friday to commemorate Women’s Day, saying they were against the council’s stand on the controversy, for which the author is facing criminal charges together with editor Mark Camilleri.
In fact, the day before, the police initiated criminal proceedings against Vella Gera for his short story published on Ir-Realtà, in which he depicts a sex-obsessed man talking about his sex life. Vella Gera, who lives in Brussels, was in Malta to testify in the criminal case against Camilleri over the same story which five months ago, but was then told by police that he was to be interrogated him.
The three writers said they would have betrayed a fellow author by attending the event – which was held under the auspices of the President’s wife – after the women’s council took a stand against Vella Gera’s work for being “degrading and offensive”.
Contacted by MaltaToday, the authors said they were initially enthusiastic at the idea of promoting women’s art on Women’s Day, but they would have been hypocritical to attend an event by an organisation that was denouncing a fellow author who was also facing a prison term.
“I could have been harsher… I could have asked for my work not to be recited,” Clare Azzopardi told MaltaToday. “But ultimately, I did not want to rain on anyone’s parade. My absence was simply intended as a statement.”
Maria Grech Ganado, herself a lecturer, maintains that the NCW missed the point of the story – which in itself, she claims, is pro-women. “The story simply depicted a mentality that still prevails in Malta – even among people who do not use the type of language narrated in the story,” she said. “Without going into the merits of whether it was a good or bad piece of literature, the story shed light on an attitude that some men still have towards women. It is actually positive and pro-women.”
Writer Simone Inguanez, a lawyer by profession, informed the council by email that she would be “betraying fellow writers” by attending. NCW did not send her a reply, nor did they answer Azzopardi’s email explaining her reasons for not attending.
Grech Ganado informed NCW by phoning an official, who promised to forward her complaint to president Grace Attard. “Other than that, none of us heard anything from the council yet,” Grech Ganado said.
Contacted yesterday, the NCW president sounded surprised when asked for a comment, saying she did not read the emails. “I am hearing this for the first time,” Attard said. “I just came back from abroad, and since my inbox was full I could not read my emails.”
However she criticised the authors on their stand, saying they had “no reason not to attend” and accusing them in turn of wanting to censor the women’s council.
“It’s not like we issued a statement that degraded women,” she said. “Everyone has the freedom to express themselves. But with this gesture – it is these authors who are controlling our freedom of expression, and nobody has a right to do that.”
Attard insisted Vella Gera’s novel was deplorable because it degraded men and women on “a media channel” but would not be drawn into whether its author had to be criminally prosecuted.
Confronted with Grech Ganado’s claim that Vella Gera’s story was actually pro-women, Attard replied: “This is a question of perception – if I read something, I may perceive it differently. Even if it was not Vella Gera’s intention to degrade women – people would have perceived it as such because come on, the story was too crude… I spoke on behalf of those people who perceived it that way.
“Men’s attitudes towards women are being reinforced by such articles,” she claimed, adding that the newspaper was also distributed at the Junior College sixth form. “We are not talking of informed and intellectual people reading the story… God knows how many people laughed and enjoyed reading those explicit descriptions, wanting to be in the place of the narrator… Had it been recited at St James Cavalier I would not have condemned it.”
Meanwhile, both Grech Ganado and Azzopardi are among the central animators of Grupp 29 – a lobby made up of 90 authors, artists and intellectuals who are defending Vella Gera by petitioning authorities to stop the criminalisation of art.
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