The legacy of the sixties

Over the last months, Alfred Sant cleaned up his Silg fuq Kemmuna with a view to publishing a second edition of the acclaimed novel that first saw light just over twenty years ago. He takes a cue from this task to survey the meaning of the 1960's - a decade that changed the shape of our continent. Alfred Sant on today's Malta Independent:

I had not been through the novel for over 20 years. It deals with the experiences of a group of young people towards the end of the 1960s and tries to describe some of the perspectives that were prevalent in Malta then. Re-reading the stuff I had written did feel like travelling in a foreign country: it was the past, and in L.P. Hartley’s famous dictum, they do things differently there. Yet, the memory of this particular foreign country was still with me, alongside the belief that those were very exciting times indeed. Many people of my generation, as well as of the generations immediately preceding and succeeding mine, share the conviction that we were very lucky to have been young in the 1960s. New things happened then; new things never before attempted, were done then; and somehow we had been part of what went on...

In Silg fuq Kemmuna I stressed as a theme the way by which Maltese youth were changing their aspirations and lifestyles as a reaction to the growing openness of their society. But I wrote the book between 1970 and 1973, perhaps too close to the period being described for one to cull from it enough relevant material for a long-term assessment. Interestingly, the young writer Guzé Stagno recently told me about the project he wishes to work upon: a historical novel about the 1960s. For him, it is history, since he was born well after the decade was over and must research it as if he were dealing with 1565 or 1798. I do hope he is progressing with this work…

Perhaps the legacy of the 1960s consists of this: for the first time, peoples around the world were connecting to the big political and social changes happening on a world basis, without there having to be a world war. They did so on an ongoing daily basis, vicariously through the media or more directly through personal experience, while their societies became less and less closed in on themselves. Because of this new interconnectedness, mentalities changed, as did lifestyles and behaviour. The changes became permanent and even though in modified form, are still with us today...

Novels set in Malta - compiled by Joseph Boffa;
1960's - Wikipedia