Malta and Muslims

Egyptian saying:

زي اللي بيأذن في مالطة
Like a call for [Muslim] prayer in Malta

Maltese saying:

Ix-xita u x-xemx, twieled Tork
With simultaneous rain and sun, a Turk (Muslim) is born.

1942 on the island of Malta

The Information Officer is a new thriller by bestselling author Mark Mills. The story takes place in Malta and the protagonist is a Max Chadwick, information officer, who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery and decides to embark on a private investigation all of his own.

Max Mills spoke here of the motive behind the choice of setting:

The reason for setting the third book in Malta during the second world war is very simple. As I was nearing the end of The Savage Garden, I was looking for some displacement activity, cause I wasn't having a very fun time of it, and I went to our local junk shop and as always I was browsing through the second hand books and I plucked out a little memoir, a dusty little memoir, and it was written by someone who had been in Malta in 1942. Although I knew that Malta had suffered terribly during the second world war, I didn't know to what degree. I went home, I should have been writing the other book but I was so hooked by this memoir that I read it in one sitting. I knew at that moment that I had the setting for my third novel.

On the question of his book's female character he said:

I've always really enjoyed writing my female characters and they figure large in all of the books. I guess they're all pretty feisty and pretty rounded individuals. I have sometimes been asked why that is. I don't know what the reason to that is other than that I come from a family of strong and willful women. I have a mother who is a force of nature and three very feisty sisters so it seems pretty normal for me that the women that I portray should have those characteristics. They should be real people and not wall flowers.

Evolutions and Revolutions

Here is some historical perspective to yesterday's blog entry. According to Dan Healey's book Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, from way back in the 1840s a belief was held by some that socialism would both end economic exploitation and bring about personal and sexual freedoms. The 1917 fall of the Tsar brought some sexual freedom but Stalin's counter revolution in the 1930s brought an end to this. The Russian Orthodox church was one with the Tsar and promoted sexism and antisemitism. Industrialisation helped lessen some traditions and social control.

After the unsuccessful 1905 revolution, censorship was relaxed and modern ideas of sex, including the concept of sexual preference, started taking hold. The Bolshevik-led revolution in 1917 secularised sexuality. Sex between men was decriminalised, as was abortion and divorce.

The civil war brought with it poverty and starvation.

"But there was a sense there that gay people saw this as their revolution too. I can think of one drag queen in Kursk, written about in a medical article, who really does seem to interpret the events of the civil war and the revolution as a licence to be quite flagrant and outrageous. For a while people seemed to be willing to go along with that."
Dan Healey

All this was reversed in the 1930s. Homosexuality would now get you a three year minimum jail sentence. All that Stalin's regime considered to be independent and out of its control, it tried to oppress. Before 1933, according to Healey:

"It (sexual freedom) was taken as part of the sexual revolution that Russia didn't persecute people the way they do in 'bourgeois philistine' countries, where a religious and moral stricture fuelled an old prejudice"

With Stalin, homosexuals returned to being 'fascists' and 'spies'.

Noise 1. Opera

At the end of 2008 Malta's Prime Minister, Dr. Lawrence Gonzi, announced to a bemused and astonished electorate that he planned to build a Parliament in place of the bombed out Opera House building in Valletta. This is Europe's most visible World War Two bomb site at the entrance to Valletta.
Ian Waugh

I have performed at many opera houses which are not as big as the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden or New York's Metropolitan Opera House, but still do a very good job of sustaining big productions. I think more studies need to be carried out to ascertain whether the footprint is indeed not suited for a modern-day theatre.
Joseph Calleja

"The numbers are simply not there!"
Dr Fenech categorically stated that whoever said Malta needed another opera house did not know what they were talking about, referring to them and their opinions as "hullabaloo".
Dr. Peter Fenech

The national theatre is not there to make profit but to serve the people irrespective of the cost.
Kenneth Zammit Tabona

The Malta Library and Information Association (MaLIA) issued a press release last month proposing that this site is developed into a Cultural Centre that should include a state-of-the-art public library, among other facilities.
MaLIA

To put Parliament there would be a clear option for The City as a museum rather than for Valletta Alive, since Parliament requires a building with severely restricted entry and even more stringent security precautions than those which have impeded St James Cavalier from making use of its splendid roof space (because of proximity to the Prime Minister's office).
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott

I truly appreciate what Fr Peter has done for the arts and culture and I fully understand his line of thinking that Valletta can only be revived in the evenings through cultural activities; on the other hand, there is simply nowhere else to put our Parliament.
Ray Bondin

Plainly speaking, I don’t agree that the Parliament should be shifted to the entrance of the city. A parliament in this location would contribute to the death rather than to the revival of the image and life of Valletta as a capital city.
Victor Galea

Given that nobody seems content to let the others get away with a parliament house, a museum of modern art, an opera house, a national theatre, and now even a public library, we run the risk of being left with the one thing that will offend no one: nothing.
Daphne Caruana Galizia

Where does the present fit in between Maltese history?

In Malta there is so much history it risks snuffing out contemporary life. How do you live in and around the glory and ruins of 5000 years of human activity? A fun example was found yesterday afternoon at the Upper Barrakka Gardens where preparations were under way for a wine festival. Tables were being set up in between cannons on the the "saluting battery". If you think about it too much, the proximity of war and leisure seems a strange mix, but in practice it's beautiful, peaceful, and the view unparalleled. However, when I'm visiting Malta, I feel overloaded by "older" or "official" history, whether it's the Knights of Saint John, the ornate churches or something involving World War II. I have a harder time getting a sense of what Malta was like more recently, during the 1970s or 1980s. And what interesting things are Maltese artists, intellectuals and up to today? As a visitor, I have to work hard to find this kind of thing, but it's there. Malta is not alone, artists and creative people in places like Edinburgh and Paris have a hard time doing "new" things under the weight of all that beautiful history.