Jiena sejjer, ħelwa Malta, se nħallik.
“I’m going, my sweet Malta, I shall be leaving you.” As I was leaving Malta, I was thinking of the opening verses of the poem Għanja ta’ Malti sejjer isiefer by Maltese socialist and strong advocate against British colonial rule Manwel Dimech (1860–1921), in which he contemplates on his forced exile by the colonial authorities, following a decade and a half of his influential activism among the Maltese people. I was intrigued to discover that just at the beginning of his activist campaign, not long after his release from imprisonment, where he had spent some twenty years of life between the ages of 13 and 36, Dimech travelled to Montenegro in 1903, where he stayed for almost three weeks to study its history and politics. No doubt this small former Yugoslav republic which prides itself on never becoming a subject of the Ottoman Empire, just like Malta, which resisted the Ottoman invasion in the 16th century–a turn of events that will profoundly shape its identity in centuries to come under the jurisdiction of the Order of St. John–has influenced Dimech’s own sense of freedom, too. No matter how small they may seem in the long, dark shadow of empires, “Montenegrins do not kiss chains”–as a famous saying, attributed to 19th-century Montenegrin prince-bishop and poet Petar II Petrović Njegoš, puts it. Nor should Maltese.
I have spent two weeks in Malta, visiting various places in the archipelago. In a central location, in the old town of Valletta, right next to St. John’s Co-Cathedral–a peculiar landmark, more magnificent on the inside than on the outside–facing the busy Triq ir-Repubblika stands a Neoclassical monument by Antonio Sciortino (1879–1947), commemorating the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, an unsuccessful attempt by the Ottomans to conquer the island held by the Knights Hospitaller. Now it is made into a makeshift memorial to journalist and anti-corruption activist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was assassinated for her outspokenness in a car bomb attack in 2017, at the age of 53. Rising above candles and flowers in tribute to Caruana Galizia, the three figures–one male and two female–featured in Sciortino’s Great Siege monument, are said to represent courage, faith, and civilization. How ironic.
Nowhere echoes memento mori more–and so vividly, at that–than while walking inside St. John’s Co-Cathedral, literally standing on the knights’ colourful marble gravestones all over its floor. In the Chapel of the Langue of Aragon, a funerary monument to the 17th-century Grand Master Nicolas Cotoner blatantly depicts an Asian and an African slave kneeling at the bottom while supporting the pedestal with the Grand Master’s golden bust on their backs, just like the mythological Atlas, who was punished for rebellion against Zeus to hold up the heavens on his shoulders for evermore. Vae victis! Even in death and in eternity, there is no make up for racism, earthly injustice, inequality, and oppression.
One of Atlas’s daughters was the nymph Calypso, who resided in Gozo, where she kept Odysseus, the Mediterranean storyteller–as the Maltese philosopher, emeritus professor Peter Serracino Inglott (1936–2012) calls him–for several years on his way back home. She offered him immortality if he stayed with her, but he chose instead to return to Ithaca, where his wife and son await him to drive away the greedy suitors. Was he just homesick, or was he aware in fact that the false promise of transcendental, divine justice is but an illusion, and that we alone are responsible for this world of ours, that needs fixing?
Then there is Caravaggio! He was expelled from Malta, too. It made me think how the greatest among us often end up contested and persecuted by their surroundings. I found another Montenegrin link inside the Co-Cathedral–the Chapel of Our Lady of Philermos was where the Order of St. John kept the icon of their patroness, brought here as a war trophy from Rhodes. When Malta was invaded by Napoleon in 1798, the icon was taken to Russia. In the turmoil of events following the October Revolution, it ended up in Montenegro, then part of Yugoslavia, where it was eventually hidden from the public for several decades. Today it is exhibited in the National Museum of Montenegro, in a totally dark room illuminated only by Philermosa’s gold and diamond covering. Indeed, strange are the ways of destiny.
Another historical event brings together Malta and Yugoslavia. In 1945, Hajduk, then the official football team of the Yugoslav partisan resistance led by Josip Broz Tito, embarked on a tourney through the Mediterranean. On 25th March, they met with the team of Malta at the Empire Stadium in Gżira. As only the Yugoslav and the British national anthem God Save the King were played before the match, thousands at the stadium rose up in protest and sung the Maltese anthem, Innu Malti. This has inspired Rużar Briffa (1906–1963), who was in the crowd on that day, to write what’s arguably one of the most patriotic poems of Maltese literature, Jum ir-Rebħ, in which masses, united, stand up and shout, demanding equal treatment and an end to humiliation: Jien Maltija! – “I am Maltese! Woe to him who mocks me, woe to him who laughs at me!” Is there a more noble cause?
Yugoslavia, the land of my ancestors, exists no more. Like Odysseus, we, too, are left in troublesome search of home, in a permanent state of exile, but ours is an eternal punishment by the devious gods. As Yugoslavia broke into a myriad of pieces, we are now condemned to finding them recurrently all over the world–in Malta, too–whilst knowing for sure, however, that no human should ever be able to collect them all. Still, each piece tells a bittersweet story of a lost civilization that once resisted the chains of colonialism and oppression