Racism in Malta

Camille Choteau interviews Adrian Grima, an artist engagé against irrationality

Adrian Grima turns up for his interview about racism with two books in his hands, The European Tribe by Caryl Phillips and Early Maltese Emigration by Lawrence Attard. He first gives me website addresses for more documentation and then we start this very interesting conversation.

Why would a lecturer in Maltese literature and a poet be interested in talking about this issue? And why did you participate in the “Youth and Racism” poetry recital organised recently by The Arts Collective?

Well, because I think it is important that artists speak out against this hatred, because basically racism is hatred: it is ignorance at best and hatred at worst. And I think it is a moral responsibility for educators like myself to take a strong position against racism.

I’ve had conversations with racist people about the necessity of cultural diversity in a society, about the importance of understanding and accepting difference, and I’ve realised that racism is a fear. Racist people see difference as a problem but this does not make sense because human beings are all essentially different. Racism produces fear and it builds walls, it creates an atmosphere of persecution instead of creating the atmosphere of sharing that we need within our communities. Racism goes against the very spirit of life and creation. Jean-Paul Sartre described anti-Semitism, and therefore racism, as a “passion” and not as an opinion; it is a “neurosis”, not a political theory. Like all other passions, it is built inside us. It is irrational and we have to fight it.

What are the reasons of racism in Malta? Some say that it is the problem of immigration…

Everything that looks different can be seen as a threat. We, as Maltese, have built our identity against the Other. It’s “us” as opposed to “them”. Identity everywhere is constructed in this “oppositional” way. It is not true that racism started with the arrival of “coloured people” or immigrants in Malta in the 1990s because our literature is full of racism and xenophobia, especially the romantic period. (From the late 19^th century till independence in 1964, our literature was very nationalistic.) Foreigners were often seen in a bad light because they were ‘something else’, ‘not us’, ‘il-barrani’ (the outsider).

The fact of being colonised does not help a country to like what comes from abroad. I mean, Malta has been colonised and now that it is independent, there is tourism that can easily be seen as a new form of colonisation. Isn’t it another reason?

Yes definitely, we were colonised, and we were not treated well. Had Malta been as rich as India or the Congo, we would have been exploited even more tragically. Mass tourism can be a type of new colonisation and it tends to alienate the host population.

The relationship between the coloniser and the colonised is perverse because it is a master/subject relationship. We were definitely not the masters. Frantz Fanon and other committed intellectuals have written about the consequences of colonisation on a society. Colonised people often try to overcome their own perception of themselves as inferior by trying to imitate their masters. They try to colonise those they see as ‘inferior’ to them in order to raise their our own perception of themselves, and perhaps in Malta we have created this superior-inferior relationship with Arabs and African people to overcome the inferiority complex created by the size or our island and colonialism.

Why them?

Because they look different. If I wanted to feel superiority over a group of people, I would choose the ones who were manifestly different. And remember that it was the Europeans colonised us, not the Africans. So the European are “superior”, the masters. They are the people we want to be.

As a teacher, I would like you to tell me if you talk about these issues with your students, and what their reactions are like.

Yes, I definitely talk about racism with my students, because the texts we teach deal with this issue, but they are not really aware or concerned with these problems. For example, Maltese racism (and/or xenophobia) is evident in Ġuzè Aquilina’s classic novel published in 1938, Taħt Tliet Saltniet (“Under Three Reigns,” set around 1800). There is no doubt in the novel about who is considered superior. One of the characters, the Muslim slave “Il-Ħalwenija”, does not have a name, it is only a nickname. When she converts to Christianity, she gets a name, and when she decides to become a nun, she gets yet another name. Therefore she is allowed an identity only because she becomes “like us”, Christian. One of the Maltese characters, Indri the singer, tells us that “Despite her dark skin, her face was attractive”!

Unlike the Arab Muslim Il-Ħalwenija, the Englishwoman Mrs. Flemington is treated with great respect and admiration by the narrator. Another Maltese character, De Flores, is enchanted by the smart widow’s “blue eyes, golden hair, and white skin.”

This “classic” novel was written by one of the most committed and enlightened Maltese scholars of the 20^th century and nobody has challenged his representation of Muslims, Jews and foreigners in general. So in many ways his worldview represents that of many Maltese people, even today.

How do the students react when you highlight this racism in Maltese literature?

The students are unaware of this problem, and they seem unperturbed by the whole thing. They are a product of their parents and of our society. It is evident that in our culture, Black people, or people with a darker skin than ours, are often seen as dangerous, ugly, bad, evil… however there is no comprehensive research about racism among the younger generation. They are products of our society, o we can’t separate their vision from that of society in general.

But don’t American comedies and television in general help people to accept Black people more…

Well, I suspect that even with popular comedies like Sister Act, people see the subject as foreign. I mean they think: ‘what I see in this film is not about me, it is not people who I work with. These are not the type of children my children play with. It is not my daily life’. “Métissage” has always been represented on TV, but so have conflicts and hatred. TV gives the impression that it represents reality but it does not: for instance, Dr Brenda Murphy of the University of Malta has written about how you see much more violence on TV than there is in everyday life. When you listen carefully to what they tell you on TV, you understand that the overall message is that ‘difference is dangerous’, that métissage and multiculturalism are essentially problematical.

So this is another reason for the development of racism, isn’t it?

Yes. And the discourse that people hear from the main institutions in Malta is not helping. The Church and politicians have failed us in this respect; they should be much more vociferous and active against racism. There are some people in the institutions who have committed themselves in active ways, but they are few.

The way I interpret the discourse coming from the Church and politicians is that the foreigner is essentially there to deceive you. This was evident in much of the discourse about Malta joining the EU. The message is that foreigners only want to further their own interests, so the Maltese should “defend” their country and its ways, even if they are wrong. For instance, in Malta there isn’t much talk and active commitment in favour of the rights of workers everywhere: we talk almost exclusively about the rights of workers in Malta. People talk about promoting Maltese culture and they don’t see why they should welcome or even promote a Congolese musician or an Irish painter because they think that everybody promotes their “own”. The result is that we disregard the richness of diversity and render our society culturally and artistically poorer. Good artists, good educators, good students must be “open”.

The acclaimed British writer Caryl Phillips [left, by Michael Eastman] believes that today, the process of hybridisation is more than ever “irreversible’, so why not benefit from this richness? Why succumb to an irrational fear?

But for racist people the problem is precisely this “irreversible” hybridisation because they insist on the necessity of remaining pure. This hybridisation is what is seen as a threat…

Yes, but I would argue that we have always been hybrids, we are a mixture. When I say ‘we’ I mean both as human beings and as Maltese. It is a myth that we are the last ‘pure civilisation’ or the ‘last bastion of Christianity’. In the 17^th century, in Vittoriosa the various nationalities, including the Maltese, communicated in Italian. There has always been this cosmopolitanism in Malta, even if we cannot ignore the differences between the villages and the urban areas, especially the Harbour area. Villages were more conservative, more traditional whereas cities were meeting points.

Today, I think that the majority of the Maltese are potentially open, if generally passive, to issues such as racism. Then there is a vibrant, growing minority that is active against racism in very creative and interesting ways, and another minority that is passionately racist.

To come back to the “Youth and Racism” week, I was really pleased that there was such an initiative because I think that many people don’t expect politicians or people from the Church to achieve this moral duty of which you are talking. Now, in my opinion, artists can really pass this message on if they want to.

I agree, but how many artists accepted this open invitation made by The Arts Collective? How many artists in Malta act on issues such as racism? It seems that many artists don’t really care.

You were talking about Jean-Paul Sartre. He fought a lot with his contemporaries about the necessity of being “engagé” on social issues. Some artists just don’t think it is normal for an artist to talk about these things. They want “L’Art pour l’Art” they are lost in their world and they don’t engage with society.

Social engagement does not make you a good artist. To be a good painter, a good writer, you need other skills. But I feel that people who are artistically sensitive should take engage themselves on certain issues. You may disagree with that and some people may be thinking: ‘Ok, this is Adrian’s social engagement crap again.’ But the reality is that many interesting artists in other countries are socially committed; they are open to what happens around them. They may be racist/xonophobic like Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, but they are not pasive.

Why are you so interested in this issue of racism?

I have been active for many years in the Third World Group and Koperattiva Kummerċ Ġust and these organisations have profoundly influenced me. My doctoral thesis dealt with the construction of the Maltese national imaginary in Maltese literature. I analysed how Maltese writers used metaphor to construct the Maltese national identity. This led me to read works by Fanon, Said, Boissevain and others about how an identity is created by pitting it against a constructed Other, ‘us’ against ‘them’.

This text of this interview by Camille Choteau appeared as "Racism in Malta - II" on The Malta Independent on Sunday, May 29, 2005