The warm recollections of Oliver Friggieri

New edition of Fjuri Li Ma Jinxfux

Just when our temporal lives are about to face nerve-wrecking, fear-provoking times, enters Oliver Friggieri with a warm, often starry-eyed 800-page recollection of an innocent, functioning, God fearing island that once was.

Much about this excellently written memoir makes Fjuri Li Ma Jinxfux (Klabb Kotba Maltin) an absolute read - first for being, stylistically, a work of art, and then for steering clear from the I-me-mine biographies often peddled out by politicians. All you need, to truly enjoy Friggieri, is a love of country and of the masterly use of our mother tongue.

The conflict between Mintoff and Borg Olivier

Fjuri Li ma Jinxfux is a moving feast of characters, locations and events – and then some more; it is a sight-seeing tour of innocence and its slow decay, of a once violence-and-corruption free governance that then collapsed: of a time when people cared for and about each another and then grew relativist: of the time politicians got upstaged by others who set neighbour against neighbour: of a Catholic Church and its imperious prelate, Gonzi, making disingenuous use of Faith and the afterlife to ring fence their crumbling antediluvian traditions and collapsing bastions: of a Labour Party that bled itself to near irrelevance trying to replace widespread mediocrity with alien British styled liberal politics: of a revered George Borg Olivier, who, almost by default and certainly the gross miscalculations of his rival Dom Mintoff, won for the country its most glittering prize yet, Independence.

It is also about the dark days of insanity that followed the Labour Party’s attempts to introduce socialism by decree, and how a Prime Minister’s claim that books are written by people with nothing better to do made Friggieri publish that other opus, Fil- Parliament Ma Jikbrux Fjuri (In Parliament No Flowers Grow), in 1986.

There’s hilarity – not least his dash by car to Birgu for the festivities marking the closure of British military bases in 1979. Then there’s poignancy, not least the loss of his two sons at birth.

Some recollections are soft and endearing, particularly his family life at home, studying for the priesthood at the Archbishop’s seminary, his first wobbly forays into literature at a very young age. There is the start of a movement dedicated to promoting Maltese language- still alive and robust - in which fea- ture a teenaged Alfred Sant, Albert Marshall and Mario Azzoppardi to mention but a few stalwarts. There is his rise from schoolteacher to University Professor.

Moving portraits of street heroes

Fjuri Li Ma Jinxfux is crowded with to-die-for characterizations, pure gold portraits of miniature and larger than life heroes, of simple folk and simple minded characters who peopled the streets of Balzunetta, now a bulldozed red light district once favoured by British troops, then young Friggieri’s neighbourhood. It all creates tons of empathy between reader and biographer. The truth is no town or village was then complete without its jeered and hounded eccentrics. In Zejtun , where I grew up, we had, IlHajbu and Ix-Xifu, homeless vagrants, even our own Koranta, the elderly spinster whose nuptials were thwarted by an ungracious crowd milling outside the church chanting insults.

An island that once was

Oliver Friggieri’s recollections are, fundamentally, much about a nation whose faith and worth got slowly seduced by modernity. Friggieri, who grew up morally sheltered inside the barricades of Saint George Preca’s MUSEUM organization and then Mons Victor Grech’s Archbishop’s Seminary, comes across, page after exiting page, dismayed at and critical of how all this came to pass.

Yet, for all of its passion, Oliver Friggieri’s wistful journey from 1955 to 1990 is never withering. If anything he is tolerant and reverent, even towards Dom Mintoff from whom years later, he uselessly sought answers on what made him bring democracy to near collapse as the two broke bread together, ate salt and then took afternoon country walks in Delimara. He is even more deferential discussing politicians he knows intimately including Eddie Fenech Adami, Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and his one-time school chum Louis Galea.

Wisely, Oliver Friggieri paints his decades in broad strokes – the right approach for a book that is neither a biography nor a narrative of history - but this if anything makes the book more fascinating.

Somewhere, I am sure, there is a picture of a young Oliver Friggieri being crowned with laurels, in jest, by friends.

Amazing how life comes to imitate art.

The detached observer of a nation

Today, mature and a grandfather, Oliver Friggieri is the undisputed Emperor of large swathes of our literary landscape, a tribute to his irreducible talent and natural industry. The majesty of his poetry, his stirring oratorios and cantatas ( Pawlu ta’ Malta, LGhanja ta’ Malta, Dun Gorg, Rewwixta and others), the weighty literary criticisms, his constant contributions to foreign academic journals, his bewildering studies, his definitive dictionary of literary terms, popularly applauded stage plays, novels and biographies - most of which have been published in several foreign countries - and now this, his memoirs, makes him justifiably a much loved national treasure.

That however comes secondary to Friggieri who, foremost, remains as fearful of God and much of the world around him as when he first started out – perplexing given his many accolades.

In writing Fjuri Li Ma Jinxfux Oliver Friggieri casts himself in the role of the detached observer of people and their actions, similar to an out-of-body experience. There is more to it than that. Friggieri’s recollections are a chart of the decease that often creeps under the nation’s carapace. His fear is that there is no cure. His prayer is that there is.