The Malta Independent on Sunday
One hundred years of memories
Continued from page 21
Keeping to the reverse order, next is Tonio Borg’s critical legal analysis of the shootings and killings. Making use of post-World War II human-rights legislation and case-law, Dr Borg essentially considers the colonial administration guilty of employing disproportionate force and concludes that had the administration been more cautious, the fatalities would have probably been avoided. Dr Borg closes his essay with a methodological justification which I would have used as premise: in 1919, the principles which were crystallised in the aftermath of WWII, were already well-known, as attested by Winston Churchill’s reference to how things ought to be done. It is obvious that Dr Borg is correct as it is accepted that human rights have existed since time immemorial; legal instruments and courts of law merely reduce them to writing, also for the benefit of those who – as WWII has amply shown – are not aware of them or are reluctant to respect them.
Preceding Dr Borg’s short and crisp essay, is a timely contextualisation of the Sette Giugno penned by André P. Debattista, an up-and-coming public intellectual whose writings I follow with interest and admiration.
I have long noticed that for the Maltese, the island is in the head. Do you remember Norbert Attard’s deceptively simple drawings of Malta surrounded by bastions? That’s how a certain type of Maltese historiography is presented to the reading public, portraying Malta as if she exists in vacuo and the Maltese are cut off from what’s going on beyond the shores of their tiny homeland. The newspapers articles I cited about, quoted by Professor Bartolo, actually show that the Maltese – even the supposedly ignorant workers – were fully abreast with current affairs and knew that US President Wilson was sympathetic toward small nations and Britain had ostensibly fought the Great War for democracy. Mr Debattista’s essay is thus valuable as it places the Sette Giugno events in the context of what was unfolding within the Empire and elsewhere. He manages to compress a huge amount of information into a few pages, transmitting to the intelligent reader the essentials necessary to form a mental image of the times. The result of this contextualisation is that the intelligent reader realises that the Maltese were somehow already part of the universal identity Charles Xuereb referred to. On one point only I might disagree with Mr Debattista: the omission of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, particularly in the light of Crown Advocate Refalo’s Marxist speech cited by Paul Bartolo. Then again, Mr Debattista might have been focussing exclusively on 1919.
The book opens – and this review closes – with an assertive essay replete with quotable nuggets, penned by Henry Frendo, who also edited the book.
Professor Frendo has practically dedicated much of his professional life, if not all of it, to capture and convey Malta’s colonial experience and the core tension between the British who needed a fortress-colony to protect their interests and the Maltese who desired to be a British protectorate to allow them to pursue their interests, or, at worse, a British colony which would still allow the metropole to enjoy the military benefits of the Islands’ strategic position while permitting the population to realise its aspirations. This tension electrified Anglo-Maltese relations and galvanised Professor Frendo’s work. His essay reflects this powerful relationship between historian and historical subject, and achieves a number of objectives. It not only gives a masterful interpretation of the events, but also affords the intelligent reader the opportunity to reflect on the effects of imperialism on intra-Maltese relations. If you have read Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus or watched Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (or both), you will have before your eyes the phenomenon which, to my mind, Professor Frendo is referring to in his essay. For the Professor, who is among Malta’s finest historians, the Sette Giugno was not rowdy bravado and vandalism or the misdeeds of a wild bunch intent on theft. It was not the eruption of pent-up violence to give vent to the base instincts of the uncouth projected toward the wealthy. It was not class hatred. Instead, it was one of the defining moments in the protracted coming of age of the Nation. All the other essays in the book are intellectually stimulating and rewarding, but Henry Frendo’s goes one step further. It transmits the emotional charge of a life-long passion to reach to the soul of a people, to understand the spirit of the times, and to convey the “spiritual” way in which history manifests itself, making use of individuals through whom the Nation’s destiny is forged.
According to the blurb on the back cover, the book is a “modest commemoration”, “a small addition to... the books about the event that have already been published.” I’ll take these words at face value and strongly disagree. This is neither a modest commemoration nor a small addition. This is an excellent revisiting of one of the most tragic days in the making of the Nation, a hundred years later.