As you can imagine, there haven’t been many moments in my life where I’ve been lost for words. In fact, my father always tells me that one day I’m going to die trying to get the last word in. What I can’t state through logic, I usually convey through wit or sarcasm. My friends say I should do stand-up, and today, standing up is what I’m going to be doing, though maybe not in the way they intended.
I’m writing this next to a rain-spattered window; there’s a burning candle next to me and I’m all bundled up in a quilt. I suppose from the grey outside I must look particularly Dickensian. Maybe in another life, I could have been a Miss Havisham, save for the fact that at this stage in my life I’m not silly enough to weep over a man while wearing a wedding gown; I’d probably just catch a flight to Jamaica instead. I’ve always hated Octobers in Malta because I find them so undecided and inconsistent: I suppose in some ways they mirror us as a people. Nowadays, I have another reason to dislike them.
It’s been two years since Daphne Caruana Galizia walked out of her house and unto her death. I’ve never been good at Maths but I think that 730 days is an awfully long time for the truth behind such a violent act to remain so very hidden. It’s hard to write about this for a lot of different reasons, many of them not my own but rather attributable to things I’ve heard other people say.
You never want to come across as self-serving or imprudent when speaking about someone else’s life and death, and yet, if we all stop writing about it, we will be cementing the common and mistaken belief that this didn’t really matter. It did then and it does now in more ways than any of us will be able to qualify or quantify. Her death changed the face of the country, or rather it helped to continue unmasking it.
Something struck me at last Wednesday’s vigil, a phrase uttered by one of the speakers addressing the crowd, a call to take up arms and seek out the truth. It sounded so beautiful and brave and shiny, and yet now that I’m writing this article I feel listless.
One of the speakers spoke about Malta being her home and how she shouldn’t have to leave her home, but the more time passes, the more I wonder whether this truly has ever been the home I believed it to be. After all, how much time has passed since Karin Grech and Raymond Caruana were murdered? Not even half a lifetime. Maybe in our haste to let bygones be bygones and leave the past where it belonged because our parents and their parents were so tired of the civil war that tore the nation apart, we created a beautiful nest of vipers who were merely lying in wait, half-asleep.
It’s been 730 days, and all we have are three very lacklustre arrests. No rhyme, no reason, no why, no how, and half of the European Union baying at our doors for justice. I clearly don’t have the stomach to be a politician because I would probably be weeping myself to sleep if I found myself in such a predicament.
Daphne, her family and the country deserve answers. Hell, at this point, even Meryl Streep and Margaret Atwood want answers (not too shabby for a biċċa blogger if I do say so myself). I think what gets to me the most is the waste of it all. She had so much left to write, so much more beauty to share, so much left to do.
We need to know why, and then we need to repeat, over and over again, to anyone who will listen, that no one, no one deserves to die in the service of searching for the truth. No one gets murdered for ‘spewing lies and hatred’. It’s bitterly ironic and I imagine endlessly frustrating for some how even from beyond the grave she continues to provoke and instigate: they tried to bury Daphne; they didn’t know that she was a seed.