On September 8 two years ago, Norman Lowell and three of his sidekicks stood in front of the Great Siege monument in Valletta to commemorate, as they put it, “the sacrifice of our forefathers”. An Imperium Europa wreath was laid and a speech read out that told of how, if we did not stand tall and manly, we would be overrun by African brutes.
Not exactly standard 8th September fare, then. And yet, I am not aware that the wreath was removed or the speech interrupted. Nor did anyone publicly object that the Siege monument, and what it stood for, had been hijacked by fascists. Nobody except Daphne Caruana Galizia, that is.
Caruana Galizia’s point was not that Lowell should have been arrested on the spot, or that his wreath should have been removed by the police. (She was too broad-minded for that.) Rather, she wrote about how readily national commemorations and monuments lend themselves to disparate readings by different groups and individuals. She went on to give her own understanding of the Siege as a war over control of the sea for piracy and trade – but that’s beside the point here.
The reasoning, which I happen to share, is that public spaces generally and monuments in particular can never be the preserve of any single idea or interest. Caruana Galizia saw the Siege monument as an imaginative reading of history for the purposes of nation-building. That bit explains the wreaths laid ever year by the President and the political parties. For their part, Imperium Europa chose to honour the bravery of light-skinned men in the face of a threat by dark-skinned men. And so on.
The flowers and the candles that honour the memory of Caruana Galizia do not violate the one and only meaning of the Siege monument, simply because there is no such thing. It follows that the people who put them there had every right to do so. It also follows that the woman who last week saw fit to have a go at the flowers with her stick was exercising her right to object. I see it as a round of citizen protest and counter-protest, or, if you will, a democratic use of public space.
The reason why there are many – very many, in fact – who do not think of the Caruana Galizia memorial as a shrine to freedom, has nothing to do with their low standards of humanity or partisan mindlessness. It has everything to do with who Caruana Galizia was.
Clearly, I refer strictly to her incarnation as a political commentator. As her husband has said, Daphne the wife and mother lies in a grave where she is respected by those who matter, and hopefully by everyone else. I can think of only one public figure who suffered the violence of seeing his family grave violated by political opponents. That was Dom Mintoff in 1998 and it was very terrible.
Daphne Caruana Galizia should not be nationalised. True to what she wrote, she ought to remain always in private hands
Back to Caruana Galizia the writer, and to the flowers and candles in Valletta that are primarily a homage to her work as such. It is both predictable and understandable that many people should object to the makeshift memorial. Caruana Galizia routinely wrote about “a whole other Malta out there” which she barely recognised. It was a Malta populated by undesirables created by a coming together of class (or the lack of it) and allegiance to Labour.
Whatever the value of that analysis, it strikes me as unreasonable to suddenly expect the Maltese nation – including that whole other Malta out there – to come together in a collective act of remembrance that would involve remembering for some and forgetting for others. If the memory of Caruana Galizia the writer stands for social and political discord, it’s as it should be.
If this sounds churlish, consider a scenario in which government and Glenn Bedingfield and the renegade Valletta councillors had a change of heart and decided to join forces with the Civil Society Network to build a splendid monument to Caruana Galizia in a prominent place in Valletta. October 16 would be instituted as a day of remembrance and everyone – including, presumably Joseph Muscat and Adrian Delia – would lay wreaths and make speeches.
It would be the ultimate insult to Caruana Galizia’s life work. Certainly, Daphne’s family would be horrified. It’s worth remembering that they had asked the President, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to stay away from her funeral. (I’d probably have done the same.) They would be joined in their horror by those who think she was the best thing that ever happened to Malta, as well as those who think she was actually the worst.
I’m saying two things. First, that Daphne Caruana Galizia should not be nationalised. True to what she wrote, she ought to remain always in private hands.
Second, that those who are asking for a monument in Valletta are taking a big risk. (Perhaps a big risk is exactly what they want.) They may well end up rather like the woman with the stick: waving about and cursing the day flowers were created.
Because it is the capital, the public spaces of Valletta will invariably involve the nation in some way or other. A statue of an għana singer in a quiet corner of Żejtun is one thing, a monument in a square in the capital quite another. The risk is that Caruana Galizia’s memory would be appropriated – and, to well-wishers, corrupted – by the nation and its jockeys and myth-mongerers.
The other day, Bedingfield was reported as having said that, if we must, the monument to Daphne Caruana Galizia should be placed “out of sight and out of mind”. If he meant his own sight and mind and ones of a similar bent, it’s exactly the place she would want to be.
mafalzon@hotmail.com