As pure as driven slush

As the carols, the tinsel and the cribs along with the champagne and the Auld Lang Syne become distant memories, the realities that coloured up the year we have all dispatched to oblivion with such alacrity and enthusiasm return to haunt us and taunt us.

The first of them is that there is no such thing as true freedom of expression and that censorship is protected by the law. The case of Ir-Realtà drags on. Editor Mark Camilleri faces criminal charges, imprisonment of up to six months and/or a fine of €466 "for distributing obscene or pornographic material and for injuring public morals or decency, under the Criminal Code and the Press Act".

Many of us have now read and re-read the 1,300 word story written by Alex Vella Gera called Li Tkisser Sewwi. I very much doubt that, in this day and age, anyone's morality has been injured or our decency violated, bombarded as we are by soft porn wherever we look and hardcore should we care to look for it. Not a day passes without the media reporting the most heinous of sexual crimes, many of them of a nature far worse than Mr Vella Gera's anti-hero's, whose unbridled sexual lust condemns to be forever deprived of that most basic and essential of human emotions: true love.

Let whoever is responsible for proceeding with this case ponder a little on how the notorious snip in the Duchess of Malfi is still, after well over a decade, a byword for bigotry. Even more recently, Stitching was given the chop too.

What is happening here is that we are being intellectual NIMBYS.

What probably offended most in the Vella Gera story was that it was written in Maltese and that the crudity of the language had greater impact. People who read have, in the course of their reading, met anti-heroes far worse than Mr Vella Gera's, who has, not so deep down, a craving for love and some sort of sentiment that renders him human. Don Juan and Casanova are viewed with rose-tinted spectacles that have been dimmed by time, but both men were demoniacally guided by their loins in no less a manner than the Vella Gera sex-crazed protagonist whose musings are merely a very crude version of La Ci Darem la Mano.

There was nothing strange or new in the Vella Gera story. Had men's and women's sex drive to disappear, so would the human race. Anybody would think that we Maltese are saints, all as pure as driven snow. From time immemorial, our Grand Harbour welcomed sailors in more ways than one and still does while the opportunities presented by waves of willowy and ethereal Scandinavian girls on our beaches in the 1970s and 1980s awakened hitherto unprecedented stratagems worthy of Count Almaviva himself in many of my contemporaries.

I recently met a priest who told me that one of his biggest problems was that a growing number of husbands were straying with Russian girls who, unlike their Swedish and Norwegian predecessors, are not merely interested in romantic sex with lusty swarthy Mediterranean ephebes but only with those having substantial bank balances matching their paunches.

We Maltese have been sexed up for generations and it pervades all classes and conditions. We all know everyone else's peccadilloes and because people in glass houses don't usually throw stones, we follow that very sound advice given to the world by Mrs Patrick Campbell and do whatever is necessary behind closed doors without frightening the horses in the street.

What Mr Vella Gera has done with his story was frighten the ponies a little and for this, his editor could spend time with murderers and drug pushers. The whole thing is ludicrously disproportionate and the charges should be dropped forthwith before we make a bigger laughing stock of ourselves than we are already.

Mark Camilleri should not even be tried. If he should be sentenced to even five minutes in prison, let alone six months, we are a doomed nation where freedom of conscience, of thought and of expression are pies in the sky. By breaking the time-honoured code that allows us to get away with so much while pretending to be innocent First Holy Communicants, Mr Vella Gera and Mr Camilleri have exposed society's underbelly, something that the establishment cannot either forgive or forget.

Ir-Realtà is distributed on campus free of charge. It is not sponsored by the University. Ergo, should I win the Super Five and decide to buy 5,000 copies of DH Lawrence's once proscribed masterpiece, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and amuse myself for a morning by distributing them free of charge on campus would the Rector have me arrested? There is nothing less immoral about Lady Chatterley's Lover than Li Tkisser Sewwi, apart from language and the lack of a few decorous euphemisms like John Thomas and Lady Jane.

At the end of the day it is sex that calls the literary shots and always has since the first caveman decided to tell his mate about the fun he had with the woman two caves away whom he had just clunked on the head with a dinosaur's jawbone as a way of appreciation for sexual favours received. That she was the mate's secret lover too merely adds spice to the story and, hence, that was the start of romantic literature. Have we turned full circle?

kzt@onvol.net