Our national poet, Dun Karm had already shown us the way forward with his spirit of inclusive patriotism, not narrow nationalism. His love for Maltese was not binary. He encouraged us to love our language and love other languages too, as he did. We need Dun Karm’s spirit more than ever as our country becomes increasingly multicultural. Our traditional sense of national identity is being put to the test.
If we do not change our idea of what it means to be Maltese in the coming decades, we will feel displaced. Increasingly, we will resent foreigners and frame most of our problems as ‘Maltese vs foreigners’. It does not have to be like that. While we need to grow our infrastructure sustainably to satisfy the needs of our population, we can embrace our heritage and still learn from the diverse cultures of the people we have asked to come and work and live amongst us.
In 1972, the Swiss writer, Max Frisch was insisting that migrant workers have lives, families, hopes and dreams, just like the citizens of the states they come to live in. He said: “We asked for workers and human beings came.” We must transform our islands into a community where, whoever we are and wherever we come from, we all belong.
We must be ready to move beyond the fake comfort zone we have created of being monocultural. We are not. Our heritage is diverse. Our multiple identity, expressed through our language, food and social customs, has evolved over centuries through the coming together of people from all sides of the Mediterranean and beyond.
Discovering our multiple identity will equip us to feel more at home in the Malta of today and tomorrow. Over the centuries, we have been both Muslim and Christian. During the reign of the Knights of St John we were influenced by the thousands of Muslim slaves among us. In the same period, a number of Maltese were persecuted for spreading Calvinism in Malta.
We are a nation of immigrants who settled here 8,000 years ago with the first inhabitants, and then, 800 years ago when these islands were repeopled. We have Maltese and Gozitans living in every corner of the globe. We have ancestors coming from many different countries with a diversity of cultures and religions. Even three centuries ago you could walk around Valletta and hear people talking to each other in many different languages.
World in a city
A good realistic grasp of our heritage should give us the humility to keep learning and never to think that we are superior to any of the thousands of people coming from other countries to work and live amongst us. If we do not want to diminish our own humanity, we need to not diminish theirs.
Our young are already doing that. Seventy-nine per cent of the 3,900 14-year-old students who participated in the 2022 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study agree that migrants bring many cultural, social and economic benefits. Eighty-four per cent of these students agree that immigrants who have lived in Malta for several years should have the opportunity to vote in elections.
If we do not change our idea of what it means to be Maltese in the coming decades, we will feel displaced- Evarist Bartolo
These teenagers embody the demographic change going on in our society: 13 per cent of teens participating in the study were not born in Malta – up from eight per cent in 2016. Nineteen per cent had a non-Maltese mother, up from 15 per cent in 2016, and 23 per cent a non-Maltese father, up from 16 per cent in 2016.
The Indonesian historian, Gungwu Wang says we need to learn from leaders like Chinese president Sun Yat-sen and Nelson Mandela. He says their visions for China and South Africa reach a higher level of nation building and identity making by rising above the outdated and narrowly conceived nation-state: “Sun Yat-sen had actually offered his peoples a vision of the future, a future that is still evolving as the whole world has sooner or later also to face up to. President Mandela, of course, is personally closer to that future. But his place with Sun Yat-sen is not merely because they are both Fathers of their modern country, but because they both embody the spirit of a multi-national republic that will become the better model for the world in the 21st century... where narrow nation-state structures will be symbols of weakness and multicultural societies recognised as powerfully enriched.”
Irish writer James Joyce says “A nation is the same people living in the same place”, meaning that a nation is not solely defined by the physical location or the people living within it. Rather, it is the amalgamation of collective experiences, aspirations, beliefs and values that truly moulds it into a nation. Joyce challenges us to rethink the traditional notion of a nation and encourages us to consider the fluidity and adaptability of identity.
The great Caribbean-born writer and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott shows how diverse cultural influences have created a rich tapestry in a city like Port-of-Spain, in Trinidad and Tobago: “…every culture, every continent of the world is represented in that one city. And not just as a sort of detritus of slavery or indenture – actively represented by the Hindu religion, by Moslem religion, by Chinese, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, white, black... The identity is in the very fulfilment of criss-crossing of those various cultures within one very compact city.
“And, therefore, Port-of-Spain is, perhaps, one of the most interesting cities in the world. And someone may say, ‘Where’s the culture of Port-of-Spain?’ The culture of Port-of-Spain ‒ since it was only 200 years out of slavery ‒ lies in the people of Port-of-Spain. And it is inevitable that, if all these various strains of Asian, African, Mediterranean, and so on, are circulating within a vertiginous situation, that something is bound to ferment that is very, very fertile.”
In Malta, if inequality continues to rise, and the provision of physical infrastructure and public services do not catch up with population growth, all talk about building an inclusive multicultural society will come to nothing.
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.