John P. Portelli: L-Ittra ta’ Osama u Stejjer Oħra(Osama’s Letter and Other Stories)
Published by Horizons
L-Ittra ta’ Osama u Stejjer Oħra (Osama’s Letter and Other Stories) is made up of 14 fiction stories, told in one story ‒ that of disjunctures and crossroads. The stories are carefully constructed to evoke visualisations that involve perspectives through the gaze of multiple social, political and cultural lenses. Each story is told from a different perspective, but the narratives are linked, as though they trespass the same terrain which converges with the author’s life.
There is the feel of I-was-there in the scenes depicted. Readers are made to see into contexts the stories tell through the eyes of an immigrant, an academic, a friend, and someone who straddles worlds and cultures.
The stories take place in various countries and demarcate different worlds. The opening story, L-Appartament (The Apartment), recounts the migratory transition that Mark, a Maltese man, went through when he attempted to settle in Canada.
He was relieved to escape the suffocating, judgemental attitude prevalent in his native country, only to wake up to find the comments “No niggers! No fags! No Jews!” sprayed on his apartment door. The story reminds us that irrespective of geographical location, the human condition is still troubled and still agitated in its aliveness. The characters hold space for specific human situations that link the personal with the universal.
The theme of victimhood underlies most of the stories. In one way or another the characters seem to struggle with everyday situations that make their life problematic. They are humiliated, subjected to mishaps, offended or made to face confrontations in varying degrees. Some of these characters are ridden with an existential crisis and assaulted by inner demons.
Irrespective of class, gender, age and race, some of the characters grapple with their thoughts and others with their eccentricities, restlessness and melancholic bitterness.
Some stories narrate human doubts and darkness with lightheartedness and humour
The stories bring these characters forward, as if by Portelli’s demand to surface or perhaps through his intention to counteract a quietism that surrounds particular people who are forgotten. The unifying theme signals the characters’ insistence to try and be human.
Nearly all the stories revolve around one main character. Nuċċali is narrated from the point of view of a pair of spectacles.
There is a posthuman feel to this story that suggests personhood and materiality are enmeshed with each other in occurrences that are short lived. In general, the characters’ inner monologues mirror the depth which Portelli gives to the direction of the narratives and add dimension to the stories.
Main female characters are largely missing in the stories. This present absence made me look for them and catch a glimpse of them through what the male characters say and do and who they are. The exclusive focus on masculinity casts an ambivalent male gaze on the feminine.
The men in the stories are boldly angry, imperfect, confused, arrogant, guilty, ill-informed, vulnerable, banal, scared and repulsive. They feel relatable. I can also relate to women being hidden.
In Paxawwa (a nickname) the main character is a woman; the outcast in the village, who becomes the villain after getting her own way back.
Each story reminds us of the uniqueness of moments; of that moment which is brought about by the forces of life and death, but which seems to pass in an eye’s blink and jolted out of itself. Portelli brings moments back and seems to relive them retrospectively through his stories, adding layers of meanings that the events had acquired.
Portelli’s realism is mixed with pragmatic knowledge that leaves space for human contradictions to emerge. He presents stark realities of everyday life without adopting a blatant moralising tone. Neither does he attempt a reckoning of past political upheavals.
Larry takes place at the centre of a national crisis that caused political turmoil in the 1980s in Malta. Feelings cannot, however, be neutral and politics is not value free.
The stories are situated in moral positions that are subjective. The characters are not purely good or bad but mainly representational of humanity.
They speak the language of everyday life, rooted in personal and social relations. Some of the stories narrate human doubts and darkness with lightheartedness and humour that make them soul-warming.
Yet Portelli does not keep back from showing raw discomfort, cynicism and unease, as he does in L-Ittra ta’ Osama, which is presented as the last story in the book. Osama is a dangerous man who forcefully demands that a Moroccan waitress goes to this hotel room to have sex with him.
The narrator, who is Osama’s male friend, is totally embarrassed when he witnesses this act and tries to project himself into the mind of a misogynist. Like other stories in the collection this one is also driven by unanswered questions that seem to demarcate boundaries around the author’s more intimate self.
The interpretation of his stories cannot stay still. It remains open to pathways of understanding in the never- ending narratives of human experiences.
L-Ittra ta’ Osama u Stejjer Oħra offers fascinating spaces to think about personal feelings, experiences and reflections within the many moments in time that the stories capture.
Joanne Cassar is a senior lecturer at the University of Malta.