The National Book Council has recently commemorated Doreen Micallef, naming the National Poetry Contest in her honour and celebrating one of the most distinctive voices of her generation. Her poetics and her mark on Maltese literature are traced here by Rowna Baldacchino

“Record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” – Virginia Woolf

Doreen Micallef stands out as one of few female writers associated with the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju and, more importantly, as a pioneer of the feminist thought in Maltese literature.

She published three collections of poems: Fit-Triq tal-Empirew (1975), De Profundis (1979) and Kyrie (1980). Her poems originate from a complex personality that carries an excruciating pain, mostly due to the fact that she was born with a physical impairment that conditioned her life significantly. Her body is, more often than not, felt to be a recipient of pain. A pain that she aestheticises in her poems, as she records her own metaphorical inner journey through Limbo, Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, and the hope of a rebirth.

Most of her poems are addressed either to God or to an abstract male figure, never to a woman. Man, it could be said, constituted a primary source of suffering throughout her adult life as she grappled with sentimental relationships and rejection. At times, God and her imagined lover merge into one. She seeks man in God, and God in man; she humanises God and deifies man. Her attitude towards God is not that easy or direct and she is as capable of nurturing love as she is of nurturing anger. Moments of adoration, attraction and love easily transform, all of a sudden, into diametrically opposed feelings. After all, it is God who allows, maybe even causes, her pain.

Nourished by her deep solitude, her poems continually reflect a yearning for dialogue. Paradoxically, however, while Micallef is driven by a strong need to communicate, her message is seemingly inexpressible; she suffers and writes, suffers and writes. In her poems, referential meaning is problematised rather than transmitted, as the actual function of meaning – which calls for permanent contents – is not fulfilled. Her soul is in turmoil, and it is turmoil that ultimately surfaces and settles on the verses, i.e. the external form.

To experience the poems, the reader must ‘perform’ the artistic event

Chaos is the driving force in her poetry, a chaos that will not be moulded into a sense of order. Meaning may seemingly be missing, but there is movement. The reader, it appears, would be at a loss seeking an inner logic, and should rather try to understand the source from where the crude compression of words and the disorganised sentences originate.

Micallef thus engages into a style of writing that is not instrumental to practical communication. There is no grammatical consistency in the sequence of sentences. Words are associated in such a way as to cause a sudden change of meaning. Sentences end abruptly before they are finished. Punctuation vanishes. Moreover, words are spread over the page in such a way as to visually suggest something that is constantly descending without ever taking a definitive form.

Images hang at a distance from each other, and each image breaks the harmony it would have reached had it been associated to another image. There is no obvious logic to the flow of ideas from one thing to the next; just a stream of disconnected statements. In other words, it is a chaos that reflects the inner state of Micallef.

Putting an order to chaos is, however, falsifying. Since the content is dizzying and cannot be fathomed, one should perhaps better approach it through an analysis of style. Repetition and parallelism of words are aesthetic devices which Micallef resorts to frequently and bestow an identity to her style.

When she repeats the same noun preceded by different prepositions, as in “I do not believe/that you/and me/and all humans/came from nothing/for nothing/to go into nothing”, she not only creates a verbal musicality and rhythm, but she also enhances the aura of mystery and ambiguity. The repetition of words is ritualistic and has an incantatory effect. Such repetitions and parallelisms provide a unifying factor in her poems otherwise free in structure.

In 2014, Kenneth Scicluna directed a short film inspired by Micallef’s poetry, namely by her two poems Dedika and Eleġija, screened at the 2014 Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival. As he states in an interview, one of the main challenges in the process of adaptation was “the search for, and creation of, objective correlatives that give those words a physical dimension”. In her fragmentary poems, Micallef is communicating through the soulful texture of her language.

Through the distortion of grammatical rules, she manages to create her own, unique, literary space. Such distortion breaks our assured way of experiencing the world. This process of deconstruction demands of the reader a far more active participation in understanding the work. The reader is therefore provoked into assuming an active role. It follows that to experience the poems, the reader must ‘perform’ the artistic event.

The winners of the Doreen Micallef National Poetry Contest will be announced at an official ceremony on November 8 during the Malta Book Festival as part of its cultural programme. The 2019 Malta Book Festival will be taking place from November 6 to 10 at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta. The full contest regulations, criteria and application form can be found on the National Book Council website at www.ktieb.org.mt.