By now, most of Manwel Dimech’s life has been thoroughly researched, documented and published. In this two-part article, Fr Montebello, author of a biography of Dimech published in 2004, reveals the discovery of new manuscripts penned by Dimech during his exile in Egypt, which carry significant philosophical weight.
April 17, 1921, was a Sunday. On that day, exiled from his country six-and-a-half years earlier, 60-year-old Manwel Dimech died at the British military hospital of Victoria College, Alexandria, Egypt. This year too, 90 years later, April 17 also falls on a Sunday.
However, though back then the social reformer, polyglot, writer, poet and philosopher gave up the ghost without having a single friend or foe by his side, today he is fittingly remembered and honoured as one of Malta’s greatest 20th century heroes.
Dimech’s life was no joyride. Born in Valletta in 1860, the economic situation of Malta, then a British colony, during his lifetime was particularly dismal.
Like thousands of others, this condemned Dimech to a boyhood of penury and illiteracy which, almost inevitably, led him to a life of vagrancy, petty thefts and a series of short spells in jail.
Later, however, Dimech was involved in a violent brawl which resulted in the death of another ragamuffin. Though Dimech had really caused the lad grievous bodily harm, the youngster’s death was precipitated by injudicious after-care, especially by the police.
Nevertheless, jointly with another vagrant, Dimech was convicted of murder. He only escaped the death penalty because he was still a minor. The other unfortunate was hanged.
Quite extraordinarily, all through his long incarceration Dimech learned to read and write, and went on to undertake serious studies in modern languages and familiarised himself with politics, philosophy, history, poetry, literature and the classics.
He subsequently continued his remarkable education during a further stretch in prison follow-ing another incident involving counterfeit money.
Dimech left the Corradino Civil Prison for good on July 31, 1897. A month later he started holding adult language classes, and at the beginning of January 1898 launched a weekly paper called Il Bandiera tal Maltin (The Flag of the Maltese). Despite some interruptions, the paper continued to be published until August 1914.
During his 11-year career in politics (1898-1906; 1911-14), Dimech emerged as a staunch defender of human rights and an organiser of those seeking social and political emancipation.
Unlike other contemporary politicians, he dealt more with the structural causes of oppression than its effects, considering poverty not as a natural phenomenon or divine will but rather as man-made. This is what made him different and a cut above the rest.
To enhance his work, after more than three-and-a-half years in northern Italy, Dimech launched an organisation, Ix Xirka tal Imdawlin (The Fellowship of the Enlightened), which was something between a workers’ union, a political party and an institution for life-long adult education.
This was on October 21, 100 years ago. The fellowship’s radical philosophy, however, earned him the Church’s condemnation and excommunication.
After striking a truce with the Church, Dimech persisted in his political work with renewed vigour.
But his growing success with the working and middle classes did not endear him to the British authorities. Eventually, at the onset of World War I, they connived to remove him from the island.
Dimech was first deported to Sicily. For want of a better solution, he was then allowed to proceed to Egypt. After a month there living like a pauper, he was locked up as a prisoner of war. He remained in jail well after hostilities came to an end, right up to his death in April 1921.
During his six-and-a-half years of captivity (1914-21) Dimech was detained twice in prison, at three different concentration camps, and once in a lunatic asylum, all around Alexandria and Cairo. Though kept in poor and abject conditions, he always sought to keep himself occupied, mostly by teaching languages to inmates and learning new ones.
In the meantime, back in Malta his wife and children – a son and two daughters – were reduced to utter destitution. They were evicted from their home and lacked proper clothing and food. Schooling was out of the question. The 12-year-old son actually died of malnutrition.
Dimech spent the last five months of his life half-paralysed, bed-ridden, infested with parasites, constantly soiled and starving, and ill-treated by other patients. He was humiliated and forsaken.
When he breathed his last, his body was wrapped in the same bedsheets he had lain upon, taken to a spot in the desert-land which surrounded the hospital, and buried in a shallow hole in the sand. The grave had not even been marked. Years later, the entire place was urbanised.
During Dimech’s exile, various petitions for his release were made to the Governor of Malta (first Methuen, then Plumer). All were refused.
Dimech was originally deported under martial law, which had been imposed because of the war. However, when martial law was lifted after the war, his captivity and the refusal to repatriate him became illegal and abusive. This had been recognised by none other than the Colonial Office in London.
While Dimech waited out his terrible predicament, he stoically sought to soothe his spirit, think positively, and take life philosophically. Though this was his attitude throughout his life, now, faced with the probability of an untimely and cruel death, this mind-set became imperative and urgent. He would not allow his enemies to break his back or make him stoop low.
It was in this frame of mind that Dimech penned his final writings (1917-20). At the time, he was detained in the concentration camps of Kasir el Nil, in Cairo, and of Sidi Bishir, in Alexandria.
The writings are basically of a philosophical nature, and have been unacknowledged until now.
Before being published the writings underwent attentive and minute investigation. Authenticity, internal and external corroboration, calligraphic consistency, and chronological accuracy had to be established with absolute certainty before they were made public.
Dimech was an industrious type. During his captivity in Egypt, he always sought to engage in useful endeavours. Though his situation was grim and depressing, he taught modern languages to other inmates, learned some new ones himself from self-teaching books (such as Japanese), and also wrote.
The writings were hitherto unacknowledged by Dimech scholars. They add considerable knowledge and depth to what we already know about Dimech’s philosophical prowess and his final years of exile.
Though they still have to be analysed thoroughly and put to rigorous critical tests, in their crude form they present an insight into the psyche and mystique of the man.
The writings are a remarkable boon to Dimech studies. They are not the only texts of his which, though known to have existed, have gone missing. Un Nuovo Dio, for instance, a long poemetto bernesco (satirical poem) published by Dimech in 1904, is still to be tracked down.
The newly-discovered manuscripts were written between January 1917 and November 1920 (until Dimech was incapacitated by apoplexy).
Before his spell in the two concentration camps, since June 1915, he was held at the Abbasiya lunatic asylum in Cairo. It seems unlikely that Dimech wrote any literary work during his stay there.
The writings we now have seem to have started quite casually.
Dimech’s mind was constantly disposed to rumination. Thus, he began to jot down aphorismic musings in the page margins of some books he had.
However, only one book has been discovered so far. It is one of the two newly-located manuscripts revealed here, which, for the sake of convenience, is called Annotations.
When the marginal aphorisms became sufficiently copious, Dimech decided to copy them onto separate sheets of paper and prepare them for publication. Though his original transcript is still missing, we have a transcript of it by Juan Mamo (1886-1941).
This is the second newly-discovered manuscript revealed here. For reasons which will become clear later, it has been called Aphorisms.
Mamo was a Maltese labourer who, since August 1913, had worked in Alexandria.
He was briefly acquainted with Dimech before going there. However, for all we know he was also the only Maltese ever to visit Dimech in captivity.
Mamo’s employment conditions allowed him to call on Dimech once every four weeks between September 1920 and March 1921. Then he was transferred and the visits stopped.
Mamo was not present when Dimech passed away. However, it seems that shortly after, as the closest person to a next of kin, Mamo was handed over Dimech’s personal belongings (including his wedding ring). He also received the Annotations.
This manuscript, bearing Dimech’s signature, contains an assortment of 430 succinct aphorisms and five poems or anecdotes in English. The writings, jotted down in minuscule handwriting, are crammed haphazardly across some pages of a Japanese conversation grammar. This book by Hermann Plaut was published in London in 1905 by Julius Groos.
Evidently, Annotations is a provisional work. Apart from its educational value, Plaut’s publication (and probably others) served Dimech as a notebook.
Today this precious document is in private hands.
As Dimech’s interim inheritor, Mamo also received the manuscript which Dimech had been preparing for eventual publication.
We know about this document from a reference to a lost letter which Dimech had sent to his family from Sidi Bishir, in which he informed his wife and daughters that he “had composed a voluminous collection of poems, aphorisms, epigrams and anecdotes”, and that “its publication would eventually make them rich”.
Mamo planned to finish this incomplete work and publish it under his own editorship. There is incontestable evidence that Mamo, with the Annotations in hand, transcribed Dimech’s manuscript and, for editorial reasons, added some personal embellishments.
For example, at one point Dimech wrote that “…a Maltese named Dimech would one day write the words I am writing”. Mamo’s equivalent transcription in Aphorisms is identical except that he changed the last part, somewhat lacking grace, to “…a Maltese named Dimech would one day say the words I am saying; and another Maltese, named Mamo, would write the words I am writing”.
At another point in Aphorisms, faced with an incomplete aphorism in Annotations, Mamo explains away the fragmentary form of the aphorism by ludicrously adding a note that “His (Dimech’s) spirit throbbed violently and he convulsively muttered words between his clenched teeth which were incomprehensible”. This was pure artistic licence.
Having said all this, it can be safely concluded that, from references to Dimech’s lost letter mentioned above, from the title of Mamo’s transcription and from irrefutable internal corroboration, it can be stated with certainty that the “voluminous collection” referred to by Dimech, and the manuscript we have from Mamo’s hand, or at least the greater part of it, are one and the same work.
This work, Aphorisms, is a collection of some 2,673 aphorisms in English, most of which are short and snappy. All aphorisms found in Annotations (Dimech’s original record) are found in Aphorisms.
Mamo was in London when he began transcribing Dimech’s original work. He himself indicates this. After coming in possession of the document, Mamo was there between May and August 1922.
Later, he copied it neatly unto three ledgers now kept at the National Library in Valletta.
Apart from the significance of the aphorisms themselves, most of which are of a high philosophical nature, both manuscripts are remarkable because they attest to Dimech’s state of mind during his last years of exile. They also help us to fill in substantial details to the storyline of his final days.
(To be concluded)