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CULTURE BOOKS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 OCTOBER 2019 10 Joe Grixti THE title of John Portelli's short novel "Kullħadd barra Fajża" (Everyone ex- cept Fajża) offers an intriguing pointer to the techniques and ideas at the centre of this thought-provoking exploration of the elusive meanings of "truth", iden- tity and nationhood. All the main characters are allocated a chapter in which they recount their version of events – all, that is, except for the eponymous protagonist herself. Fajża is a protagonist whose voice is the only one we never hear directly. We get to know her obliquely, at a tangent, through the voices and perspectives of others whose lives she has touched and whose attitudes and actions have in turn crucially impacted on her life and misfortunes. We hear these voices in turn: her older husband, her sister, her lover, her mother, her father, her lover's mother, his new girlfriend, his father. Each of these characters insists in turn that he or she is to blame for the fact that Fajża is in hospital. As they do this, we gradually learn more about Fajża herself and the events which led to her present condition. But because each of these perspectives is subjective, limited and primarily self-focused, the develop- ing picture remains tangential and elu- sive. The narrative implications of this tan- gential approach – its grounding in the testimonies of a series of compromised unreliable narrators – are signalled straight away in the book's opening chapter, which is made up of several of- ten-contradictory media reports about the protagonist's "disappearance" in cir- cumstances which are suspected to be violent and criminal. These reports are, in their turn, also presented as based on speculation or the accounts or impres- sions of other witnesses or commenta- tors – so that the narrative highlights straight away the elusiveness and unre- liability of reported facts. Truth is here presented as multi-faceted, multi-lay- ered and ultimately unreachable or even non-existent, since it can only (always and inevitably) be accessed obliquely through subjective perspectives and psychologically motivated and cultur- ally grounded accounts. These existential contradictions are also encapsulated in the name of the protagonist, as well as the thematic functions she performs in the narrative. "Fajża" is an Arabic name which means "successful, victorious, beneficial". This is a point which is stressed by differ- ent characters at several points in the novel. The name's exoticism is also a re- minder of the bi-cultural household in which she has grown, as well as of the multicultural, immigrant and often still racially prejudiced environment which is her homeland. The novel's concern with the nature and implications of multi-culturalism and immigrant expe- riences is thus embodied in Fajża's po- sition as the teenage daughter of first- generation working-class immigrants to Toronto (a Kurdish mother brought up in Turkey, and a staunchly traditionalist Maltese father), and her marriage to an older and richer Italian immigrant with a possibly shady (mafia-like) past. The ways in which the novel presents these and other aspects of national and cul- tural origins, immigrant liminality and the challenges of globalisation and mul- ticulturalism, also raise questions about the nature and permeability of identity – whether personal, ethnic, psychologi- cal, cultural, religious, or even moral. Living as they do in a forever "foreign" environment which is also their prima- ry home, and still deeply rooted in the beliefs, customs and prejudices of their lands of origin, these are characters whose diasporic identities are grounded in a complex transnational construc- tion of imaginary landscapes – forever poised and in transition between differ- ent positions which draw on different cultural traditions at the same time. It is these complex (post-modern and glo- balised) conditions which account for the fact that the characters often act in ways which at first sight appear incon- sistent – as in the case of a staunchly conservative and Catholic Maltese fa- ther urging his daughter to have an abortion in order to protect the fam- ily's honour. It is also at the root of the many class-based or intergenerational conflicts depicted in the novel – among older first-generation immigrants, and between them and their children who have grown up in Canada. All the novel's narrators (the "kullħadd" of the title) end their accounts by blam- ing themselves for having brought Fajża to her current condition, as well as pro- viding oblique (but increasingly more revealing) hints of how she got there. This technique is, of course, an effective way of arousing reader curiosity and maintaining interest, as the (essentially melodramatic) events and motivations surrounding Fajża's injuries are cumu- latively revealed. But the technique is also critically and systematically linked to one of the key themes of the novel. That theme is highlighted in two of the three epigraphs which appear in the opening pages. One is from Hannah Arendt: "When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty; confessions of collective guilt ascertain that we never discover who is guilty." The other, from Audre Lorde: "Guilt is not a reaction to anger; guilt is a reaction to actions or to the lack of action". The experience of guilt, its meanings, origins and consequences, permeates Portelli's narrative. Towards the end of the novel, we are told that love and guilt are inseparable, and that guilt actually makes love stronger. This assertion is presented as coming from the lips of Fajża's brother – silent and mostly ab- sent for most of the novel (he is a dea- con training for the priesthood in South America), but now back to deliver the final word in a concluding chapter which brings all the characters together in a section entitled "Il- Ħatja Jiltaqgħu": "The Guilty Ones Meet". This final chapter initially seems to abandon the tangential narrative ap- proach adopted in the rest of the novel. Like the media reports presented at the start, it is printed in italics and is written from the point of view of an unidenti- fied or omniscient third person narra- tor who, among other things, describes the scene, tells us what is going through the minds of Fajża's parents as they sit with the other "guilty" characters, and then reports the brief speech by Fajża's brother. Because of this different tech- nique, the words of this speech (the novel's concluding words) take on add- ed resonance, which suggests that they might reflect the author's own position. Fajża, it turns out, has revealed to her brother that she felt smothered because she saw herself as having been made to embody the hopes, aspirations, and ul- timately the guilt, of those who love her and whose lives she has touched: "as if she were an extension of us all or an object in common, to be shared as and when desired". In other words, a Christ- like scapegoat or sacrificial lamb. And yet, the novel's narrative tech- nique effectively undermines this message. Guilt, love and redemption through sacrifice are of course at the core of Christian belief, and the incul- cation of guilt is central to Catholic up- bringing. In a sense then, it is fitting that the apparent authority of the novel's fi- nal words and ideas should be ascribed to a Catholic priest in training, one who is anything but impartial and who also confesses his guilt for his sister's suffer- ing. In other words, this localisation of point of view is a reminder that the sup- posedly uplifting message in the novel's final words is no more and no less than one further perspective among others – subjective, culturally motivated, and ultimately and inevitably partial and in- conclusive. This is John Portelli's first novel, but he has previously published several po- etry anthologies and a recent collection of short stories (Everyday Encounters) which are similarly concerned with the existential conditions of human rela- tionships, identity, and the vicissitudes of immigrant cultural experiences. What makes Kullħadd barra Fajża so ef- fective is its ability to function at differ- ent levels which can potentially appeal to a variety of reader expectations. The thriller-like, piecemeal revela- tion of the often-complex plot makes this an enjoyable page turner. But the novel also manages to explore chal- lenging philosophical questions in a vividly imagined fictional setting which is peopled by memorable characters. The fact that the author deliberately leaves those challenging questions open-ended is a further measure of the book's appeal. Professor Joe Grixti recently retired from Massey University in New Zealand, where he was Head of the School of English and Media Studies. Identity and guilt in the Maltese-Canadian experience Review | 'Kullhadd Barra Fajza' by John P. Portelli