Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1221489
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 MARCH 2020 4 THIS WEEK LITERATURE As the world is all but driven to total quarantine, a hermit's memoir may just stand as the ultimate balm for the soul in these troubled times. TEODOR RELJIC speaks to Fr Gioele Galea about 'Tħabbat, Xtaqtek', written during his time at the St Jerome hermitage in Pascelupo and winner of the National Book Prize for Best Emergent Writer A call to witness What led you to write a memoir during your time at the hermit- age? What made me decide to write was the sheer thought of the disappointment and pain the person who had left me the note must have felt when she found the door closed. I felt this pain at the very depths of my being, and it was this pain that moved me to write. And when I started to write, the possibility of publication did not even occur to me. I told myself: "I shall write, and what- ever I write will be discovered after I die. I would not be let- ting the door open during my lifetime, but after I am gone. It is the same thing for me." And the diary would not have been revised and published, were it not for the insistence of a close friend of mine here in Malta, who pleaded with me to share with him my experience of si- lence. This request on the part of my friend, drew from with- in me the same feelings I had experienced when I found that note in the door lock, thirteen years earlier. Did your intentions change as you continued to write it, and did they take an even more dramatic turn when the pros- pect of publishing it became a possibility? No, my original intentions never changed. When I write (even when I express myself in poetry) I do so in response to a call that I feel down deep within me: a call to witness. I feel driven to pass on to oth- ers, what I feel has been given to me. I experience this drive to be much bigger than myself. Try as I might to resist it, it is always in vain. Because of this, whatever it is that I write, I al- ways try to write it in the best way possible, even if no one was going to read it. As I see it, writing is also the space of the experience of the Mystery. I admit that it is an experience that hurts, and that more often than not, I would rather escape from it, but at the same time it is an experience of beauty. This is also why I feel that the possibility of publica- tion does not change anything for me. Thabbat, Xtaqtek reads like an utterly non-dogmatic presentation of the relation- ship between God and man. Was this a deliberate effort on your part? Were you at least partly interested in revealing the nested, intimate elements of worship to your readership, who may or may not be either entranced or distracted by the rote motions of Church ritual? When I was struck in the Teodor Reljic "My journey is towards the light of eternity. This is such a luminous light, that no amount of light bulbs that every now and then light up around me, carry any importance to me" Fr Gioele Galea