Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/236916
8 Into 2014 Fifty maltatoday, SUNDAY, 5 JANUARY 2014 50 years after independence, who are the Maltese and how are they faring? We kick-start a year of debate on collective memory, national consciousness and a celebration of 'Malteseness' Celebration and inferiority CHARLES XUEREB DURING the 1980s in France, a lively debate on memory was initiated as to how, even whether, to celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution, long conceived as the moral touchstone of modern French national identity. The French parliament enacted four memorial laws, at times provoking national controversies. And public historian Pierre Nora published his voluminous Lieux de Mémoire (Sites of Memory) between 1984 and 1992, locating memory in specific sites from where it can be excavated or retrieved. Nora contends that these sites are the bastions on which we lean when faced with officialdom's political remembrances. 2014 could be for Malta what the 1980s were for France: a conscious analysis of how public occasions impinge on our national identity. Four national feasts – 35 years from the end of the British military presence; 95 years from the 1919 British felling of four Maltese citizens in a crowd of protesting inhabitants in Valletta; 50 years of independence from Britain and and 40 years of the republican constitution which removed the British monarch from our sovereignty – commemorate major aspects of the Island's severance with British rule. It's possible that when our legislators declared all these four events as national days – some consider it an exaggerated reaction – they were releasing their frustrated political steam, accumulated over decades of ill-deserved contempt at the hands of British officials, especially during negotiations for the island's self-sufficiency. The British-designed 'Malta story', permeating through blood and economic relationships and military and naval experiences, has been with us for so long that analysing it from a purely critical perspective is never easy. Malta's imperial and colonialist past was quite unique: while the Maltese were Europeans, the same as their colonisers, the native community was not made up of British settlers. And Malta's elite, including the political class, could boast of being intellectually endowed with a sophisticated, long history of Latin cultural heritage. This must have been, perhaps secretly, admired with some bemusement by their northern rulers but it also clashed with the administration of semi-retired military officers assigned to Malta to guard over this floating fortress, with little or no consideration for its cultural development. One national day Today those who cannot digest five national days (8 September is the fifth) and view the present predicament as a recent partisan compromise argue that either Independence or Republic day deserve the trophy for one national day. Officialdom's decisions are at times different from the community's collective memory. One may ask: what are we exactly celebrating on these occasions? Is it colonial condemnation and The historic distorted 'arrogant' statement and the ex-colonizer's royal coat of arms commanding St. George's Square, bereft of any Maltese monument severance, or the event itself for its colossal political meaning? The latter carries more weight for the political parties. But severance could help retrieve sites of memories that past generations parked uncomfortably at the back of their minds, when they felt they could not celebrate what they thought was their right to do so as a potential nation. In 1921, the new Maltese representative assembly chose 8 September as the day of victory over the Ottomans in 1565. Being a religious feast (Maria Bambina) it was easier to reclaim it from national memory and achieve consensus. In 1925 however, always under the gaze of British military rule, a national monument to the Sette Giugno 1919 victims could only be erected far from the capital city, the public sphere of which was occupied by numerous British memorials. Bringing back this site of memory – and the accompanying public monument in Valletta – was only finally possible in the 1980s. How interested are we in what Maurice Halbwachs, father of collective memory, would call 'social bonds for future generations'? Are we planning to choose one unique day to celebrate nationhood before we are even certain of what is an authentic Maltese citizen? We often define and defend citizenship without reflecting enough upon what really and truly makes one. We seem to be living in a community that tends to forget those parts of its past that it cannot readily comprehend, and move forward insensitively as long as it suits the moment. Malta has been independent for 50 years but we are still identifying ourselves to the whole world by a foreign symbol on our flag, which flutters the patron saint of another country given by the monarch of a protector who could have defended the island better and earlier during WWII. Malta's elite might have had a more sophisticated culture than that of most African colonies, but certainly we are not proud of our independence as much as they are. Not one independent state in this neighbouring continent forgot to remove an imposed foreign symbol on its flag reminding the world of their past colo- nised state. We do. How can we proudly attest our particular nationality when our capital city is blocking our memory, with its gardens full of sepulchral memorials for British officials and unknown sailors; when a foreign monarch sits in the middle of Republic Square; when we removed two Maltese monuments on the city's periphery, but not a massive coat of arms belonging to a currently reigning monarch of another EU state; and when do not mind that our highest authorities stand under its auspices while addressing us during Christmastide. Love of the Maltese Finally: how come no one mentions another anniversary: 200 years of Malta becoming a British protectorate in May 1814 according to the Treaty of Paris. After Waterloo, Malta was ceded to Britain. Now, 50 years after independence, how do we relate with the inscription on the Main Guard: 'To Great and Unconquered Britain, the Love of the Maltese and the Voice of Europe Confirm these Islands?' Maltese historian Alfredo Mifsud in 1907 argued that Malta was too small to affirm its rights and protestations against being "an object of negotiation without its intervention… arrogance in this congress of wolves was their favourite food." Maybe today no one mentions this 'arrogant' commemoration because in truth it was rejected by the Maltese collective memory. But this distorted, 'arrogant' statement persists in staring at us in the face, in front of the highest authority of the Republic in our prime square. Maybe unwittingly we are so comfortable with our past, with our colonial inferiority in our own country, that we do not realise that we have become a mnemonic product ourselves. Charles Xuereb graduated Phd (Institute of Maltese Studies, University of Malta) with a thesis on the Maltese collective memory and identity, as part of a STEPS (EU) scholarship. A golden jubilee of memories MGR CHARLES SCICLUNA I was five years old when Malta became a sovereign independent state in 1964. Memories of those days are now mingled with video footage of the historical events. I have vague recollections of myself waving a small Maltese flag and holding a bag of sweets children were given for one of the official ceremonies. But that may have happened when Her Majesty the Queen (of Malta) visited the islands in November 1967. I was eight years old then and in primary education at Saint Sebastian's, Qormi. The paradigm of this Beloved State accompanied my childhood, my adolescence and my adulthood. My civic sense has also been wrought by the turbulent birth pangs of democracy in a post-colonial society. I have basked in carefree democracy, but I have also gone through, like many of my generation, the stifling terror of arrogant demagogy. But I have learnt to be proud of our heritage and our culture which go back thousands of years. Indeed, this golden jubilee of the State of Malta is like a tiny comet in the firmament of stars which makes up our history. We should certainly celebrate it, but with a sense of proportion and a modicum of humility. After all, 'independence' is a relative term – independence from what? Are we truly masters in our own house? I doubt we ever were. The proper term is inter-dependence, which is a good term when you stop and realise that we have always relied heavily on finances we obtained from abroad, either through Lilliputian threats or through Marionette sweetness. As to the Republic in 1974, I remember the black and white television footage and the rain. Two years later, as a first year student reading Law at University, I was appalled to learn that it all happened by a ploy of a mechanism knowingly put in the 1964 Independence Constitution and craftily used to blackmail all and sun-