Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/257374
THIS WEEK maltatoday, SUNDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2014 35 THIS WEEK The fruit of mystery and doubt YOU know those Romantics; always bitching at each others' throats. For instance Keats, who didn't like Col- eridge much because he believed that he valued knowledge over beauty. Keats, for one, didn't, and he married both splendidly in what at the time passed for #coleridgesucks: a letter. On the 21st of December 1817, he wrote to his two brothers: '... it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, es- pecially in Literature... I mean Nega- tive Capability... when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason...' What Man is capable of being, Woman can be too, and this is where, ladies and gentleman, Clare Azzop- ardi comes in. For those of you who don't know her, Azzopardi is one of the most prolific writers on the island. At 37 years of age she has novels, short stories, po- ems, plays, picture books, textbooks and workbooks under her belt. She is a veritable writing machine, one that, luckily for us, produces quality in quantity. The eight stories featured in her lat- est anthology, Kulħadd Ħalla Isem Warajh, all carry a female name: 'Sandra', 'Rita', 'Gracey', 'Roża', 'Lily', 'Margaret', 'Camilla' and 'Polly'. Be- ing female and being Maltese are two motifs close to Azzopardi's heart. She speaks about women, articulating their concerns, their anxieties, their joys and their disappointments. Her voice is decidedly female (which one must not assume simply by virtue of her sex) and the landscapes she paints, both interior and exterior, are definitely Maltese. However this is not a book with a militant feminist agenda as perceived through a Maltese lens. Not at all. Az- zopardi's characters are vessels and/ or allegories that seek higher truths than those espoused by allosomes and citizenship, focusing on images, concepts and ideas that speak to us as human beings. They ask questions without insulting us with answers; or, as the physician poet put it, 'uncer- tainties, mysteries and doubts'. Rumour is a recurrent motif in Azz- opardi's anthology. Whether it stems from neighbourly gossip, a personal grudge or an unresolved past, it acts as a catalyst that instigates and ac- centuates an obsessive drive towards establishing a self. We never meet the titular charac- ter in 'Camilla' but yet her presence, part spectral and part vampiric, is everpresent. We get to know her in- timately through hearsay; everyone knows everything and nothing about her and, just like death, whose agent she seems to be (she wrote epitaphs when she was alive), she ubiquitously possesses the lives of the people who came in contact with her or her my- thos. 'Lily' is another case in point. Here we have an Austerian tale (as in Paul Auster) in which Claudine, seemingly free of her past, haunts the neigh- bourhood where she grew up. Her ob- session with her former house and its present tenants reaches absurdist pro- portions until it finally tears apart the very fabric of her being. She dissolves right in front of our eyes, becoming little more than a whisper trapped in- side a gaol of her own devise. Or maybe not. Maybe Claudine is the creation of the house she once in- habited. Dealing in uncertainties is not the same as being vague. It's taking one chilling step after another, on a very very fine line that divides the known from the unknown, the truths from the untruths, the two sides of the same coin. Think of it as a gentle murmur, a pale area of liminality. This is the place that 'Gracey', 'Rita', 'Sandra' and the others inhabit, a world where people have a name but not a self, ensnared within a spatio- temporal loop that is fed by the shack- ling dictates of fate. Choices and co- nundrums abound but the difficulty of committing oneself, sometimes to taking a leap of faith, holds them back from beginning a new life, bet- tering the one that they have. Maybe it's too early in the year to commit myself but I'm taking the plunge: Azzopardi, with Kulħadd Ħalla Isem Warajh, has raised the local literary stakes very high and it's going to be extremely hard to top this one. Picking up the eight-story anthology about Maltese women, NOEL TANTI celebrates Clare Azzopardi's return to fiction for adults Rails and crakes are birds of lake edges and reedbeds. Their colours are generally (with some notable exceptions) low-key, mostly patterns of blacks, blue-greys and whites, which render these largely secretive birds even more secretive. Of the dozen or so species recorded in Malta, moorhens are the ones you will most likely see, the main reason being that this species is a year-round resident breeding bird. But it hasn't always been so: in Sultana and Gauci's landmark New Guide to the Birds of Malta (1982), moorhens are still recorded as birds of passage, but not breeding. So what happened? Habitat restoration happened. The wetland projects at Ghadira and Is-Simar became a magnet for moorhens, with several pairs now breeding at each site. Every year, young moorhens leave the nature reserves and disperse to other suitable breeding locations, such as valleys. But thanks to our socio-cultural hunters, they never succeed. Text Victor Falzon Photo Aron Tanti 390. MOORHEN Visit Friends of the Earth's website for more information about our work, as well as for information about how to join us www.foemalta.org. You can also support us by sending a blank SMS donation on 50618070 (€4.66) or 50619223 (€11.65). GREEN IDEA OF THE WEEK 292: : READ MORE – Visit http://www.evb.ch/en/freepepper for more information and updates on free pepper. Europe-wide resistance against Syngenta's patent on pepper Earlier this week, Friends of the Earth Malta as part of a broad coalition consisting of 34 NGOs, farmers' and breeders' organisations from 27 European countries filed an opposition to a pepper-patent from Syngenta. The company patented an insect resistance, which they copied from a wild pepper. Such patents are ethically questionable, increase the seed market concentration, hinder innovation, and consequently pose a threat to global food security. While filing the opposition in Munich, a hot pepper soup was served to the employees of the European patent office. On May 8, 2013, the European Patent Organisation (EPO) granted a patent (EP 2140023 B1) to Syngenta for insect resistant pepper plants. A wild pepper plant from Jamaica was crossed with commercial pepper plants. Since the wild plant is resistant to various pests, the patented resistance already existed in nature. However, Syngenta claims the ownership to insect-resistant pepper plants, their seeds, and their fruits, although the patented plants are products of conventional breeding. Such plants should definitely not be patentable under European patent law. The opposition to the patent demands that it should be revoked. It is the first time in EPO's history that such a widely supported opposition, featuring co-opponents from 27 member countries of the European Patent Convention, has been filed, echoing the broad disagreement with the current EPO practice. In May 2012 a resolution has been adopted by the European Parliament which "calls on the EPO to exclude from patenting products derived from conventional breeding and all conventional breeding methods." An upcoming decision by the enlarged board of the EPO may lead to a change of the practice to grant patents on conventional plants. The revocation of the pepper-patent would be an important first step. But to bring about a much-needed and lasting change, a political decision by the administrative council of the EPO is needed. If plants can be patented, this aggravates the already existing concentration process of the global seed market with a few multinational corporations controlling the future of our food. Supposedly, patents on seeds should create an incentive for breeding new plant varieties, but they cause the opposite: Breeders cannot access freely the very base material of plant breeding, such as plant varieties and wild plants. This leads to a decreasing agro- biodiversity and food sovereignty and thus to a smaller choice for consumers.