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maltatoday SUNDAY 4 MARCH 2018 32 This Week Walking is one of the most crucial through-lines for this collection. What is it about walking in particular that makes it such a rich resource for your writing? Each of the 'daytime' poems in Erbgħin Jum narrates a walk, real or metaphorical or both, but they are all born of long walks I took in urban and rural Luxembourg, along the cliffs of southern Malta, in the Coole Forest of County Galway, or in the Jura moun- tains, incidentally the territory of Rousseau. This self-styled prome- neur solitaire praised walking for "lending a greater boldness" to his thinking, allowing him to select, combine and shape his reflections into writing "without fear or re- straint". This is one of the major reasons why I began to take walk- ing more seriously and embarked upon writing the book – to culti- vate courage and perseverance, to nurture enough strength to face a number of deeply-seated fears head-on and hopefully overcome them. For years I was convinced that writing about childhood trauma and family turmoil would be banal. I wrote about languages, maps and borders, in the il- lusory belief that I was 'rising above' what I had long attempted to con- sider as corny and in- significant melodrama. As a third-culture kid uncomfortable within the confines of a sin- gle language or nation, there was (and still is) a degree of self-expression in those poems, but at the same time, to a cer- tain extent, I was bor- rowing the tribulations of others. After a gradual yet protracted slide into depression, one night in the autumn of 2014, I hit rock-bottom. It was time to confront my own monsters, before falling unawares into the cage of genetic determinism and becom- ing a monster myself. "Movement is the best cure for melancholia", wrote Robert Bur- ton in 1621, essentially echoing what Hippocrates had advised two millenia before. Walking is a natural anti-depressant, raising serotonin levels, opening neural pathways. Even if I'm not walking toward any particular destination, walking gives me a feeling of di- rection, and in that sense, being in motion, grounds me. It helps me to unravel the spirals of rumi- nation, to untie knots of thought, to gain emotional clarity and bal- ance. Discovering new pathways or streets, even close to where I may be living, broadens my per- sonal geography, and helps me to breathe more profoundly. Having said that, to walk is not necessarily straight-forward. The attitude needs to be right; at first, it can take a lot of concentration to allow the mind to let itself go, to slow down enough to become conscious of its surroundings, to allow a sharpening of the senses and thus to walk with presence, and enjoy the simple, sensual pleasure of openness in move- ment. After several kilometres, with the body fully oxygenated and the spirits raised, anything and everything becomes possible – a chance encounter, a new way of seeing things, a wild association of ideas, a creative quickening of the mind. Each walk is a little drama in it- self, and several of the walks in the book end in failure by surrender- ing to paranoia, but by Day 35, there is a rediscovery of pleasure in the pain of a long hike, a quiet yet gratified acceptance of the self and of all its mistakes, and the glee of what Rebecca Solnit in Wan- derlust: A History of Walking calls "knowing the world through the body, and the body through the world". Did you always have a clear idea of what some of the key motifs of this collection would be – walking, the '40 Days' imposition – or did these reveal themselves later on? After the first short poem, Night 0, scribbled upon waking from a nightmare, somewhere at the bottom of the abyss I found the determination to start climbing out. From the following morn- ing onwards, I walked and wrote every single day for seven months. The only structural plan was to write alternate daytime walk- ing poems and nocturnal poems about insomnia, in the at once disciplined and flexible rhythms of the endekasillabu. I didn't know where exactly my feet and mind would take me, nor in what order I would eventually encounter past and present ghosts. I had no idea I would be capable of tapping and releasing such ferocious anger, nor of taking personal and fam- ily taboo by the horns and giving it artistic form for any potential stranger to read. I did set the number 40 as a distant finish line early on, as I needed a horizon, and the hope that by then I would reach some "Some people, mostly women, have come forward to say they identify personally with some of the stories of domestic violence and psychological abuse" Launched with a memorable, emotionally-wrenching performance at Studio Solipsis in Rabat, Antione Cassar's poetry collection Erbgħin Jum, illustrated by Steven Scicluna, addresses childhood trauma through the motif of walking – an integral part of what helps Cassar to process his emotions, as he tells TEODOR RELJIC The ache of sincerity Antoine Cassar reading from his collection Erbghin Jum during its launch performance at Studio Solipsis, Rabat on December 30 Erbghin Jum was launched to musical accompaniment by fellow author Alex Vella Gera and other musicians PHOTOGRAPHY BY GIOLA CASSAR