My father was a teacher at the then George Schinas Primary School in Luqa in the 90s. He didn’t drive a car – still doesn’t – and, being from Birkirkara, he had to catch two buses every single day to make it to work. I went to school with him, as a student and a son, and I used to love those four daily bus rides because it meant that I would have time to read the books that my father had recommended at any given week.
I mention primary school because of a particular memory. I was often picked at school raffles to be the one tasked with pulling out names from a nondescript bag. I used to close my eyes really tight, raise my hand up high and then dunk it blindly into the bag. When I’d pull out a piece of paper, I would open my eyes and read the name out loud.
Once, after calling out a name, the teacher holding the bag during a San Martin lottery told me that I was a lamebrain for never peeking in and drawing my own name.
You did the right thing, my father said. It’s just not the fair thing to do.
Looking back, it would have been much fairer had I not been allowed anywhere near that nondescript bag simply because my father was a teacher at that school. But any other student might have been tempted to draw their own name – I wasn’t – so did it work out in the end? Was chance the fair thing or would it have been fairer still to allow the kid whose parents could barely afford a uniform for their child to have a bit of good fortune?
Suffice it to say, I’ve been obsessed about ideas of fairness and justice ever since.
Growing up in a country with very little meritocracy to show for itself intensified my desire to see justice being done. Whether it was a socialist government or a nationalist government, there were clear and constant breaches of righteousness. Brown-nosing, nepotism, daily injustices guaranteed that our island country would be regularly mired in mediocrity. I was never very confident in my own abilities until I got my fill of rubbish and thought: yes, we can definitely do better. And this thought didn’t mean that I could do better either; it just meant that we, as a nation, could do better.
This mediocrity, from my perspective, did not spill into the literary field until recently. I always thought of Maltese literature as quite powerful for its youth, moving, confident. The potential of this plant was through the roof and I shook with excitement at the thought of what future fruit it might bear.
But then something happened and the plant stopped growing. Alongside the advent of official writing communities and literary NGOs and government entities involved with literature, money, favour, and influence became rather important in the publishing sphere. No longer was it just about the writing quality.
We turn away when a musician bombs on stage, we tear down a building when an architect’s vision fails, and we call out anyone who does a terrible job. Yet somehow, when literature became entangled with power (not political parties, but power all the same), it too became tainted with mediocrity — and no one said a word. Publicly, at least. Behind closed doors, I often heard writers, even those claiming friendship with others, tear those same friends’ work apart with a sharp, stony gleam — though only when the criticised party was safely out of earshot.
It is for this reason that when I wrote criticism or practiced it, I’ve always attempted – for lack of a better phrase – a kind of moral criticism. I would not pick apart the work of someone who is modest and attempting to do his best, I would not go after an individual who is clearly willing to learn, I won’t attack the work of someone humble and good-natured. I’d go after powerful people who had a tinge of mediocrity about them, people who would make fun of their friends’ works behind their back while they enjoy the spoils of unearned influence.
There have been hundreds of writers and thinkers who said something about the importance of criticism, writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin. At least one of these writers used to pen anonymous reviews – some glowing with love, others with hate – in a then up-and-coming periodical known as the Times Literary Supplement.
Malta tried anonymous literary criticism once and it was an unprecedented success. That publication closed within two weeks, but not before it made local literature headline news–twice. It sparked a witch hunt with calls for people to be fired, forced some insular literary circles to admit they didn’t welcome criticism, and unleashed rounds of threats and hostility. I say it was successful without irony. The proof is in the pudding: it drew enough outrage and attention to suggest it struck a nerve. If it hadn’t mattered, no one would have cared.
The problem with social media windbags is that they were out of their depth and got a lot of things wrong. People with little understanding of the Maltese literary scene took it upon themselves to sway opinions on topics they didn’t fully grasp. I ask them: how much taxpayer money is wasted on vanity projects or is lost to corrupt direct orders? Are our literary NGOs using public funds responsibly, or are certain private projects favoured? Does everyone have equal opportunity? Who is the Maltese poet who was celebrated by UK Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis and who won numerous awards abroad and read by Queen Elizabeth II and yet is mysteriously absent from HELA’s directory of Maltese writers? What happened to the English translations of our national poet Dun Karm Psaila’s work? Were they done well? Why are individuals receiving threats for writing reviews? If anyone spouting an opinion then did not have an answer to these questions now, then they should have known better.
This is why we need a critic — because literature should be democratic. As Terry Eagleton said, “literary criticism helps to foster a questioning of accepted beliefs and provides insights that help us make sense of the broader culture in which we live.” It’s astonishing that writers, who claim to bear the weight of civilisation, would choose to silence fair criticism in a country where a journalist was murdered just a few years ago. How can we, as a nation, claim to have internalised that dark chapter and grown from it when our own writers prefer hostility over a diversity of opinions?
In today’s world, success is often seen as a series of profitable connections. A writer who appears chummy with everyone — at least in the public eye — is considered destined for success, someone who will profit at every turn. But in doing so, they risk feeding the very mediocrity they think they stand above. To effect real change, we need honesty to stand against the trolls of democracy. The reading public deserves to know which writers have truly earned their place and which have merely bought their way to the top shelf.
As a critic, my job is to stay vigilant — not to act as a service or charity for authors seeking free praise. My role is to be fair and democratic, to urge writers to rely solely on their craft, not on their popularity. If writers think that this industry, reduced to a contest of connections, is their lottery ticket, they misunderstand literature and the fact that true success here isn’t fame; it’s freedom. It’s the democratic freedom to peel back the layers and reveal perspectives that readers might otherwise miss.
It’s disheartening when one of those layers we’re trying to peel back is the very establishment of local literature itself — a beacon that should shine through the dark. If you want to understand the state of a nation, look at its literary criticism.
We need this criticism precisely because it doesn’t exist here. There’s no fair platform or multiplicity of voices to help us assess what’s being written. Without this critical foundation, we reveal a disregard for our literature and its potential. If we, the very ground from which this art is meant to grow, don’t take it seriously, how can we expect the world to do so?
Don’t we deserve at least one dissident voice to say what no one else is saying? I still hear my father’s kind voice telling me I did the right thing. I think I deserved that. I was hoping someone would notice.
Culture Editor
Author and Literary Critic
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