VV(15) - Malta

[David Morris]

http://www.aboutmalta.com/grazio/scape6.html

LIL DIN L-ART HELWA?
Victor Debattista Ph.D.

We have forgiven. Our skies, once darkened by the destruction they pelted us
with, now are bright enough to burn their fair skins under. Perhaps so it
should be, their pilots died at our hands, with only fleeting smoke trails to
mark their final resting places. 
>From the harsh sackcloth of the Second World War, our grandparents shaped their
sacred mythology, their epic of a holy national resistance. From it came tales
of suffering and horror with which to shame errant grandchildren. (Cens
Perpetwu.) The story of the priest who lost his head in a shower of broken
glass. Such hunger! The rich man spied eating a carrot stalk discarded on the
street. And the ruined heritage; the magnificant shell of the bombed out
theatre, now a place for school boys to break bottles. Butterfly bombs, kettle
bombs: instruments of terror that still bring death to the curious. Stukas
screaming obscenities and death, diving from the same sky to which they turned
in prayer. 

And the miracles! The bomb that tore through the Mosta dome but never exploded.
Did it fail to explode or was it prevented from exploding? Its miraculously
inert form is still present there to remind us of God's mercy. And on the feast
of His Mother, the Ohio, battered but not beaten, came to dock, dutifully
sinking only after it had discharged its precious cargo. 

With their God beside them, our grandparents generation beat off a second,
harsher seige. Today we are free. But beware! Foreign invasion creeps behind
us, for our language is our shame. It is the currency we use in posturing
blasphemy, and too little poetry. We reject our Semitic language for the
learned facade of Shakespeare's honey'd tongue. Even foreigners notice. In the
words of Fausto Maijstral "We talk as animals might". Our minds are filled with
the dread of a language imagined hard to read and write in. So hard that it
does become hard to read and write in. So hard that I cannot help but give this
testimony in the language of the unwilling invader. 

Are we so spineless that the language of a people who oppressed us sounds
better in our ears than our own? 

--------------- 

Victor P. Debattista: Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Rutgers U. Doctoral
dissertation: "The Torquing of Galactic Bars by Dark Matter Halos". Married to
a Romanian national, a teacher at Union College in upstate New York. Has lived
in the States for 10 years. Presently doing post-doctoral work in Basel,
Switzerland. He is a great admirer of Pynchon. E-mail: debattis at astro.unibas.ch




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