November 23rd. NanowrimoMalta 15. Four newbies meet at The Palace Hotel in Sliema and one hallowed, established and published regular. The event has been cancelled, but we only get to know of this once we have already turned up. At first there is just a Malteser and a young Greek woman. We have no idea on how to proceed. We are total strangers, so we talk about our unbirthed 'novels' and share who we are, our background and the language we write in. Again, we are novices in the art of (novel writing), and there is no-one to direct or discipline our chatter.
Because we have just met, we decide we will work together and not separately on our respective 'novels'.
Therefore we decide upon a theme: 'BELONGING'. I suggest and Mara (Marw?)warms up to this theme immediately, waving away any further proposals.
We draw a spider web of free associations radiating out from the word 'belonging' an encircled nucleus in the centre of the page:
Arrows point to other circles which point to family, lovers, friends, country, nationality, ideology, belief, religion, attitude, profession, community, culture, language, lifestyle, be-longing, the longing to 'be', yearning, and of course Greek mythology (you can't take either one out of each other..the Greek or the myth). Zeus throwing the thunderbolt of separation and creating dualism and the 'other'. The unrequited yearning for the mythic whole, the separation from bliss and the garden of Eden. U-topia: U meaning 'No' and topos-place. So 'no-place'. Not in this reality. Striving towards the unachievable. (Digression here to Mara's thesis and the economies of scale of eco-villages).We discuss how each person represents part of the jigsaw puzzle, whilst we are busy piecing it together. Maybe that we are all inherently polygamous, how one lover cannot give you that sense of wholeness, the utopian love, and the only person who can give it to you, is yourself. So eventually we return 'home' to ourselves after losing oneself, a process we have to go through before we can truly belong to ourselves, the only fragmented belonging we can hold to (lots of 'selves' here, we out 'self' ourselves). We talk about possession and monogamy. How monogamy as a cultural 'modus-vivendi' only came into being because of property and the ownership of territory, both metaphorical and physical. We talk until the cows come home, but we are here to write.
Then we decide to write a dialogue.
Questions and answers: I ask, she replies. I type. She talks. Spontaneously
Who are you?
I am a man
Where do you come from?
Greece
Why are you here?
I came to work
On another island?
The Mediterranean, feels closer to home, more familiar.
Malta is unique. You can meet so many people here. Even the Maltese are like
foreigners in their own country.
Why?
Because you were dominated by so many cultures. You are a
mixture of the European, particularly the Sicilian, the English and the Arabic.
Do you feel you can belong here?
No I don’t. Malta is place where people come and go. You belong to where you start a family of your own. It depends on your memories. You try and delete your memories and re-start. When you leave your home, you will never find it anywhere
else. Not just your family and friends.
It is the memory of place that makes you feel at home. Smells like home, for example the whiff of a spice, food that takes you back............
We stop
Others join.
More coffee and wine. More discussion and sharing, where do you come from? why are you here? what do you do? Everyone is in transition. One of us, a Sardinian, is an architect. We listen to why she is living on Malta. We hone in. We decide to marry architecture and place to the theme at hand. A hush descends on our corner of the cafe and we scribble and thump away at the keyboard. A five minute break. Nibbles arrive and fuel the free-associative exercise. Hard to halt the conversation. Back to work. We write some more. Imbibe some more. Stop and share our offings. Then we depart. Happy Sunday afternoon.
This is my 30 minute stream:
How My Physical Sense of Space Defines my Sense of Belonging.
The
sea contains me. The horizon defines me. This is my territory as far as the eye
can see, 360 degrees, all around. It is enough to crane my neck and my nostrils
dilate. Salt is in my blood. I crave salt, the way other people crave coffee.
Salt on my lips. Salt on the sea breeze. Salty sun dried tomatoes rubbed in
olive oil and smeared onto fresh crusty Maltese bread.
Metallic
salt, the taste of spilt blood. I bite my tongue with regret, a faux-pas
uttered before thought kicks in to restrain it too late. Violence, war, territorial greed, the stench
of stale sweat under boiling armour in August midday heat.. Blood spilt in defence.
Blood flowing in possession. Salt everywhere. Terraced fields of encrusted
diamonds in a basin of limestone. Worth your weight in salt. The currency of a
thousand conquests. In winter, these incised rectangles mirror the blue sky above
in their sea water below. The world is upside down. Sifting salt pans.
On a
train ride from New Delhi to Diu, I smell the salt in the carriage air, an hour
or so before we approach the coast. I start squirming in my seat, suddenly full
of excitement, of nostalgia, of opportunity. My Australian carriage-mates look
at me quizzically. The sea has always brought promise of potential, of the
outside world, the other beyond the horizon, adventure, sustenance, hope and
trade. Spices from the orient, foreign tongue and escape. The sea is also a threat.
A double-sided sword. My forebears shaded their brows, screwing their eyeballs,
crow-lines furrowed by fear and sun, ever scanning what the waves my bring.
Friend or foe. Food, fish or fire and
brimstone. Pirates to carry off cotton growers into captivity forever,
marauders to raze and haze, pillage and rape maidens in their first blush.
Run
to the citadel, run. Shut yourself up in yellow walls, yellow dust. Always
dust. Choking with enclosure. Nostrils
now full of stone, but safety in the stone too and damp. Seeping winters, never
feeling warm enough. Wet rising, sfilata/strata upon sfilata/strata. Mould in
my nostrils now. The fungus of history, choked by history. Rooted by the past,
sinking lethewards bound, rising above it, straining to unloosen the noose.
Yellow.
Yellow and blue. The colours that encircle me. Green is the holy grail. Green
in spring. Green of the rains. Much needed and prayed for. Crosses made of
stone. Jagged garique, etching guilt into my psyche. Fortress strength eroded
by guilt and the salt of tears, generations of waterfalls of salt and salt,
gurgling through novenas and latticed hearts, bleeding salty wounds. Monthly
menstruations and the warriors that seek to destroy those that birthed them. I
am the belly button of the Mediterranean. I’m the land of honey. Sweetness
flows out with me and bile from me too. My gift is bittersweet. All reality is
bittersweet, like the memory of my children who have departed from me. My soil is dry and brittle and the wind
ravages me. Some days more violently, more completely than the days
before. My womb is fertile but my milk,
despite the abundance of sweet fennel that grows on my shallow soil, runs dry
quickly. Many hungry bellies must seek their fortunes elsewhere. They always
return. An islander always does. It is the magnetic pull of sea and moon. The
memory of the trail of midnight phosphorescence, on a carpet of deep indigo that
stretches forever into destiny.
My
spawn think they are the centre of the earth. How can they not. The Mediterranean
whirls in their thoughts, the sound of waves crashing in their ear drums, the
foam of history lapping at the sides of their mouths. Mare Nostrum - our sea.
Middle earth and this archipelago straddling the ley-lines of history.
Acupuncture points on tracts of land. All roads lead to Rome, but first they must
pass through Malta. The mouth of the fish, its fins. Its harbours, cradling,
refuge from the storm. Exposed and welcoming. Safety for the sick. Hospitality and hopitalliers. The brothel of
Europe, way before Amsterdam claimed the throne. The Jews of the
Mediterranean. Marlowe’s moniker. Who am I? Arab, European, Englishman,
Italian?
Always
looking towards the horizon line, the horizon, smelling of thyme and salt,
honeyed words and sweat. Forever this
longing to be, this longing for the other. Whatever is other is better. In the
centre and incomplete. And abroad, turreted by mountains and acres of trees,
yards of green, cities of money, libraries offering the known. Yearning for home, the unknown the horizon
brings. I come home to my land, to myself, and I need the horizon line, the
promise of the unsaid.
