‘Din il-Ġawhra ta’ Pajjiżna’
Author: Tyrone Grima
Publisher: Horizons Publications / 2024
Pages: 278
Some years ago the author, one of our foremost writers, gave us Bep, a story of repressed sexual feelings and religious life.
This new novel by Tyrone Grima goes a step further. It tells, we might say, the story of our country as exemplified by the story of one family and then even more in the history of one individual who remains nameless but who we may call The Protagonist.
The evolution of this individual is not a linear one, it passes through evolutions and involutions – just like the history of the country itself.
There are times when the reader feels a wrong turning has been taken and the consequences will be dire. But then something reasserts itself inside him, he faces up to his reality and finds the courage to be open to others.
This cathartic process is called coming out. In other words, the author seems to be telling us, this is what the country should be doing – facing up to its reality, accepting itself and in so doing healing itself.
The beginning of the story is lost in the mist of time – the country lives around a forest where the powerful and the rich, who are from a different galaxy, live. The people live in two parallel universes and rarely mix.
Enter the national hero, the liberator, who wants to break down this separateness, the Mighty and his followers – a barely disguised description of Dom Mintoff.
There is a second party led by a Gorgi, which opposes anything that the Mighty does.
The people of the country are thus split between the two leaders, fighting each other, injuring each other.
Family loyalties are supreme but when they are infringed and broken people stop talking to each other for years and years.
We then come to focus on The Protagonist who despite warnings by some of his family, begins to be attracted to the Church and its rhythm of prayers.
In a way, he is in denial after being for years subject to sexual advances from his uncle in return for Math’s lessons. An innocent victim.
Living an enclosed religious life seems what he wants to do, although there is always some doubt if not by him, by others around him. Will he succeed?
Then he finds himself embroiled in a three-way relationship with two other students. He goes to study in another country and again ends up in a gay relationship.
But now he has matured and leaves religious life, settling for a gay, fulfilling, relationship. Slowly his family come round to his way of living.
Will the country likewise find peace and prosperity?
This post was originally published on here
