ADRIAN GRIMA
The Melting Pot that Never Was
Published in Africa and the West, ed. Badra LAHOUEL, Dar El Quds El Arabi, Oran, Algeria, May 2009
The official website of the Malta Tourism Authority proudly proclaims that Malta is “The
Island at the Heart of the Mediterranean,” the heart of a single body, that is, a living
organism that has, or can develop, the ability to act or function independently.1 And in
one of its latest advertisements abroad, the Maltese national airline Airmalta describes
the island as “Truly Mediterranean,”2 thus assuming that there exists some such essence
and that Malta partakes of it. One may be (perhaps rightly) tempted to dismiss such
statements as empty publicity, rather than take account of the chords they strike in our
collective consciousness, but adverts are not the only home for such statements. Like
other leading intellectuals, Malta’s foremost writer and literary critic Oliver Friggieri not
only believes that there exists such a thing as a “Mediterranean civilization” but also that
it is “one organism” and Malta is a living part of it.
In a short introduction to his fundamental text on the history of Maltese Literature
published in 1979, Storja tal-Letteratura Maltija, Oliver Friggieri, one of Malta’s mostrespected writers and intellectuals, argues that the “Europeanness” of Maltese literature
is proof of its cultural Europeanness in general, as the steady Europeanisation of
elements in its language of Arabic origin shows. However he goes on to suggest, or
rather claim, that Malta “participates in a full and natural way in the complex identity of
one civilization,” the Mediterranean civilization.3 There are “many common elements
that characterize this tradition,” and these “feelings, realms of imagination, ways of
reasoning, rhetorical tendencies, and other things” that all point to the conclusion that
there is “one identity, “one big civilization.” Friggieri sees Malta as “taqsima żgħira u
ħajja tal-organiżmu kollu,” a small and lively part of the whole organism” that is the
Mediterranean civilization, which forms the substratum of Maltese culture.4 The birth of
Maltese literature written in Maltese coincided, not by chance, with the emergence on
the island of romantic nationalistic and literary ideals influenced by Italian Risorgimento
exiles in the 19th century. The pioneers of Maltese literature showed that they were
more inclined to write lyrical works inspired by their inner feelings and tribulations,
apart from passionately expressing the political aspirations of their colonized
community, rather than works employing their intellectual powers. Friggieri believes
that this choice was also dictated by the fact that the Maltese are Mediterranean, and
therefore naturally predisposed to the heart rather than the mind.5
1
http://www.visitmalta.com.
The Times, Editorial, “Is Malta truly Mediterranean?” Monday, 24th August 2009,
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090824/opinion/editorial
3
Oliver Friggieri, Storja tal-Letteratura Maltija, vol. 1 (Malta: Klabb Kotba Maltin) 16.
4
Friggieri, Storja tal-Letteratura Maltija, 16.
5
Friggieri, Storja tal-Letteratura Maltija, 27.
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Oliver Friggieri develops his concept of the “mediterrananjetà” of Maltese literature in
works like his collection of essays on the “Maltese National Consciousness.” Towards a
historical-cultural definition, in which he immediately identifies this concept with a
strong sense of religion, “a radical experience of divinity that governs everything, from
the small acts to great political advances.”6 Another mediterranean characteristic of
Maltese literature is its consciousness of antiquity, of the past as “a mental category, a
psychological model that emerged from the confines of a particular epoch.”7 It is a
search for the origins, for the birth with all the questions that it inevitably raises. As with
other mediterranean lands – he uses a small “m” here – for Malta, writes Friggieri,
antiquity is also “a high civilization and a window on the sense of divinity. The
development of organized tourism, he argues, sells this heritage as something that is,
“attwali,” still alive and relevant. Friggieri concludes that the Mediterranean, the
first“patrija” or homeland of Maltese literature’s, “is a stretch of land and sea that
consists of cells and territories that share a common heritage, one identity.”8
The “Mediterraneanness” of Malta, writes Friggieri, is exposed to the winds of Southern
Europe and Northern Africa. The two continents meet in the Maltese language, with its
Arabic substratum and morphology and its Romance vocabulary, but also in so many
other aspects of life in the Maltese Islands that, according to Friggieri, display this
synthesis, like religious tradition, cuisine, mental attitudes, architecture, and farming
practices.9 This idea of the Mediterranean is very much in line with an editorial
published in August 2009 in one of Malta’s most influential papers, The Times,
identifying the vanishing Mediterranean character of the Maltese Islands with “idyllic”
landscapes, children playing in the streets, a “sense of personal security,” “solidarity”
among members of the society, a “relatively slow pace of life,” “a national festive air” in
summer, “strolling on promenades in the evening” and the general feeling that “life is
hardly ever dull”...10
When one reads such representations of the Mediterranean, one inevitably thinks of the
adverts that sell the Islands as a “taste of the Mediterranean” to the outsider. As the
world’s foremost destination for tourists, the region narrates itself in ways that often
alienate the “Mediterraneans” themselves, selling a stereotypical image that does not
allow them to look themselves in the eyes, to venture beyond the grand narratives of
passion, siesta climate, sun-sea landscape and quaint culture that it sells, to question the
highly dubious idea of the region as some kind of unified cultural and historical whole.
6
Oliver Friggieri, Il-Kuxjenza Nazzjonali Maltija. Lejn Definizzjoni Storika-Kulturali (Malta: PEG, 1995) 96.
Friggieri, Il-Kuxjenza Nazzjonali Maltija, 97.
8
Friggieri, Il-Kuxjenza Nazzjonali Maltija, 97.
9
Friggieri, Il-Kuxjenza Nazzjonali Maltija, 113.
10
The Times, Editorial, “Is Malta truly Mediterranean?” Monday, 24th August 2009,
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090824/opinion/editorial.
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Main tourist attraction on the planet
Selling the Mediterranean is big business. The First Medlink Report (2006) talks about
this Basin as “the main tourist attraction on the planet” visited by something like 132
million tourists in 1990 and possibly by a staggering 312 million in 2025. Domestic
tourism, included in these figures, has grown strongly, initially in the North but now also
in the South and East of the basin. People tend to go to the coasts: 96 million people (51
million foreigners and 35 million national ones) in 1984, 132 million in 1990, 176
million in the year 2000. In 2002 this “true invasion” of foreign tourists alone generated
an income of 134 billion dollars.11
Moreover, as the locus par excellence, as the pundits would have it, of political, cultural
and religious conflict, discourse about the Mediterranean is plagued by clichés and
empty words about building bridges and bringing people together, about partnerships
and unions, about “free” trade areas and collaboration in different areas. In recent years,
the Mediterranean has become the focus of intense political and diplomatic activity, and
thousands of people migrate across its waters every year to flee from persecution and to
seek a better future. It also provides one of the most important routes for the
transportation of energy. “A ces réalités factuelles,” writes the French mediterraneanist
Thierry Fabre, “s'ajoute une immense portée symbolique, liée à l'attachement aux grandes
civilisations du passé (égyptienne, phénicienne, grecque, latine, arabe ou byzantine…) et à
l'actualité des trois monothéismes, qui trouvent dans le monde méditerranéen le lieu de
leurs communes origines comme de leurs sanglantes différenciations.”12 The international
mainstream media rarely acknowledges the complexities of the Mediterranean, and it
often provides either a postcard, exotic image of the region, or else a crude, negative
documentation of its many ills.
When Nicholas Sarkozy first mentioned his proposal for a Union of the Mediterranean in
his presidential campaign in a speech in Toulon on 7th February 2007, Fabre
acknowledged that Sarkozy had managed to draw the attention of mainstream politics
and the international media to the importance of the region for Europe and for the world
and the potentially constructive role that the region could play. But when it came to the
ideology underpinning the content Fabre was far from impressed. He argued that the
President’s initiative was fundamentally flawed because it set out to do the wrong things
in the wrong ways. In an article published in La pensée de midi, Fabre criticized the UM
initiative as essentially stunted, perhaps like the Barcelona process, by “a pseudodialogue of cultures” (“un pseudo-dialogue des cultures.”).13 He expressed his fear that
The First Medlink Report (2006), written by Laura Davì and Claudio Jampaglia, was published by the
following NGOs: Un ponte per..., Arci, Attac-Italia, Beati i Costruttori di Pace, Fiom-CGIL,
Guerre&Pace, ICS, Libera, Lunaria, and Rete del Nuovo Municipio, with the support of the Presidenza
della Regione Lazio. These quotes and figures are from p. 65.
12 Thierry Fabre, “Nicolas Sarkozy et la Méditerranée, des lignes de failles,” La pensée de midi (Actes
Sud) N°22, 2 novembre 2007, 4.
13 Fabre, “Nicolas Sarkozy et la Méditerranée, des lignes de failles,” 12.
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the UM was not motivated by a genuine desire to work together for a sustainable, more
just, more peaceful Mediterranean. In “Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for
Everything, from Epistemology to Eating,” Michael Herzfeld had already identified
claims of Mediterranean unity as, among other things, “political moves aiming to unify
weaker countries behind a strong regional leader such as France.”14 And despite the
romanticism surrounding “Mediterranean culture,” this construct was used by French
and Italian 19th century colonialists to justify the violent occupation of Libya and Algeria.
Although Sarkozy’s proposal eventually developed into a Union for the Mediterranean
which attempted to rope in all Mediterranean partners and members of the EU and
made it look increasingly like a resuscitation of the failed Barcelona process, Fabre’s
initial misgivings were not purged. By late 2009, the activities within the UM had all but
stalled, because of many of the same North-South, North-North and even South-South
issues that the Barcelona process had failed to address.
More importantly, some commentators interpret the French President’s initiative as an
indication of France’s desire to (re-)establish itself as a leader in the region and to
impose its agenda. Some would argue that apart from keeping Turkey out of the EU,
ignoring the decades-old illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel and stemming
immigration, this agenda includes, perhaps indirectly, an attempt by France to
rehabilitate its colonial past. According to Sarkozy, colonization “ne fut pas tant un rêve
de conquête qu’un rêve de civilisation;” it was about civilization, not about conquest.15 In
a highly criticized speech at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, on 26 July,
2007, written by his special counsellor Henri Guaino (who, according to Fabre, also
penned his speeches about the Mediterranean), Sarkozy defended France's past role in
Africa by saying that while it may have made “mistakes,” it “did not exploit anybody.”16
Commentators like Michel Agier saw arrogance and a profound ignorance of African
history in that speech.17
What Thierry Fabre calls for is not a public “repentance” or some kind of humiliation of
the former colonizer but
un véritable travail de mémoire, de part et d'autre, et d'une politique active de reconnaissance,
comme nous y invite Paul Ricoeur, pour établir avec justesse et précision les faits et évaluer leur
signification et leur portée dans l'histoire.18
Michael Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to
Eating,” W. V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, 2005) 52.
15 Fabre, “France, Europe, Méditerranée: un triangle incertain.”
16 Chris McGreal, “Mbeki criticised for praising 'racist' Sarkozy,” The Guardian, Monday August 27
2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/27/southafrica.france.
17 Michel Agier, “l’Afrique en France après le discours de Dakar.” Vacarme 42 - hiver 2008. “Plusieurs
commentaires ont mis l’accent sur l’arrogance et l’ignorance profonde de l’Afrique historique et actuelle qu’a
montrées le discours prononcé par Nicolas Sarkozy.” http://www.vacarme.eu.org/article1493.html.
18 Fabre, “Nicolas Sarkozy et la Méditerranée, des lignes de failles,” 6.
14
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This is not an easy process and it will take a lot of conviction and determination, on the
part of the former colonizers in the region, especially France and Italy, and the colonized,
perhaps Algeria and Libya more than others, to see it through. “Il y a là un chantier
majeur pour l'avenir, la nécessité de nous entendre sur les lectures du passé.” This is one of
the first tasks that we have to carry out together in order to build a Community of the
Mediterranean that is sincere and not based on “une accumulation de ressentiments ou
d'arrière-pensées.”19
Sarkozy’s project has had a lukewarm reception in Malta. Some columnists have hailed
the project as a positive intiative; and in September 2008, in a piece he titled “As the
Mediterranean settles...” the editor of The Times hailed the “improving dialogue between
countries working towards an EU-Mediterranean union” as a ray that has “shone upon
the Mediterranean.”20 But many others are not so sure. When Dorothée Schmid
presented her paper on “The Union for the Mediterranean: French Track or New
European Policy?” in Malta in April 2008,21 celebrating the Mediterranean constructivist
concept which started with colonisation but has been “transformed today into a dream
of pacific coexistence, which is vividly described in president Sarkozy’s 2007 and 2008
discourses,” many of the Maltese in the audience who reacted publicly to her speech
highlighted the fact that the UM project (as Fabre claims) fails to address the issues that
make dialogue and cooperation in the Mediterranean almost impossible. These issues
included migration flows, Turkey’s application to join the EU, internal EU squabbling,
the open wounds from the colonial past, the failures of the Barcelona process and the
EU’s heavy-handedness vis-à-vis its so-called “Mediterranean partners,” the Israeli
Occupation of Palestine, and the walls raised by the EU to Mediterranean Arabs trying to
visit countries in the EU. The critics included Guido de Marco, a former President of the
Republic, leading diplomat and promoter of dialogue in the Mediterranean. And in a
lecture on “The Mediterranean dilemma: The difficulties of stability in the
Mediterranean” organized by the European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and
Euro-Arab Cooperation (MEDEA) in Brussels on November 5, 2009, Prof. de Marco
argued that the Union for the Mediterranean had yet to prove itself.22
This is not to say that our political and cultural discourse about the Mediterranean is not
replete with well-intentioned platitudes and clichés. In an opinion piece celebrating
Malta’s Independence achieved in 1964, Mario de Marco, a senior government figure and
son of the former President, wrote about the present generation of Maltese as “living the
Fabre, “Nicolas Sarkozy et la Méditerranée, des lignes de failles,” 6-7.
Editorial, The Times (Malta), “As the Mediterranean settles...” Thursday, 4th September 2008.
21 Dorothée Schmid, “The Union for the Mediterranean: French Track or New European Policy?”
Paper presented in Malta on the 29th April 2008. The Jean Monnet Seminar Series, European
Documentation and Research Centre, University of Malta, 2008.
22
The Times (Malta), Sunday, 8th November 2009, “Former president speaks about the Med dilemma,”
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20091108/local/former-president-speaks-about-the-med-dilemma
19
20
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reality of Malta becoming a member of the European Union without losing sight for a
moment of our Mediterranean identity.”23 It’s a refrain that we’ve heard time and again.
The exotic Mediterranean
In Malta, the Mediterranean becomes part of our discourse when it has the potential to
sell. The grand narrative of the Mediterranean is inevitably bound to tourism, normally
mass tourism, and to the cliché of building bridges between peoples. There is little
public interest (that is, outside the realm of academia and niche cultural initiatives) to
scrape the surface of these clichés, to explore centuries’ old links, to treat cultural,
political and environmental issues regionally. Malta has taken some very important
initiatives over the years, most notably in the fields of peace brokering and the law of the
sea. But most Maltese would find it difficult to name even a handful of major political or
cultural figures living in the region today. Most Maltese know next to nothing, for
example, about the literatures of the vast majority of Mediterranean countries. The
social and cultural aspirations of the Maltese lie further north.
And yet, when it comes to promoting what one could call a “modern traditional” wine
festival in one of Malta’s largest towns, Ħal Qormi, the Mediterranean features
prominently on the billboard. Because this is the image of themselves that the Maltese
both want, and perhaps feel obliged, to portray. The fonts used are indicative: the name
of the town comes across as solid and bold while the more “poetic” statement about the
Mediterranean character of the event is rendered by using flowing letters beneath a
sequence of pictures related to the traditional culture of wine and the modern events
23
Mario de Marco, “The Pillars of Independence,” The Times (Malta), Saturday, 20th September 2008.
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that will celebrate it. Herzfeld’s words about “strategies of self-stereotyping”24 and
“folklorism,25 and Glissant’s observations about the conscious, wilful, folklorization of
the periphery26 (read, in this case, the Mediterranean as periphery of Europe) inevitably
come to mind because the Mediterranean here is depicting itself in the way that the
northern Europeans depicted it. According to Glissant, self-folklorization happens
quando permane la convinzione che non si può arrivare da nessuna parte senza l’accordo, la
considerazione dei vecchi centri. È per questo che si fa di tutto, sia nel campo del linguaggio che
nel campo delle idee, perché il vecchio centro sia affascinato e coinvolto da quello che si dice [...].
La vera regionalizzazione non deve dipendere da un centro né costituirsi in un centro.27
For Malta to find an alternative to the logic of periphery (Mediterranean) vs centre
(northern Europe), it must refuse to repeat the clichés about it and about the
Mediterranean dished out by that which it continues to revere as the centre (the socalled “West”). It must refuse to play the stereotypical roles in the fields of politics and
culture which have been assigned to it by that centre.
Local people, like the Greeks or the Maltese, invoke the idea of a shared Mediterranean
identity for a variety of reasons. One such reason may simply be the desire to represent
themselves as exercising cultural choice, like other, neighbouring populations. A second
reason may be a genuinely expanded access to resources of knowledge about local and
regional culture that were simply not available under the more repressive regimes of the
past. Herzfeld argues that the idea of a Mediterranean identity may be as much of “a
trap” as its predecessors, nativist demoticism and neoclassical folklorism. “For, by
conforming to a model of Mediterranean peoples as unreliable, imprecise, and
spontaneous – all virtues that are highly regarded in the inside spaces of Greek cultural
intimacy – they are also providing both an excuse for their own failures in the larger
spheres of competition and an excuse for others to despise them.”28 Here one can easily
substitute “Greeks” with “Maltese.”
Herzfeld invites us to treat attributions of Mediterranean culture not as literal
statements but as performative utterances in J. L. Austin’s sense (as expounded in How
To Do Things with Words): “they do not so much enunciate facts as create them.”29 This
way, suggests Herzfeld, we can see claims of Mediterranean unity as “excuses expressive
of, and enmeshed in, a global hierarchy of value in which ‘Mediterranean’ comes
somewhere between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive.’”30 This mix is evident in the Qormi Wine
Michael Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to
Eating,” W. V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, 2005) 52.
25 Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass. Critical Ethnography in the Margins of
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 13.
26 Édouard Glissant, Poetica del diverso, trans. Francesca Neri (Ruma: Meltemi, 1998) 106.
27 Glissant 106-07.
28 Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 57.
29 Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 50.
30 Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 50.
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Festival poster, in the choice of both fonts and pictures; even the blue which is used in
the poster to evoke the region is a more contemporary shade of what you would expect
from a Mediterranean blue. This global hierarchy of value is established by the so-called
West which, despite the end, decades ago, of 19th century-style colonialism, continues to
wield great power over our imagination and, in an increasingly globalized and
centralized world media, backed by economic and military power, tends to shape our
thoughts and perceptions.
But claims of Mediterranean unity are also the result of “the rhetorical moves of
publicity campaigns designed to exploit lingering exoticism among consumers or
awaken their mystical leanings toward new diet fads.”31 Maltese newspapers and
magazines regularly carry articles and adverts about the Mediterranean cuisine and diet.
A wine festival billboard, with its sensual evocation of the “taste of the Mediterranean,”
exploited lingering exoticism about the region and attempted to attract the attention of
both foreigners and locals.
The same phrase was used to promote Kinnie, the ultimate Maltese “bitter sweet” soft
drink and the object of Maltese collective pride. This advert appeared on billboards and
in local newspapers and magazines available to both locals and foreigners. It depicted
the Mediterranean Malta that one finds in tourist brochures but also in local discourse,
including literature, meant for local consumption: the cloudless blue sky, the crystal
clear blue sea, the sunlight shining on a sandy summer beach, the siesta climate, the
peacefulness, the refreshing taste of holidays, the fresh Mediterranean orange sensually
lingering on the lips of the glass, the masculine boldness of the bottled Kinnie...
31
Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 50.
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This self-image of Malta and the Maltese, to quote Barthes writing in a different context,
is imbued with “the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense
constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly
determined by history.” This advert is a good example of the image of the Mediterranean
Maltese historically constructed by non-Maltese, mainly Northern European visitors and
tourists. “Nature and History are confused at every turn,” and one is tempted, like
Barthes, “to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without saying, the
ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.”32
According to its official website, Kinnie was originally developed by Simonds Farsons
Cisk in Malta in 1952, “as an alternative to the innumerable colas that had proliferated in
Europe” after the Second World War. This statement immediately distinguishes the
Maltese drink from the ensemble of its northern counterparts. The sensual, exotic and
therefore “Mediterranean” nature of the drink comes across unmistakably: “Kinnie is a
unique tasting, alcohol-free, natural, refreshing beverage. Its golden amber colour, and
32
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993) 11.
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the fact that it is made from bitter oranges and a variety of aromatic herbs, lend
this beverage a bitter taste which is an excellent thirst quencher.” Like the exotic
Mediterranean island of Malta, “ This drink is ideal on its own, particularly with a slice of
orange.” But the locals also mix well with the visiting foreigners: “It also mixes
excellently with a number of alcoholic drinks and cocktails.”33 We are told that “Almost
overnight, these distinctive characteristics made it Malta's own favourite soft drink,
loved ever since by the local population and tourists alike.”34 The Kinnie story is imbued
with the grand narrative of the exotic Mediterranean, with its spirit, charm, passion, joie
de vivre, sensuality. A novel by the Maltese-Australian writer Lou Drofenik, for example,
celebrates the “Mediterranean charm” which one of the Maltese male characters “knew
how to turn on when he was in the company of women.”35 In her first novel she writes
about "the gentle breezes of the Mediterranean" and “the Mediterranean spread below
them in all its glory.”36 As in other Maltese writers, there is a strong element of nostalgia
and romanticism in Drofenik’s portrayal of the Mediterranean, and, perhaps more
importantly, an identification of the Mediterranean with Malta.
The idea of the Mediterranean as a region, writes Peregrine Horden, of the circumMediterranean lands as a distinctive collectivity, is “a creation of nineteenth-century
geographers who represent, whether explicitly or indirectly, the Mediterranean
ambitions and designs of northern European powers.”37 This partly explains the
scepticism with which some social and cultural activists among formerly colonized
peoples in North Africa and the Near East view both institutional and civil society
projects for the construction of a more unified, more politically, socially and culturally
active Mediterranean region.38 But there is also significant scepticism among scholars
who, like Michael Herzfeld who coined the term, view “Mediterraneanism” as an
“excuse” of various kinds – political, cultural, even, in a scholarly sense, heuristic.39 It is
meant to assert “the simple undifferentiated unity, backwardness, environmental
exhaustion or whatever of circum-Mediterranean societies as a justification of
northerners’ political, economic, or cultural superiority and domination.”40 Herzfeld
claims that “the idea of a vast Mediterranean culture has frequently served the interests
of disdainful cultural imperialism.”41 He notes that in an age in which just about every
other category has been “deconstructed or reconstructed, or at least has selfwww.kinnie.com 2 May 2008.
http://www.kinnie.com/page.asp?p=17008&l=1. 2 May 2008.
35 Lou Drofenik, In Search of Carmen Caruana (Melbourne: Drofenik, 2007) 333.
36 Lou Drofenik, Birds of Passage (Victoria, Australia: L. Drofenik, 2005) 65 and 151.
37 Peregrine Horden, “Mediterranean Excuses: Historical Writing on the Mediterranean since
Braudel,” Réseau thématique des centres européens de recherche en sciences humaines sur l'ensemble
euro-méditerranéen (5ème PCRD), Séminaire de Berlin 13-16 novembre 2003.
http://periples.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/REMSH/Publication/berlin/Horden.pdf
38 See, for example, Omeyya Seddik’s highly critical perspective in Adrian Grima, “The Mediterranean
as Segregation,” ZNET, February 07, 2007. http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/2108.
39 Horden, “Mediterranean Excuses.”
40 Horden, “Mediterranean Excuses.”
41 Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 48.
33
34
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destructed,” the Mediterranean has shown “a remarkable tenacity in the face of a
barrage of critiques.” It seems that at times that barrage has actually confirmed its
general importance. And that, in itself makes the concept of the Mediterranean worth
taking seriously.42 Such “culture-area categories have an existence by virtue of being
articulated.”43
Once we acknowledge that the Mediterranean is a cultural construct and that the
physical Mediterranean, as Matvejević would say,44 is inseparable from discourse about
it, we “get away from the tiresome ontological debate” about the region and its unity and
allow ourselves to “focus instead on issues of power and hierarchy,”45 on who, how and
why controls, or attempts to control, the Mediterranean imaginary.
The Melting Pot
The construction of the Mediterranean imaginary in colonized Algeria by the French
colonial authorities is a good example of who has controlled this discourse, and why.
Official French colonial discourse about the relations between the various ethnic groups
and accounts of colonial Algeria from the late nineteenth century to this day have used
metaphor and the Mediterranean imaginary to tell another story. Algeria is described as
a “melting pot” (creuset) in which the various European ethnicities “melted together” (se
sont fondues), underwent “fusion” (la fusion) or “blended together” (se sont amalgamés).
In 1906, the demographer Victor Demontès wrote about “a new people forming on the
sunny shores of the Mediterranean,” and discussed the “mixing, or better yet fusion” of
different European races in the “African melting pot” (creuset africain). A publication by
Gignoux and Simiot that came out in 1961 described the popular Bab-el-Oued
neighborhood of Algiers, where most working class European colonists in the city lived,
including many Maltese, as “a miraculous melting pot at the bottom of which are slowly
melted [...] all of the ethnicities of the Mediterranean.”46
The dominant official memory was forged through these one-sided accounts with their
simplified representation of the assimilation process. The melting pot metaphor served
as “almost a formula of erasure, a figure of discourse that aids in the production of
silences in historical narratives.” In his history of contemporary Algeria published in
1979, Charles-Robert Ageron sees the “fusion” of the non-French in the Algerian
“melting pot” as a straightforward process not worthy of historical examination or focus.
“These European communities didn’t just cohabitate in Algeria, they began very early to
42
Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 46.
Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 47.
44 Predrag Matvejević, Mediterraneo. Un Nuovo Breviario, trans. Silvio Ferrari (Milano: Garzanti, 1991)
20. “Il Mediterraneo e il discorso sul Mediterraneo sono inseparabili fra loro.”
45 Herzfeld, “Practical Mediterraneanism,” 50.
46 Smith 100.
43
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mix together.” And he assumes complete assimilation to have occurred through
involvement with such French institutions as obligatory military service for men, public
school and the electoral and legal systems, and through intermarriage and daily
interaction with French citizens.47
A very good example of how a radically different, official discourse about the
Mediterranean served the colonial purpose is that of architecture. In “Mediterraneanism:
the politics of architectural production in Algiers during the 1930s,”48 Sherry McKay
writes about how the concept of “Mediterranean architecture” in Algeria in the 1930s
was constructed to strengthen French cultural colonization.
If imperialism is about capturing foreign lands, then it is also about managing the resultant
and juxtaposed identities within its expanding frame, the contents and discontents. Marking a
Mediterranean spirit in Algeria was one such management device.49
In the texts that identified the essence of this Mediterranean architecture published in
the 1930s the writers were committed to presenting “defining characteristics,
legitimating precedents, a formal genealogy and shared cultural attributes.” Algiers was
meant to become the very expression of the Mediterranean synthesis.50 The fabrication
of the Latin origin of the Mediterranean world gave the “vainqueur gaulois,” the
Victorious Gaul, the right to proclaim themselves its rightful heirs.51 However, “While
synthesis was emphasized – of modern technique with local climate and topography, of
indigenous forms with European spatial planning – elision was practiced.”52 While the
“Mediterranean villa” freed itself from the alienating effects of modern universal
civilization by “claims to a pedigree for its volumetric complexity, climatic controls and
landscape sensitivities in the interior ambiance of the Arab and ultimately Roman house,
it also displaced the maison indigène,” and confirmed to the French and the Europeans
what they saw as their right to be there.
The Mediterranean region assumed a poignant role in the negotiation of modernity in
architectural discourse and its presence is threaded through the ideology of the Modern
Movement as the “emotive, poetic and lyrical antidote to an overemphasis on reason and
technology.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, geographers, historians and
sociologists portrayed the Mediterranean, to quote Anne Ruel, as “an autonomous object,
a historical, economic and cultural space inhabited by a Mediterranean people,” thus
Smith 101.
Sherry McKay, “Mediterraneanism: the politics of architectural production in Algiers during the
1930s,” City and Society 2000, XII (1):79-102, American Antropological Society.
49 McKay 84.
50 McKay 86.
51 McKay 87.
52 McKay 87-88.
47
48
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throwing off both nationalist sentiments and the rootlessness associated with a more
international and cosmopolitan modernism.53
McKay believes that “the idea of the Mediterranean rests on the paradox of frontiers,
permeable and impervious, a place to traverse and a point of stopping, a space and a
place.” According to Gabriel Audisio in his Jeunese de la Méditerranée of 1935, as a
permeable space the Mediterranean held out a future of mélange, a place of métissages
culturels, the divisiveness of nations replaced by a patrie, a home and country. However,
this idealistic or perhaps utopian idea of the Mediterranean contrasted with the ideology
and concerns of the powerful colonialist project; as geographical space was annexed to
political ambitions, conflicting claims to alternative cultural borders emerged. “The
presence of rival assertions haunts the very description of the Mediterranean utopia of
métissage in the 1930s.” Writing in Algeria in 1937, Albert Camus protested that the
Mediterraneanism of Maurras, Mussolini and Latinity was not the Mediterranean that
“our ‘House of Culture’ lays claim to.”54 So although it was claimed that a number of
buildings in Algiers (like the Government Offices, the Orphanage at Beni-Messous, the
Algiers City Hall, and private villas) designed by the colonialists and built by the
colonists were examples of “Mediterranean architecture” and that a “Mediterranean
spirit” infused the new buildings,55 local materials were largely replaced by “that greatly
universalized material, reinforced concrete,” and imported construction companies
employing European colonists, including many Maltese, displaced local craftsmen. In
their quest for an authentic Mediterranean architecture, the new breed of architects who
had left a decadent, old Europe for a “new” land “would dredge more deeply than the
recent colonial accumulation, to the bedrock of classical occupation and an apparently
untrammeled landscape.”56
True Pioneers
Sarkozy’s initiative has focused some attention in mainstream political and media circles
and beyond on the potential for regional political action in the Mediterranean but Fabre
believes that it is common values that can truly bring the people of the region together
to work on a common project, rather than the ambitions of a single leader or nation. He
writes about an increasing number of people in culture, civil society and grassroots
organizations who are active on the ground “pour un rapprochement et une convergence
transméditerranéenne.” These operators and activists, many of whom, I would add, are
young people who have created their own web of alliances throughout much of the
region, need the support and encouragement of politics; Fabre warns, that they should
not be used as pawns by politicians as often happens today. He calls them “les véritables
McKay 82.
McKay 83.
55 McKay 84.
56 McKay 85.
53
54
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pionniers,” the true pioneers of a Mediterranean ensemble that is livable and sustainable
in vital areas such as water resources, pollution, transport, migration, health, and
culture.57
The population on the southern shore of the Mediterranean is growing fast. There are
now 80 million people living in Egypt, the largest population in the Arab world and the
second largest in Africa. Between 1975 and 2003 the Egyptian population almost
doubled, from 39,3 to 71,3 million. The same happened in Israel, Algeria and Mauritania,
whilst in Libya, Syria and Palestine the population more than doubled and in Jordan it
increased three-fold. The largest populations in the Mediterranean after Egypt are those
of Turkey, metropolitan France, Italy, Spain, Morocco and Algeria. In the next twenty
years there will be an increase in the population difference between the developed
north and the countries in the south and the east; the Medlink report anticipates that
“the Mediterranean will be more Arab, Maghrebin and Turkish.”58 It will also be more
urbanized and coastal.
With the huge percentage of youths in the region, there is an extraordinary amount of
energy in today’s Mediterranean. In 2003, in the Maghreb and Mashrek states,
youngsters (27,5 - 46%) greatly outnumbered the elderly (2,3 - 8,7%), while
throughout western Europe there were as many people over-65 as under-15 – in some
cases the elderly actually outnumbered the youth. In Algeria % of the population in 2003
was less than 19 years old; in Egypt 42% was under 18; in Tunisia 30% was under 14;
and two thirds of Moroccans were under 30 years old.59
But the significant rise in population in the Maghreb and Mashrek countries has also
meant that more than 25% of youth are unemployed, un unenviable record.60 In Algeria
the unemployment rate among the active population is as high as 30%, but among youth
it reaches a staggering 60%.61 In Morocco the rate of unemployment is significant,
especially amongst young graduates. The Medlink report concludes that the main
challenges that the Moroccan leadership is facing are to improve education, to fight
against poverty and to attract foreign investment in order to improve job prospects and
life conditions for a young population.62 The same could be said of many other countries
of the southern and eastern shores.
These figures show that the Mediterranean countries, both individually and in
partnership with each other, have to empower their great human resources – their
youth – to find longterm, sustainable solutions to the economic, environmental, political
Fabre, “Nicolas Sarkozy et la Méditerranée, des lignes de failles,” 12-13.
The First Medlink Report 11.
59 The First Medlink Report 12.
60 The First Medlink Report 33.
61 The First Medlink Report 24.
62 The First Medlink Report 23-24.
57
58
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and social problems that they are facing. If they can act collectively rather than
individually they have a much greater chance of success. The complex problems that the
Mediterranean is facing today, like the rest of the world, demand concerted, sustainable
solutions. This is what a Mediterranean project should be all about. It’s useless playing
with age-old platitudes and stereotypes.
In order to become a meaningful collective project, in order to capture the imagination
and energies of today and tomorrow’s youth, both in the Mediterranean and beyond, it is
vital that cultural constructs about the region are seen for what they are: products of
particular moments in history serving the interests of particular groups and cultures.
They must not be allowed to disorientate or dampen the spirits of those who are
committed to building creative solidarity networks in the region that are able to respond
to pressing needs by tapping the many available resources. The new Mediterranean
project must involve creation as well as discovery, and creation mainly by indigenous
people rather than their imperialist neighbours. The project requires a synthesis of the
material and the mental, the discursive and the down-to earth.63
The true pioneers of the Mediterranean are those whose vision and commitment are
free of the self-stereotyping that has stood in the way of meaningful cultural exchange
and common action in favour of a sustainable future. They are those who are committed
to working together to solve the same economic, environmental, social, cultural, and
political problems that are being faced by people in different parts of the region and
beyond. The true pioneers are those who refuse to bask in the sun of neo-colonialism
and its icons and have committed themselves to a freer, fairer, safer Mediterranean.
Dr. Adrian Grima is a senior lecturer in Maltese literature at the University of Malta. He has read and
published papers on literature, culture and the Mediterranean in various countries in the Mediterranean,
Europe, the USA and Puerto Rico. www.adriangrima.com
63
Horden, “Mediterranean Excuses.”
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