A Politician beyond Politics

Oliver Friggieri (1947–2020)

Romilda Pace

Friggieri ofen explained how an author may not agree with anyone, not even with himself, while the politician has to build everything on consensus. Tis demonstrates the several candidacy proposals that he turned down, notably Eddie Fenech Adami’s for the elections in 1981 and 1987. Despite his sincere belief that politics is a tool that can be used for good, he had always struggled to comprehend how someone could be a member of a political party that entirely rejects the views of its opponent. As a result, he disregarded such approaches on the advise of his friends Godfrey Grima and Pawlu Mizzi.2

Tere are other lyrical moments when the political profle is built through historical references, brought for the most part in the form of a politico-intellectual confrontation itself translated into a number of analogies. Friggieri explains how the amendment to the Education Act of 1980, which was considered by many as a dismantling of the Old University, specifcally of the Faculties of Arts and Science, ‘showed that in Southern Europe, on the island of Malta, the social living system had only two levels: the level of those who command and the level of those who do not command.’3 Friggieri himself writes how the political violence of the seventies and eighties, encouraged him to write such political poems. He then proceeds by describing a cordial episode between him and Lino Spiteri in which he explains to him that he would like to be a politician beyond politics, like a player who plays outside the ground.4

Te connotative load in the poem ‘My Song’5 is inspired by a politicised context in favor of material gain, fostering a society considered indiferent to a poetic idiom that does not yield proft. Tis should also be considered in the background of a serious and long confrontation between the artist, the academic, or the intellectual on one side and the utilitarianism proposed as a necessary social substitute in Mintof ’s eyes: ‘Now Mintof seemed