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Creative Maltese in Parallel » Part 2
Part 2: Immigration and Maltese Identity “Immigration from one country to another is a complex and multi-faceted psychosocial process with significant and lasting effects on an individual’s identity. Leaving one’s country involves profound losses. Often one has to give up familiar food, native music, unquestioned social customs, and even one’s language. The new country offers strange-tasting food, new songs, different political concerns, unfamiliar language, pale festivals, unknown heroes, psychically unearned history, and a visually unfamiliar landscape. However, alongside the various losses is a renewed opportunity for psychic growth and alteration. New channels of self-expression become available. There are new identification models, different superego dictates, and different ideals. One thing is clear: immigration results in a sudden change from an “average expectable environment” (Hartmann,1950) to a strange and unpredictable one.” (Akhtar,1995). If, as Akhtar(1995) explains in his research article, immigration can be so hard on an individual and causes “profound losses”, why do so many Maltese, and particularly Maltese in the creative sector, feel that they need to move away? Is it ultimately a need for the “strange and unpredictable” environment? Does this type of environment provide Maltese creatives with more inspiration, or is it simply because nowadays it is the norm for people to live in different countries? When I asked participants why they think Maltese creatives tend to want to move abroad, most participants answered
that it was probably due to better opportunities abroad, but when I asked participants why they had personally moved, the answer was often more emotional. The word “outsider” was mentioned more than once when participants explained how they felt in Malta, with some mentioning that they didn’t feel that they belonged in their own home country. Some participants even admitted they they used an “opportunity” to “escape”. This is quite curious, especially when we look back at Maltese immigration during the 60s. In Maltese in London, Dench(1975, p.16) explains that in the 1960s in Malta, emigration was regarded as a short-term “safety-valve” to be used in difficult periods. He states that during the majority of the nineteenth century and perhaps earlier, migrant clow in Malta consisted of people drifting along trade and shipping links with nearby Mediterranean ports. When economy in Malta was suffering, people would move out, but when the situation improved, most Maltese would return. Dench(1975) also states however, that not every emigrant was a “reluctant exile” with many being “only too glad of the opportunity to get away”. He adds that this was usually related to disaffection with the dominance of the church in Malta, “from which emigration may appear to offer the only release”. Dench (1975) adds that it’s not easy to live in Malta and ignore the church, and that wherever you are in Malta, you’re almost sure to have a church building in sight. He calls the atmosphere as
