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Pigs, shoes, earrings, perfumes - anything in any shape, size or form - Clare Azzopardi collects it. At an early age she took up writing to drive away the boredom at secondary school, now she’s using it to try give an honest portrayal of women in Maltese literature. She speaks to Gilbert Calleja about ‘Il-Linja l-Hadra’, her latest short story book.
Frank and confrontational, Clare Azzopardi says that early on in her university studies she realised that for the most part, women in Maltese literature had been represented (by male writers) either as “bland anti-heroes, kindly homemakers who spend their time with their belly to the kitchen sink, or as prostitutes. Well, maybe not quite. But they seldom have anything to contribute.”
This was one of the reasons why she decided to continue writing, trying to resist making her characters – male and female alike – conform to the stereotypes, even when they are prostitutes. She likes to think of her stories as “shards or fragments of everyday experience, told from a rather unusual angle.”
Azzopardi explains how her writings are an extension of her many collections, a magpie who returns home with randomly collected experiences and tries to make up a narrative. These bits and pieces, these fragments from daily life “which seem to refuse to cohere into a single narrative” very often determine the way she writes and develops her stories.
“Il-Linja l-Hadra’ (the Green Line) - the idea of a ‘journey’ seems to be the leit motif in this collection of short-stories,” I say, instantaneously triggering Azzopardi’s defence mode.
“The idea of a journey, as metaphor, or leitmotif, is a literary cliché that is at least as old as Homer. It is easy to conceive of practically any literary work as being about ‘a journey’. The fact that journeys feature in my stories is hardly surprising – they feature in anybody’s story,” she says, “The Green Line is one of the stories in my book, in which a young woman travels from Stepney Green to London Victoria in the wake of the July 7 bombings in London last year, and tries to understand how someone could decide to kill himself and lots of other people. The way she goes about this is to try and understand many aspects of her own life that have so far eluded her. For instance, she can’t understand why her father refuses to reminisce about the teachers’ strike in the early 80s, and why her mother refuses to acknowledge that her sister is a lesbian.
“The protagonist revisits these experiences at various intervals throughout the journey. Although this story is about a journey, physical and mental, I’d like to think that there is more to it than simply a variation on the theme of a voyage.
“Having said that, I do think that themes, metaphors and leitmotifs are the province of the literary critic, and I am a writer, not a critic. When I write, I don’t tend to analyse my writing in terms of its underlying metaphors and figures of speech, or from the point of view of a particular critical theory. In fact, I find literary criticism a rather tedious enterprise, one I have no intention of ever pursuing.”
“If you are going to read this book prepare yourself: in these stories the familiar turns strange and the strange becomes very familiar. Clare Azzopardi will take you to places you’re not supposed to see,” author Immanuel Mifsud says in a note on the cover of ‘Il-Linja l-Hadra’.
“Irregular migration, man-women relationships, sex … much has been said about authors and artists taking to ordinary subjects and turning them into something intriguing, interesting, ‘extra-ordinary’… do you have a secret magic potion? In real, concrete terms, how do you do it?”
“I have no secret magic potions. My style tends to be quite fragmentary, and I tend to avoid ‘linear’ narratives. I’m not in a position to say whether this works better than some other style.
“As far as my choice of subjects is concerned, I write about things with which I have been engaged with, and which strike me. I’m not the sort of person who writes about a political theme because it is currently topical or has been featured in the papers, but because it is something with which I have had a direct personal contact, one way or the other. And of course I write about people … eccentric people … “
“Isn’t everyone eccentric in his or her own way?”
“I disagree,” Azzopardi says, “there are people who come across as boring, flat, un-interesting… then there are others who catch my attention be that by their image, attitude, way of talking or anything else about them. Others simply don’t intrigue me…”
At times your choice of words is bold, for example you write, “Is-sitwazzjoni Hal Far tal-liba”. Why was this necessary? Does this choice of language help you achieve a greater sense of realism? Do you think readers might be shocked even by the direct reference (explicit) to sexuality.
“Generally, I write with a particular character in mind. If such a character speaks in a certain way, for example, utters obscenities, then that is how I write about them. I think that if a reader finds this use of language shocking, then they are very poor readers indeed, in the sense that contemporary literature is replete with such language… come to think of it, so is also Maltese day-to-day conversation. Or is Maltese literature to be kept apart from the vagaries of the language that we actually speak?
As for sexuality, I hardly think direct references are shocking. Do you find sexuality shocking?”
“In ‘/No Adjective Describe Story/’ your reference is the passage from the Acts of the Apostles where we read about St Paul’s Shipwreck on an Island, presumably Malta, on his way to his beheading. The relationship between the ‘immigrant’ and St Paul’s presumed irregular landing in Malta is self-explanatory. However your presentation of a Christian-cultural backdrop to the stories is still ambiguous. How do you define it, if you can at all?”
“As Maltese, we are very proud of our Christian heritage, which we claim was bequeathed to us by St. Paul, something we celebrate every year on February 10. On this day, we go to mass and hear how the people of this island carried out this splendid deed, welcoming a stranger, whom they thought of as ‘il-qattiel’ (the murderer), and we celebrate this heroic gesture. Today, I think this situation has changed a fair bit. I’m not so sure that we can still claim to be descendants of those people back then, who welcomed a stranger to their shores so openly…”
Clare Azzopardi has been very active in Inizjamed (with whom she has coordinated workshops in writing for children and adults. She also directs writing workshops at St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity.
Her works have featured regularly in literary events set up by Inizjamed and have been published in G_ejjer (2000), ‘F’kull Belt Hemm Kantuniera’ (2003), ‘Ktieb ghall-hruq’ (2005), and ‘Storja Tinkiteb’ (2006).
Her stories have also been translated into English, Hungarian and Greek, and have appeard in ‘In Focus’ (the literary review of PEN Cyprus), ‘Cuirt 21’ (Ireland, 2006), Lettre (2006) and on Laura Hird’s official website www.laurahird.com . In 2005 she published ‘Others, Across’, a small collection of stories translated into English, as part of the ‘New Wave Writers’ series published by Inizjamed and Midsea Books. She read for a Masters degree in literacy at the University of Sheffield. She currently teaches Maltese in a girls Secondary School.
‘Il-Linja l-hadra’ (Merlin), is a collection of short stories she wrote over the past two years. The book was launched last Thursday at St James’ Cavalier.
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