A taste of his own violence: Mur Ġibek... turns the tables on the war on women

An uncanny prescience characterises Mur Ġibek..., the translation into Maltese of Irene Chias’s Ezercizi di Sevizia e Seduzione, originally published by Mondadori in 2013 and Premio Mondello winner the year after.

Translated by Mark Vella, the novel recounts Ignazia’s double life: while in the process of developing a meaningful relationship with her gynaecologist, she embarks on a series of  ‘exercises’ in gender role reversal, subjecting obnoxious and violent men to the savage reality of the various abuses faced by women from time immemorial.

Hence the title in Maltese, implying the admonition to imagine being in someone else’s shoes: inspired by the fight against fixed stereotypes holding back women (and men), Ignazia revisits rape scenes from classic literature, ranging from the Bible to American Psycho, inverts the characters’ sex in the process, and practices this symbolic torture on selected men who will have to pay the price for their self-indulgent chauvinism.

Much closer to home, indeed, is Ignazia’s re-rendering of A Clockwork Orange, referenced heavily by the alleged perpetator of the Dembska murder that shook Malta to the core on the dawn of the new year.

Chias provides an inverted rendering of the gratuitous violence of Anthony Burgess’s novel, this time wielded not by Alex and his droogs, but by Lexa’s droogettes, while also acknowledging the different versions of the work: Kubrick’s classic cinematographic reading, and the English and American editions of the novel.

Burgess’s original was in fact divided in three sections comprising seven chapters each, a total of 21, the age of maturity, as the British author remarked. While the novel actually does redeem the protagonist by the last chapter, Kubrick chose to ignore this, even due to the fact that the American version closed at the twentieth chapter. After having finished the screenplay, he had read the missing part, and was amazed at this conclusion which he deemed was added by Burgess in order to allay the publisher’s fears.

Back home, Horizons have chose to undertake the publication of this third novel by Irene Chias, now resident in Malta, through financing by the National Book Council’s Malta Book Fund.

A novel whose themes are both timely and timeless, in the sense that the historically subaltern state of women through history has been recently coming to the fore through the #metoo movement, but also in the local context through the frequent stories of one too many women succumbing to their violent and murderous partners.

Well before the actual rise of #metoo in 2017, this novel in fact raised the issue of the perception of sexual violence against women. The fact that violence against women is accepted and ‘normalised’ becomes blatant as soon as the author turns the narrative tables, and portrays a male victim of this gender violence, and therefore extremely different reactions and opinions towards this violence arise in the reader.

Mur Ġibek...Eżerċizzji ta’ tortura u seduzzjoni is available in all major bookshops, and will be launched on the 25th March (5pm.) during Kampus Kotba: The 2022 Campus Book Festival in a debate with the author, lawyer and women’s rights activist Dr Lara Dimitrijevic, and book blogger Robert Pisani.