No reference to criminalisation of authors in World Book Day message

Education minister Dolores Cristina has steered away from the controversy of the prosecution of writer Alex Vella Gera and history student Mark Camilleri, whose acquittal from obscenity charges is being appealed by the Attorney General.

In a message she issued for UNESCO’s World Book Day, Cristina made no mention of the year’s singularly controversial threat to the freedom of writers and editors, and instead referred to the lifting of British colonial censorship in 1839 and the resultant growth of printing presses.

“When in 1839 the British lifted censorship of printing material, Malta experienced a cultural reawakening… Charles Dickens was so right in describing printing presses as bastions of liberty.”

Cristina has in the past expressed ‘serious concern’ on the legal proceedings against Mark Camilleri, the 21-year-old university student who was criminally charged for publishing Alex Vella Gera’s short story in campus newspaper Realtà. But she steered from any mention of the prosecution when she paid tribute to “books that challenged people’s boundaries” at this year’s national book awards, when Vella Gera took second prize for his book Zewg.

Ordinance number IV of 1839 made book and press censorship formally illegal despite the protests of the Church hierarchy. But newspapers and books could still be banned for moral and political reasons.

“From 1839, the Maltese never looked back and an interesting history of book titles was born… I note satisfaction that even in Malta a lot is being done for this sector to improve. You have authors, publishers, printers and various governmental institutions working so that people read more.”

Nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth in the case of the prosecution of Camilleri and Vella Gera – whose short story was reported to the police by University of Malta rector Juanito Camilleri; and now appealed by Attorney General Peter Grech, who is pushing the line in his lengthy 32-page write that “God is certainly bigger than the biggest of egos of even more famous writers.”

The appeal itself refers to Vella Gera’s reference to ‘god’ in his court testimony, when he said he wanted to give readers total immersion in his first-person monologue Li Tkisser Sewwi – narrated by a sex-driven man who treats women sordidly – “without any moralism, in the sense that I didn’t include the voice of God saying ‘look you’re going wrong’.”

Quoting this statement in his appeal, Grech says Vella Gera had to realise that there are others “whose ideas, preferences and tastes are unlike his; a society that must be protected, and its morality preserved. “And there’s God above everything and above everyone, and God is certainly bigger than the biggest of egos of even more famous writers.”

In talking of the challenges to publishing, Cristina asks: “Will we ever see a Maltese e-book? Will foreign e-books usurp all possibilities for Maltese e-books?”

In her message for World Book Day, Cristina describes books as “beneficial to thinking and objects that open great horizons of creativity in our lives. They’ve changed and keep changing the course of history and are sources of relaxation and rest.”

“From Plato to Jane Austen, Franz Kafka to William Shakespeare, from Sappho to Orhan Pamuh, from Vassalli to Friggieri, it’s been a consistent line. The styles are different and you cannot draw comparisons, but every writer wanted to share their burning and living emotions with their readers. This is the beauty of the book: it flares up our emotions.”