Phantom Bodies

I’m referring to two BBC online reports about bodies of war victims.

1) 64 corpses will be transferred from Belgrade to Kosova. These are the corpses of Kosovar civilians who were probably killed by Serb security forces during the war between Milosevic’s Serbia and Kosova. The killers buried the corpses haphazardly on a site which catered for some police academy. Once transferred to Kosova, the corpses will be taken to a huge mortuary where they will be laid together with hundreds of other bodies waiting to be identified. The war between Serbia and Kosova – the very last absurd act of the Yugoslav epilogue – ended in 1999. It is expected that hundreds of ethnic Albanians (whose relatives had been declared ‘missing’) will be waiting, hoping to identify their lost loved ones. To be fair, 37 bodies of Serb civilians were recently found buried in a mass grave in Kosova. I’d presume that these will be transported in the reverse route to Belgrade.

2) A forensic team in Belgium is doing its best to identify a body found in Passchendaele, where for some four months, beginning on 31 July 1917, a fierce battle was fought. It is said that the battlefield was actually a sea of mud, and half a million soldiers lost their lives there, shot or drowned in earth. The corpse was found in a shell hole, in an almost perfect condition, still wearing special anti-gas attire.

Phantom Bodies

Just imagine you wake up one morning, go to the shower, dress, and drive to a huge building where you then find hundreds of lifeless bodies, lying in rows. Imagine you are walking slowly, with a fixed look in your eyes, scrutinising the bluish white look of each corpse in your nth attempt to spot your son, father, brother or sister who you haven’t seen since 1999.

Imagine you are sitting in your kitchen reading the last reports from the front on the newspaper. Imagine you read this title spread in bold letters announcing the end of the war, and in the meantime, His Majesty sends you a personalised message, signed and all, comforting you for the loss of your son, brother or father who went ‘missing in action’. And you spend your whole life hoping that one day this lost loved one appears alive, or even dead! And each year you light a candle on his birthday. And then you grow old and you still cherish his loving memory. And some ninety years after you read about the end of the war, years after you died of a heart attack, someone unearths the man you had spent your life waiting for. And yet they cannot even identify him.

Phantoms

You may start believing the war is over. You may start thinking that the dates you know by heart are now text book stuff for students to study for their exams. You start thinking that once upon a time there was a land called Yugoslavia, but her citizens fought a silly civil war, and killed each other and … well there’s nothing one can do: all that lives is born to die and that’s exactly what happened to Yugoslavia. The people(s) fought, murdered each other but now it is all over. And years go by, and then one day you realise that the phantoms of the war are still haunting you. They have emerged from the paragraphs printed on textbooks, from massive mass graves, to haunt your memory.

And that which you believed to have belonged to a bygone time comes into view, and waits for you to start crying.

Wanted!

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

Tabellina

Friends and friends of friends,

this is the online journal which Sharon blogged about a couple of days ago. I have very little to add to Sharon's post, but I'd like to renew her call to all those who would like to contribute. You can do that by sending an email.

Many of us have been complaining about the Maltese media being controlled by powerful entities. Many have pointed out that journalists, being employed by these entities, are not as free as one would expect them to be. And many have been complaining that the majority of the Maltese newspapers have been reduced to mere loudspeakers for ministers, deputies and the Archbishop.

The way the Maltese blogscape is evloving is quite interesting, so much so it is drawing the attention of the print media. However blogs are not enough.

Tabellina's primary aim is to provide an opportunity to those who shy away from the mainstream media.

You are invited to contribute.

Bloggo (Wo)Man

Got an email from a journalist writing for the Malta Independent asking for a comment about the Maltese blogosphere. It's the second invitation of this kind in a couple of weeks. Apparently the Maltese print media have become aware of this fairly 'recent' phenomenon and they got interested in the subject. Fair enough, especially when the print media in Malta is usually more absorbed in what the minister said, and hung up about Chiara's outfit.

In the email I got this morning the journalist asked me to comment about the bloggers' 'revolution'. Well, to be honest I do not regard the Maltese blogosphere to be some kind of revolution. I think this term is over used and abused. Certainly, as I have commented elsewhere (I'm too lazy to find the link), blogging does give you the freedom to air your views without any fear of being censored. At least so far, for the recent case of Bahraini bloggers should be constantly kept in mind.

However, I think that the proliferation of Maltese blogs is more proof of a trend than a revolution. It has become trendy to keep a blog. I don't see anything wrong in that, so much so that I've been blogging for almost two years now, also because the Maltese print medium is tightly controlled by the political parties or the Church or very conservative institutions, and it seems that the possibility to change this situation is very remote. The case is even worse for those who would want to write in Maltese. So indeed blogs have given many the opportunity to scribble their thoughts which otherwise would have never seen the light of day.

But blogs remain mostly a personal venture, something you do when you feel like, if you feel like and how you feel like. There is no discipline in it. Despite the freedom my blog gives me I still feel the need to have a space (in print or digital) where a collective alternative is put forward. I know that there is such a thing being planned Hopefully this initiative will be launched in the near future.

<...>

I knew it!

Piano Man

Piano Man

While reading the latest reports re the current violent crisis in Uzbekistan, I came across this story about a man in his twenties who was found wandering aimlessly by the sea on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, dressed in a black suit carrying music sheets in a plastic folder. Refusing to talk, the young man was taken to a hospital where by chance it was discovered that the man could or would only reach out by playing melancholic tunes on the piano. No one knows, yet, who this man is and where he came from, let alone what his story is, but personnel at the psychiatric unit where he has been confined believe that something alarming must have happened to the guy, nicknamed Piano Man, causing him an amnesiac shock.

The story of Piano Man would provide a perfect plot for Oliver Friggieri, whose Stejjer għal Qabel Jidlam is full of melancholic characters with heart breaking life histories. I remember reading these tear jerking stories when they were serialised in Sagħtar back in the 1970s. I mean Piano Man's story does lend itself to poetry and it could very easily be romanticised in books or film. It did remind me of certain Chaplin films bar their comic reliefs.

Piano Man reminded me also of a man I had met in a Naples asylum where I was doing voluntary work when I was seventeen. In a large building run by the Sisters of Charity in Vicolo dei Panettieri (at the very heart of Naples's detestable centre) there lived a considerable number of mentally and physically sick homeless people: schizophrenics, junkies, ex-prostitutes with late stage syphilis, and other patients with similar cases. One of the inmates was a huge unkempt man who though in his late thirties looked more like a sexagenarian. The guy never spoke but sniggered all the time. All he did was smoke cheap cigarettes he would get from fellow inmates, and help the nuns carry the huge pots of soup to the refectory. I got to know his story through one of the nuns' helpers. The big guy had once been a concert violinist, teaching at some conservatory in Italy. He fell in love with a female student who once alleged the violinist had sexually harassed her, thus denting his reputation. And that was the end of the virtuoso. During my stay at the asylum I often wondered how the big guy would have reacted had anyone played the violin to him.

The story of Piano Man led my mind to rejuvenate old memories of those 'ugly people' I had come across in that asylum in Naples. I'd like to recount one final story of a man I had also met at this asylum. A university graduate was employed as a librarian. He simply loved books. Lacking a social life he immersed himself into reading, and once he decided to read all the books collected in the library where he worked. He later fell in love and married a physically and slightly mentally handicapped girl whose parents had died and had no siblings. They lived together for a number of years but their neighbours used to make fun of them until the librarian could not take it anymore and lost all contact with the real world. When I met him at the asylum he used to spend his days in the yard wittingly reciting by heart Dante's Inferno.

Power to the People

I hardly know where Uzbekistan is but the bloody incidents which took place over these last couple of days can hardly go unnoticed. Whenever people take to the streets, protesting against their own government, it is always a sign of grievous problems. As is the case with the Uzbekistani crisis.

What baffles me is that the people have defied all the state-inflicted fear and went out protesting because they are dying of hunger, and at the same time this is a land very rich in natural resources. This simply goes beyond my understanding.

Of course, a tight fisted regime with a world known reputation of despotism cannot but suppress its own people. And hence the violence, the bloodshed and death.

Events like this make me rethink my philosophy of non-violence. I hate admitting this, but ...

Feed your head, feed your head

Jefferson Airplane 1967

On 2 May, www.jeffersonairplane.com announced the release of a double cd: Essential Jefferson Airplane, featuring 32 tracks penned by the legendary psychedelic band. Well, this afternoon I happened to be killing time before appearing in court (I was booked by some warden! ... it happens sometimes) and bought this compilation from exotique.

Unfortunately I was too busy to just sit and listen to it. But driving back home I must have listened to "Somebody to Love" some eight or ten times. Grace's great vibrato, vibrant interpretation is simply an epiphany!

Can't wait to be driving to work in seven hours time!

CI vandalised

Ms Sara Sue Sammut

Having read Toni Sant's blog re the vandalistic attacks on Portes des Bombes and the Catholic Institute, where reference is made to Ms Sara Sue Sammut, I feel dutybound to let readers know that this time Ms Sara Sue Sammut has had nothing to do with the vandalistic attacks on the CI.

As her mentor and former lover I can vouch for her innocence. And so help me God!