Francis Ebejer - his novels

Abstract

If biculturalism presents problems, I should imagine bilingualism adds a few more to a writer working in two distinct, and disparate, languages: in my case, Maltese and English. What follows are extracts from a talk which I gave in March 1978, during an international conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS); the talk was later published along with several other papers by various Commonwealth writers in a volume edited by Dr. Daniel Massa of the University of Malta, and entitled " Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature" (University Press, 1979): " . .. The dichotomy of tradition and folklore on one side and, on the other, the search for new suitable roots from cultures more immediate and amenable to his own is a condition of life for the writer in a bicultural situation . . . . The right blend of cultures should further aid the writer to raise his sights over and beyond the little causalities of the swiftly transient moment and focus on longer-term visions . .. . Some of us, much as we loved our own language, and loved it even more in the new shapes into which it allowed itself to be manipulated by us - each creation a miracle - were being consistently drawn out by the visions of a wider appeal than a small Island could offer, and by means of a jar more influential language, and that was English. "