The Maltese writer in exile

Abstract

“That night Dora slept but little. When in the sadness of exile you dream and long for the land of your youth, and the white sails shiver with the cool breeze of a bright morning, on the eve of departure, how can sleep overcome your eyes? No, you have to wait and wake hours, with the fever raging in your heart.” That is the opening of a Maltese expatriate novel-written in French-Laurent Ropa's The Song of the Watermill (1932). Dora is a young Maltese woman. In a moment of crisis, she and her husband Lazarus emigrated and are now in Algeria moving towards what they describe as their "promised land" (p. 15). There is proleptic irony in the way Ropa describes their "road to heaven" (title to Chap. I); superimposed above all others, even in moments of achievement, discovery and exhilaration, is the expatriate feeling of exile as they think of the islands they have left behind.