Mobilities and Mediterranean peripheries: Narrating Maltese identities in Vincent Vella’s Slippery Steps

ABSTRACT

This article examines the representation of European peripheries in contemporary postcolonial writing through a study of the centre–periphery relationship in the English-language novel Slippery Steps: A Maltese Odyssey (2011) by the Maltese writer Vincent Vella. The article argues that Vella’s novel is embedded in transnational mobility and shows that Maltese identity is constituted by constant movement between Malta and Britain, periphery and centre, as well as in interaction with other Mediterranean and European spaces. This reading of the novel suggests that its representation of Maltese identities is ambiguous. While the experience of mobility in the novel emphasizes the importance of contact zones as sites of hybridity in both the centre and the periphery, by locating its central characters in the contexts of diaspora and migration, the novel also shows how its diasporic identities signify trauma and loss, thus problematizing the centre–periphery relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Centre and periphery
• Malta
• transnational mobility
• diaspora
• trauma
• Vincent Vella

Introduction

In the English-language novel Slippery Steps: A Maltese Odyssey by the Maltese playwright and novelist Vincent Vella (2011), the conventional idea of a small European nation as peripheral and insignificant is challenged by showing Malta and Maltese identities as actors involved in transnational mobility between Mediterranean and European spaces. Emphasizing cultural exchange between Malta, Britain, and other locations, the novel resists simplifying conceptions of peripheries as passive and subservient to centres, but also shows how the centre–periphery relationship can be traumatizing and needs to be worked through. From the British perspective, Malta’s allegedly peripheral identity tends to be based on its status as a British colony with an important military base until its independence in 1964, as well as on its position at the fringes of Europe, between Europe and Africa. In his anthropological study of Malta, Jon P. Mitchell (2002a) argues that its marginal position has generated amongst the Maltese an “ambivalent relationship with Europe” (2) where Europe is associated with modernity, but also seen as “a threat to local integrity, ‘tradition’ and morality” (2). This view is to some extent rooted in the nation’s history of colonization: Malta was dominated by the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, the Hospitaller Order of St John in the 16th century, and France and Italy during the Napoleonic wars, until it sought protection from the British around 1800 (Borg Barthet 2013, 331–334).

While the island today is characteristically seen by the inhabitants of western centres as primarily suitable for charter holidays in the sun and associated with the Siege of Malta during the Second World War, Malta should not be seen as peripheral, since current trends in cross-Mediterranean migration have placed it directly on the route from Africa towards Europe; it has thus become one of the locations where Europe’s postcolonial connections are made visible. Similarly, the historical connections between Malta, Europe, and Mediterranean spaces are not unidirectional: Maltese migrants have reached other shores of the Mediterranean, from France to Algeria, though 19th-century discourses often deemed them as non-Europeans or “liminal” on the basis of their language and cultural traits (Smith 2006, 81–83; see also Mitchell 2002b, 46–49) and applied orientalist tropes (Zammit 2018). The legacy of such views remains, and in a study of British tourists’ encounters with the Maltese Avellino remarks that some of them continue to see Malta through the experience of colonialism, “as subservient to Britain” (2016, 58). To counter such views, the novel Slippery Steps by the Maltese playwright and fiction writer Vincent Vella (b. 1950) is a serious attempt to address the formation of Maltese identities in transnational contexts.

Writing both in English and Maltese, Vella is better known for his plays and has received several literary prizes (Xuereb 2005, 390). Rather than understanding the mobility of the main characters in Vella’s ambitious novel as a mere effect of contemporary economic globalization, this article reads Malta’s alleged peripheral status in tandem with the metropolitan centre of London in order to understand the role that both spaces play in the making of diasporic Maltese identity in various historical and geographical locations. This is evident in Vella’s novel’s three different narratives – those of the protagonist Paul growing up motherless in Valletta, his mother Flora’s act of leaving Malta for diasporic life in London, and the migrant Reno’s story of labour migration to London from the late 1950s to the 2000s – the novel shows how metropolitan spaces are linked with other European spaces sometimes considered peripheral. Instead of the Mediterranean being seen as a limiting environment bordering Europe, or as a site of exclusion and othering, in Vella’s novel the sea links the island with the wider world and its overlapping geographies and that gives articulation to entangled histories and cultural encounters (see Dobie 2014, 389–404). To use the words of Iain Chambers (2008), as a “complex geopolitical, cultural, and historical space”, the Mediterranean directs “our attention to the cultural cross-overs, contaminations, creolizations and uneven historical memories” (28).

Through an examination of the encounters between Malta and Britain in Vella’s novel, this article contextualizes Malta in histories of Mediterranean mobility and transnational identity formation. My approach to the text differs from conventional ways of analysing the thematics of postcolonial fiction. Vella’s novel is not read here as merely an example of a postcolonial nation seeking to define its own identity or grappling with national historical trauma; nor is Vella’s text understood as an example of minority literature, a category Ivan Callus (2009, 31–40) proposes as a way of understanding postcolonial Maltese writing that in his view needs to make itself heard by the majority by using the latter’s language. What I argue is that Vella’s novel is embedded in processes of migration and transnational mobility that form a useful frame for reading. In other words, Slippery Steps suggests that Maltese identity is constituted by constant mobility between Malta and Britain, periphery and centre, as well as by interaction with other Mediterranean and European spaces. In this process, the novel reflects on Maltese identity/identities in two intertwined contact zones, Valletta and London. I pay particular attention to mobility and its effects on Paul’s maturation and life in Valletta where his mother Flora left him and his sister in the late 1950s. By locating its central characters in the context of diaspora and migration, I argue that the novel approaches the promises of cultural hybridization. However, it also shows how diasporic identities, as Vijay Mishra (2007) has suggested, incorporate the sense of trauma and loss that is one of the products of mobility flows and characteristic of living between centre and periphery.

Mobilities in the periphery

Slippery Steps explores and recasts issues of mobility, migration, and cultural identity. Placing its key characters in what sociologist Ulrich Beck (2006, 103) has referred to as “cosmopolitanism from below”, a form of everyday border-crossing travel by migrants seeking work, or journeying to new spaces for other reasons, Vella’s novel shows how Maltese identities have been constructed in historical and contemporary encounters with various cultural and linguistic others.

Scholars have emphasized the way in which cultures have influenced each other through various forms of mobility, thus creating links that are not always self-evident. This is seen in Stephen Greenblatt’s (2010) claim for the field of mobility studies, which in his view aims to examine both “hidden as well as conspicuous movements of people, objects, images, texts, and ideas” (250; original emphasis). A similar view can be found in James Clifford’s (1992) discussion of “traveling cultures”, where he argues for the need to study both local and cosmopolitan experiences and problematizes dichotomies such as “native”, “traveller”, and “dwelling/traveling” (24). Such encounters generate what Arjun Appadurai (1996, 33–37) describes in his analysis of border-crossing media- and other scapes, suggesting that mobility – of people, cultures, and texts – challenges nationalisms and fixed identities. According to Beck, in contemporary society such forms of mobility as travel and staying abroad are no longer class privileges, but rather the ordinary and everyday character of cultural and national border-crossings by groups such as migrant workers, their families, pensioners, exchange students, and others in similar positions. This has led to the emergence of a condition that Beck calls “cosmopolitanism from below” (2006, 103) and Pnina Werbner (2006) “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (496). Such understanding of cosmopolitanism is quite different from theorizations of the concept that see it primarily as an ethical mode of engagement with alterity (Appiah 2007) or a way of furthering global solidarity (Cheah 2006).

Such mobilities challenge traditional views concerning the role and nature of peripheries, suggesting that the division into centre and peripheries is a complex one that involves more than merely geopolitical factors (Wallerstein 1979). While conventional thinking of the unilateral relationship between centres and peripheries has reproduced the binaries of colonialist discourse where the imperial centre rules over peripheral dominions, world system theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein have sought to define these concepts in more detail, albeit from a Eurocentric perspective. According to Wallerstein’s (1979, 97) well-known typology, the world system consists of a three-level hierarchy according to which the world is divided into core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral countries. In this system, the dominant core nations with access to high technology exploit peripheral countries for labour and raw materials, while the semi-peripheral countries have characteristics of both types since they are peripheries for core countries but also function as core countries in their own region (97). Anna Klobucka (1997, 120) has suggested that the distinction between cores and peripheries is more complicated and based on scalarity rather than binaries, owing to the fact that some regions and nations occupy intermediate positions. Indeed, centres and peripheries are relative concepts whose meanings derive from interactions that affect their mutual definition (Peeren, Stuit, and Van Weyenberg 2016, 2–3). With particular reference to Europe, as Jobst Welge (2015) suggests, the idea of Europe derives from “the existence of its internal peripheries” (7; original emphasis) – a division where, in his view, modernity and the nation are associated with the north and periphery with the south. Such a stereotypical view, however, has been challenged by scholars such as Chambers (2008) who have examined the role of the Mediterranean in enabling divergent passages, encounters, and identities.

Accordingly, the conventional core–periphery distinction is too unidirectional and provides only a limited degree of agency. Critiquing core–periphery concepts from the perspective of diaspora studies, Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn (2006, 14–25) argues that the concepts need to be redefined and reorientated: in the context of diaspora, an alleged colonial periphery such as India may transform into a centre but without the burden of power hierarchy. The plurality of centres and multiple paths of migration are also recognized in current research. The interaction between Europe and non-European spaces in migrant narratives is a central topic, and is often addressed by taking into account African perspectives (Toivanen 2019) or intra-African mobilities (Nyman 2017, 37–55). Recent analyses of mobilities and intertwined histories that do not involve European core countries have also addressed interchanges between South Africa and the Indian Ocean, thus interrogating established conceptions and ideas (see Hofmeyr 2007; Haaland 2014).

Following this revised understanding concerning the status of peripheries – one that emphasizes connections and mobility, transformation rather than fixity – my reading of Vella’s novel pays attention to the various levels of mobility and diaspora it addresses, as well as to its related understanding of the centre–periphery relationship. While Vella’s novel reconstructs Maltese identities in contact zones extending Malta to London and other spaces and linking it with them, the role of Malta as a periphery is present in the novel through its protagonist’s loss and search for identity in the centre.

Vella’s mobile Maltese identities: Contact zones in Valletta

Vella’s novel places Malta and Maltese identities within several historical and contemporary narratives of mobility. By locating these within larger Mediterranean and British histories of transfers and cultural encounters, the novel counters a simplistic understanding of Malta as a periphery and Britain as a centre. The multiple histories that meet each other in Malta extend to the location of Paul’s childhood home in Valletta, as the family lives near the once “stately” palaces (Vella 2011, 19) built in the 16th century by the Knights of St John, a mobile mediaeval military order policing the Mediterranean at the time. In addition to the Knights, the novel also references other mobilities such as the presence of Italians (evident in Paul’s wife’s Italian family background) and the British, as well as Maltese experiences of international seamanship. The novel’s “Preamble” emphasizes that everyday life is rooted in the different histories that have contributed to the transnational construction of Maltese identity. While a peripheral location, the island has a history as a contact zone:

The boys’ primary school was housed in one of the old auberges which had formerly belonged to the Knights of the Langue of Bavière. It was an imposing baroque building, with heavy mouldings around the windows and enormous rooms overlooking a central courtyard sporting a disused fountain. [ ... ] The auberge rose proudly over the stretch of bastions that, in the event of a fresh invasion by the Ottomans after their botched attempt in 1565, would have been the special charge of the German Knights. From the top of the bastions it was a sheer drop to the rocks below where fishermen hauled up their boats.

To the left of the auberge, the British, fearing enemies of their own, had put up a gun-post from where to sweep the harbour waters in the eventuality of the sea attack. The gun-post was fenced of and guarded by German shepherds. (Vella 2011, 9)

This history, including the Knights, the Ottomans, and the British, forms the childhood spaces of the protagonist and the Maltese more generally, and shows how Mediterranean spaces are scaled rather than dependent upon one alleged centre. This history of cultural encounters is central to the novel’s representation of Maltese identity and constructs the periphery as an historically hybrid space. The construction of Malteseness through cultural encounters is also evident in the life story of Paul’s uncle Bert who served for years in the Royal Navy, which took him to places such as Alexandria and Oman, generating a wider awareness of the world and its values. As the novel’s cultural encounters extend from Valletta to London, the centre and the periphery are not merely contrasted with each other, as the conventional centre–periphery dichotomy would suggest. Rather, they are intertwined with each other through mobility and diaspora, showing that the centre is present in the periphery, but also that the periphery is present in the centre.

The construction of Maltese identity occurs in the multicultural contact zones the novel covers. Contact zones, defined by Mary Louise Pratt (1992) as locations of encounters where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (2), transform identities and characterize the novel’s Malta. This is emphasized in the representation of Strait Street, an urban section in old Valletta frequented by drunken British soldiers and known for its shady reputation: “Strait Street, or the Gut as it was dubbed by the British servicemen, is a narrow street running the length of the city which, at the time, teemed with bars and music-halls” (Vella 2011, 27–28). Following the death of her husband, Paul’s mother Flora, still “young and pretty” (26), is forced to accept a job in one of the bars. Upon receiving the necessary police licence, Flora starts working for Geraldu’s Hideaway Club where the task of the girls is to make the customers drink as much as possible and dance with them, an activity which reveals the asymmetrical power relations alluded to by Pratt (1992). Living next to Strait Street, Paul and his friends find the thoroughfare attractive yet dangerous: while it offers them both pleasure and their first sexual experiences, it is also a site of sin and guilt, as the Catholic priests claim, full of drunken brawls and flying beer bottles.

This contact zone hosts diverse encounters at various levels that show how the novel’s Malta is actively involved in entangling the centre with the alleged periphery. The contact zones of Strait Street also recast Valletta as a site of transcultural encounters usually associated with the centre – here Valletta resembles such allegedly peripheral locations as Tangiers and Singapore. While evenings may turn into moments of violence, the clubs bring the Maltese into contact with others:

The artists included a good sprinkling of itinerant, rootless individuals with an eye on the big chance. At the time, the Maltese held British passports and marriage to a local entitled foreigners to stay on in Malta or even move on to the United Kingdom. (42)

At another level, the music played at the clubs links the characters with the anglophone world and provides a location amidst global popular culture and its fantasies. Performed by “Elvis look-alike[s]” (41) and cover bands, songs such as “Are You Lonesome Tonight” and “Living Doll” exemplify Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) notion of transnational mediascape now available in the Strait Street club shared by servicemen and locals, but the local versions also show how the periphery appropriates global culture by creating new versions of its products. This places Malta in the context of international and unstoppable mobility of people, ideas, and objects across borders, as proposed by Appadurai; a stance the book takes further by showing how Paul grows up in an anglophone world consisting of global popular culture as well as of British high culture. The reading list of Paul and his friends includes anglophone children’s texts such as the Hardy Boys (Vella 2011, 60), the British comic magazine The Beano (74), and John Buchan’s imperial adventure novel Prester John (75). Later they read works by Graham Greene and E.M. Forster (85) as well as Muriel Spark and Shakespeare (271). Significantly, Paul’s chosen field of university study is English, which links him further with a desired position in the anglophone community and culture. While this could be seen as a way in which the periphery imitates the culture of the centre, such diverse border-crossings reveal how Malteseness is not fixed. As Paul’s story of growing up with such anglophone texts shows, his Maltese identity is transformed and hybridized through exposure to British and other cultures.

The novel’s representation of Strait Street underlines its role as one of what Pierre Nora (1989) has termed lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), particularly significant locations where the past of a community is revealed to have symbolic and shared value that extends from one generation to another. In the view of Nora, a site of memory is “the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (7). Paul, in fact, reflects on the current state of the street when visiting it for professional purposes in the 1980s, noticing that “[t]he whole place had become quieter, shabbier”, and that the replacement of bands with jukeboxes has taken away a “good part of the veneer of colour and sound that had formerly mantled the nights” (Vella 2011, 151). In contemporary Malta, however, the street has become a memory site, a status testified to in such examples as John Schofield’s and Emily Morrissey’s (2013) Strait Street: Malta’s “Red Light District” Revealed and the Maltese television series Strada Stretta set in 1957 and screened from 2015 onwards.

It is significant for my reading of Vella’s novel that Strait Street is a site of memory that is intertwined with migration and mobility. It is here, amidst British soldiers, Maltese girls and bar-keepers, as well as representatives of other European nations such as Greeks and Austrians, that new configurations of identity and networks are formed; in the novel’s contemporary Malta, such networks are present in the references to the Black and Eastern European prostitutes who enter the island through the networks of international sex trade operated by Maltese and Sicilian criminals (see Vella 2011, 186, 284–285). When Paul’s mother receives her “brass badge [ ... ] to be pinned to the dress” (37), as demanded by the police from all female bar staff to indicate their status, the apartment next to theirs receives new occupants, two young Austrian women (Magda and Mathilde) who speak a foreign language and perform at the Hideaway Club in the evenings. Their flat becomes a place for friendship that provides opportunities for communal laughter through multilingual performances and humour that make work in an oppressive environment at least momentarily bearable:

They laughed at the men they met at the music hall and Mathilde, the shorter of the two, had us in stitches when she strutted about the room with a cushion stuffed under her dress, puffing on an imaginary cigar, in imitation of Geraldu, the dumpy proprietor.

“Ah, frowline,” she drooled. “Was a zormok sie got! Unt your breasts! Mmah!” And she wiggled her bum and threw a passionate kiss heavenward. (Vella 2011, 38)

Regardless of the cosmopolitan camaraderie generated by European labour migration from one alleged periphery to another, for many migrants such moments remain utopian and ephemeral. Magda and Mathilde become absorbed into the violence of the street and eventually disappear, apparently murdered by “il-Keffien”, a.k.a. the Undertaker, a crooked policeman, a development which leads to Flora’s sudden decision to leave both Malta and her children to save her own life. This traumatizing moment is a starting point for the following section that addresses the novel’s representation of mobility in the contexts of diaspora, centre, and periphery.

Traumas of diaspora and periphery

While the centre–periphery mobility generates new identities enacted in diverse contact zones, Vella’s novel also addresses the relationship from the perspectives of trauma and loss. His mother’s disappearance leads to Paul’s lifelong trauma, and the novel culminates in his search for her in London in 2004. While this narrative of trauma and attempt to recuperate is ostensibly focused on individuals, it also addresses the hierarchical relationship between the centre and the periphery that forces Paul to define his identity in relation to the centre. As the centre has taken away his mother, it does not offer positive opportunities of identification for him. Rather, Flora’s disappearance and Paul’s life with foster parents remains a source of constant mourning, a topic he mentions to few. Paul reveals the burden of the “shame” and “disgrace” associated with his childhood trauma: the “facts” were

not as difficult to talk about as when I moved on to my shame as a child and as a young man at having a mother who had worked the bars and then disappeared, leaving me behind, and of the long time it had taken me to come to terms with my disgrace. (Vella 2011, 289–290)

While the trauma is at one level personal, a result of his mother’s departure, it is also collective, signifying Maltese inferiority in the face of the imperial centre. In terms proposed by Vijay Mishra (2007), the novel seems to represent Paul’s diaspora experience as one where both mourning and melancholia are present: “the diasporic imaginary is a condition [ ... ] of an impossible mourning that transforms mourning into melancholia” (9). Once Paul loses his mother to the centre, his life in the periphery becomes a form of melancholia. For Mishra, the concept of the imaginary mentioned above refers to the self-image of each diasporic group and the ambiguous relationship between the dominant and the diasporic, centre and periphery. What is important is the group’s self-understanding that it “lives in displacement” (14), as shown in Paul’s case. Diasporas are always built upon traumas haunting their members: “for diasporas to face up to their own ghosts, their own traumas, their own memories is the necessary ethical condition” (16). In the case of Paul, his mother’s leaving for Britain is an individual loss, but also suggests that for him it is only at the centre that his mourning may come to an end and displacement negotiated.

Paul’s response to loss of his mother conforms to Sigmund Freud’s (1957) definition of mourning where he states that “[m]ourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or the loss of some abstraction which has taken place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal and so on” (251–252). Both Paul and his sister Tanya – originally Antonia – seek to rework the trauma by finding belonging. While Paul finds his destiny in a career in journalism, Tanya, portrayed as being ashamed of her family, identifies with the English-speaking upper-class from an early age onward (see Vella 2011, 141), changes her name, and marries into the island’s closed anglophone elite with a materialist lifestyle (237–238) and a particular language ideology (see Borg Barthet 2013, 345–347).

In addition to its account of Flora and Paul, the novel addresses the effects of mobility through Reno’s experience of what is known as vernacular cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2006). Reno leaves Malta for Britain in 1958, before Maltese independence and subsequent changes in immigration legislation. Through Reno and Flora, the novel approaches the Maltese diaspora from different migration-related perspectives. While Flora appears to refrain from all contact with the Maltese in London (a group totalling around 35,000 in 1974 [Panayi 2014, 42]), Reno occupies a place in the stereotypical story of Maltese small-time gangsters of the era. In London, he works at various bars, hotels, gambling outfits, and strip clubs, learning gradually the language and values of the new world that promotes selfishness and materialism:

In this place [ ... ] it’s every man for himself and bugger your neighbour. Pack of wolves. Every single one of them wants to show the world he’s got more money, done more shagging, and got more girls working for him than anybody else. Slightest whiff that anyone’s doing better and they throw up. (Vella 2011, 116)

Reno becomes a rent collector for a London gangster, progresses to Soho and the sex business to work for the “bosses”, and moves in the circles of historical criminals such as the Kray brothers and the Maltese gangster Frank Mifsud. When Paul meets him in 2004, Reno is involved in similar though much less significant tasks as he is now shown distributing cards advertising “Red-Hot Stunning Brunettes and Yummy Yummy Bunnies” (Vella 2011, 340) and their services in red telephone boxes. For Reno, the promise of the metropolitan centre has waned and become a marker of an empty life. Reno’s story parallels the findings of Geoff Dench’s (1975) study Maltese in London: A Case Study of Erosion of Ethnic Consciousness, also mentioned in the acknowledgements of the novel. Dench argues that the migrants – usually young men without families – did not develop a shared sense of ethnicity apart from social life in Maltese cafés, partially because of the stigmatization of the community owing to some members’ involvement in organized prostitution. Dench’s comment, “[i]n the atmosphere of unrestrained hedonism and materialism which suffuses café society, migrants learn a defensive hardness and cynicism” (1975, 46), is exemplified in Reno’s account of life in London.

Reno’s involvement in criminal activities is further emphasized in the novel. Known amongst other migrants as “il-belbel” (Bellboy), someone who “runs errands: delivers messages, places your bets at the bookie” (Vella 2011, 335), by the 2000s he has become a marginal figure in the diaspora community that now consists mainly of old men frequenting the two remaining Maltese cafés in East End, and the German church. As a white-haired man puts it:

Trouble is we have no one to back us up here like they have in Australia and Canada. We’re all alone, except for the priest at the German Church. He’ll fill up a form for you or read you a letter. (336)

Their former streets have disappeared, and new migrant groups such as the Bangladeshi have replaced the Maltese: “At the Good Shepherd Mission [ ... ] a huge green sign hung over the door covered with the word ‘Welcome’ in dozens of languages and in all types of script – but not Maltese” (350).

This demise of Malteseness in contemporary London is contrasted with its strong historical presence. In the 1960s, on Reno’s arrival, the cafés are full of young men and women from the Mediterranean periphery. The café in Stepney, East London, where Reno first works, is a good example of a Maltese space in London. There the interaction between the periphery and the centre has generated hybridized spaces:

When he pushed open the door of Salvu’s City Café Reno was met by strong lights and loud voices. It took him a moment to register that they were talking Maltese – all of them. He nodded at some of them and looked for his cousin. [ ... ] The place was thick with cigarette smoke. The customers were mostly young men under thirty with a handful of older ones. Card games were going on at two of the tables. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Even as he watched, young women, heavily made up and with short skirts showing under open coats, came in and walked up to some of the young men. Wherever they stopped the voices grew louder and there was laughter. Some of the girls passed what looked like folded banknotes to the men. (Vella 2011, 101–102)

The excitement of what is to become Swinging London with its less puritanical sexual mores and the comfort of anonymity appeals to Reno, who chooses the big city over the small island, centre over periphery. The novel links the geographically separate spaces of Soho and Malta to show the presence of the periphery in the centre, and vice versa: “Reno was reminded of the bars in Strait Street. The joints, like the cafés, served to bring hookers together – only this lot was more classy and more expensive. They were the perfect sucker-trap” (163). Towards the end of the 1960s, however, his luck dwindles and he becomes “a drifter [ ... ] completely rootless and always on the fringe” (181). If examined in the terms of Mishra (2007), his position, like that of Paul, as I have addressed above, is one of diasporic melancholia where the hope generated by diaspora is lost and only present in his memories of the 1960s. There is no return to the past period of happiness, just as there is no return to the originary moment in Malta. In other words, Reno is living in mourning over his double loss, no longer able to access either the pleasures of life in exile in the centre, or those offered by his original home and the Maltese community.

The ethnic past of Maltese London is on the brink of disappearance in Vella’s novel, as Paul discovers during his search for his mother. For him, the diasporic trauma is strongly linked with the lost object that he seeks to reconnect with. Through his networks, Paul makes contact with Reno and, with the help of a priest, manages to locate his mother Flora. While she agrees to meet Paul, she remains distant and reserved. Unlike Paul, Flora does not suffer from a diasporic trauma based on familial loss, but it is made clear that her decision to leave Malta and her children was a conscious one and one she does not regret. Her discussion of the past with Paul consists mainly of performed smiles and selected memories. While the reader may have expected a narrative of healing and reunion, this is not offered; instead, her decision to leave her children and refrain from contact is described as “calculated” and there is no “softening”: “Our worlds had moved too far apart to hold any hope of ever coming together again” (Vella 2011, 358). Unwilling to connect with her Maltese past and out of touch with Maltese migrants, Flora’s condition is a melancholic one, where the lost object of her Maltese identity is simultaneously haunting yet kept at a distance. In its portrayal of her, the novel also hints at the possibility that Flora’s life in London might have included prostitution or similarly stigmatized behaviour. As the priest Anton puts it in emphasizing how Flora refuses the talking-therapy so central to psychoanalysis: “But you must try to understand. She’s not used to the idea that someone might just want to talk to her. You know – just talk. That’s not how it works in … in the world she’s used to” (361).

Photographs and connections across time and space

What is particularly striking in Slippery Steps is its use of the trope of the photograph to link the different spaces and memories with each other, thus connecting centre and periphery. While memory sites such as Strait Street in Valletta and the Maltese cafés in London are evoked in a somewhat nostalgic manner, the novel uses photographs as signs of memory to address the pain of the trauma. In an article on photographs in diaspora writing, Bidisha Banerjee (2010) argues that they are “multi-temporal” and “capture and freeze memories, thus preserving them; they arrest the flow of time in which the event photographed once existed, and they almost always hint at something lying outside the frame” (444). This function of the photograph as being capable of preserving memories is evident in the old photo Paul gives to Anton to confirm his identity, as requested by Flora. Taken of the narrator as a young boy near their apartment in Valletta, it shows a happy childhood moment before the onset of trauma:

I took out my wallet and fished out a photograph. It was old, turning yellow in parts, with the edges badly mauled. It showed me, about nine, and Tanya tugging at my trousers, with the flight of slippery steps rising behind us. It must have been summer for we were lightly dressed and our faces were screwed against the sun in our eyes. I had a neat bandage round my left knee. (Vella 2011, 346)

In the context of diaspora, the photograph also performs other functions, as Banerjee suggests. While it preserves memories, it also marks “absence, loss and even death” (Banerjee 2010, 445). For Paul, the photograph is a signifier of loss that marks the end of a childhood with his mother. This can be examined in the light of Susan Sontag’s (1977) essay on photography to suggest that the image provides him with an imaginary and more palatable past: “photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal; they also help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure” (9).

In Vella’s novel, photographs are markers of imaginary transnational and diasporic pasts, of memory and trauma. This is approached in particular through Paul’s parents’ wedding photograph that the novel places in two familial contexts linking centre and periphery. The image is mentioned first when Flora, Paul, and his sister Tanya take up their apartment in Bull Street: “Mother hung up the wedding photo where I could see it from my bed. It was the only picture we had of Father” (Vella 2011, 19). In addition to sentimental and emotional value, as well as marking absence and death, it provides security in an insecure space. Significantly, the same photograph is displayed in Flora’s apartment in London where it is one of the very few pictures she appears to have – no pictures of her children are mentioned. As the wedding photograph is described in detail at this point, it gains particular importance and reminds Paul of the time before his diaspora trauma:

I got to my feet and stood before the picture, done in sepia, of Mother and Father on their wedding day. Mother, holding a bouquet, was wearing a headdress like a gigantic butterfly from which cascaded a seemingly endless veil that spread in folds at their feet. Her other hand was hooked through Father’s arm as he stood, ramrod straight, in his black double-breasted suit holding white gloves across his chest. The couple was flanked by two solemn-looking bridesmaids. As far as I knew that was the only picture of Father in existence. I peered at the stern face with the thin moustache until I became aware of the silence that had fallen around me. (Vella 2011, 357)

The uncanniness of Paul’s encounter with his Maltese past in London through this photograph is an example of what Roland Barthes (1981) describes in Camera Lucida as a “punctum”. The punctum is an element in a photograph that in Barthes’s words “pricks” and “bruises” (27) its beholder. According to Banerjee’s interpretation of Barthes, the concept is a “disturbance or sudden wound that makes a particular photographic epiphanic to a particular viewer” (2010, 450). For Paul, seeing the picture is “physical – like the rush of excitement or fear” (Vella 2011, 357) and leads to “fathomless emptiness” and “nausea” (360), affective responses exemplifying the power of the experience. Rather than signifying homecoming, the encounter through the photographic image underlines the loss and trauma generated by mother’s disappearance and father’s death. The photograph addressed in the extended quotation above is multitemporal, linking the childhood past with the current diasporic moment, marking a Maltese past in the metropolitan centre.

If examined through Barthes’s idea that photographs are ways of experiencing the past and accepting death (1981, 72), Paul’s response shows how loss, absence, and death are elements in his trauma that need to be worked through. Paul’s reaction to the image can be understood as his realization that the loss of mother is final. This wound is emphasized when he shows Flora photographs of his own and his sister’s daughters, an act that leads to her merely performing “the very picture of the loving grandmother” (Vella 2011, 356) – an identity that she does not possess. It is clear that loss and absence cannot be denied, and the exchange of contact information at the end of the visit is a mere formality. The stories of the three characters are all generated by the trauma of diaspora, and their strategies to cope with shame and loss have led to difficulties in trusting others. Through its stories of three characters, Vella’s novel, while showing cultural hybridity in Malta, emphasizes the trauma generated by mobility and brings into the open different memories and fractured subjectivities characterizing the experience of diaspora. While Paul has looked up to the centre and expected it to alleviate his losses, it is only by countering his memories of diaspora and accepting his loss as final that he may find a way out of the melancholia attached to his experience as a representative of the periphery and redefine his identity.

Conclusion

This article has argued that Vincent Vella’s Slippery Steps is a transnational novel that places Maltese identities in a context of mobility and diaspora in order to underscore the transnational formation of identity. Through a narrative emphasizing the entanglement of identities, the novel critiques simplified understandings of the relationship between centres and peripheries. In so doing, it challenges views that associate peripheries with provincialism, and shows how identity formation is multidirectional in contact zones such as Malta and London because of their diverse cultural encounters. I have addressed the ways in which Vella’s novel develops ideas of intercultural encounter by locating its main character Paul in British and global popular culture, as well as by showing how Maltese identities are constructed amidst diverse global and Mediterranean flows. The analysis also locates the novel’s representations of diasporic Maltese identity in the discourse of trauma through the cases of Paul, his mother Flora, and Reno, whose experiences show the entanglement of periphery and centre. Their diverse experiences of diaspora and loss are associated with the hierarchically ordered centre–periphery relationship and the losses and gains it generates. The past, the novel suggests, is visible but ultimately inaccessible, present only in family photographs and memories, and mobility does not necessarily guarantee happiness. For Vella, the relationship between the centre and periphery generates new mobilities and identities, but also involves loss and trauma that the diaspora and the periphery need to come to terms with in the reconstruction of their identity.

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Jopi Nyman

Jopi Nyman is Professor of English and Vice Dean at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Eastern Finland. His recent books include Displacement, Memory, and Travel Contemporary Migrant Writing (2017), Equine Fictions (2019), and the co-edited collections Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings (2021) and Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture: Surfacing Histories (2021). His current research interests focus on human-animal studies, tanscultural literatures, and border narratives.