Malta made its mark on sunny Oxford yesterday, with Paul Caruana Galizia lining up beside some of the biggest names in the literary world. He joined British journalist Susannah Jowitt in the Oxford Martin School, to discuss his book ‘A Death in Malta’ for the city’s annual literary festival.
Caruana Galizia’s book describes and investigates the now-famous assassination of his mother Daphne following her committed anti-corruption journalism which threatened to expose the dirty secrets of many of Malta’s top politicians. But it also goes deeper than that, reflecting on the state of Malta itself and how Daphne’s life and work represented a fervent optimism about what the country could become in the future.
The conversation started with a focus on Caruana Galizia’s process, and his journey of discovery over the last eight years. How had he—and not the others in his family—come to write the book, Jowitt asked. Caruana Galizia described with an amused smile that initially he and his two brothers had agreed to write it together but that he had eventually found them to be very little help at all.
The Oxford audience heard about Paul and Daphne’s relationship, and the family as a whole. Daphne represented a challenge to many of Malta’s long-held customs: as the country’s first woman to write a political column, and the first under her own byline, she drew attention to herself from early in her career. This only intensified as she became more and more critical of Malta’s politics, and this bore heavily on the family. Paul remembered multiple arson attacks on the family home as a child, as well as coming home to find the family border collie dead on the doorstep in a pool of its own blood. For a while he’d believed Daphne’s white lies—there had a been a gas leak, the border collie had mistakenly eaten snail poison—but as he grew up he began to see these incidents for what they were: direct threats against his mother.
Caruana Galizia betrayed mixed feelings about his childhood in such an environment. He hesitatingly declared himself as selfish as he described how he had envied the comparative freedom of his friends at school, agreeing with Jowitt’s suggestion that he might have resented the position he had been put in. He told the audience that his mother had wanted him and his brothers to leave Malta as soon as they had the chance, to escape the constraints that had stifled her growing up, and that he had wasted no time in doing exactly that once he came of age. Daphne was a real believer, Caruana Galizia said, in the notion that Malta really could be better, that it could mature into the age of democracy and human rights. But he had never quite felt the same.
The peculiarities of Maltese journalism got a few laughs from the audience: after the first dozen ‘Vellas’ and ‘Azzopardis’ the brothers decided to stop bothering to specify ‘no relation’. On one of the many occasions that Daphne had been summoned to court to answer libel charges, she had been denied access to the building and threatened with contempt of court, all because she didn’t have closed-toe shoes. Her husband Peter had to dash over from his law office to swap with her, and spent the rest of the day practising law in her sandals.
Caruana Galizia’s story as he told it always came back to his family. His father had spoken about Daphne in the European Parliament, at one point his stern tone interrupted by his voice breaking. Paul said it was the closest he had ever seen his father come to crying. He shared a cheerier anecdote, talking about when he had shared a first draft of the book with his father and brothers. Paul had included a broad, emotional interview with his mother’s first love: his father had read it over and said, ‘we don’t need so much of the other boyfriend’. His brother Andrew had sent over a list of episodes he felt should be included – all were about him.
What was the lowest point in the whole affair, Jowitt asked: Caruana Galizia thought for a moment before telling us that it was in 2018, when the sudden shock they had all felt turned into something else which he couldn’t quite describe. ‘The country became really ugly’, he said. ‘They didn’t have a shared understanding of the murder’, and so couldn’t move forward with any sort of togetherness. Does he still believe that, as his mother said, ‘crooks are everywhere’ in the country? He does, but he’s hopeful that things can change.
What was Cauana Galizia’s book about, ultimately? Daphne had become less of a woman than an idea, he said. A symbol of resistance, yes, but hardly a person anymore. The book was about restoring the balance, bringing her humanity back in. He does an excellent job: the room was filled with her spirit, that sense of striving towards justice that she carried with her until her tragic last day.
