When we were young, we used to watch Disney films like Cinderella, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Aladdin. At the time, little did we know that such stories had much older, deeper roots. Aladdin’s, for instance, is a Middle Eastern folk tale associated with One Thousand and One Nights, not part of the original corpus, and yet Antoine Galland heard it from Hanna Diyab and added it to the French edition. The importance of such stories lies not just in their content, but also in the way they are told. Above all, such stories withstand the test of time.
Storytelling is at Inizjamed’s core. The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, organised by the cultural NGO, is about stories and narratives that were conceived long ago and endured wars, turmoil, and drought. Our festival is simply carrying the baton of those who came before us, while looking closely at what’s fresh and what’s new.
The Aladdin we grew up with, dressed in purple and white, has probably faded in our memory. Yet, the stories remain. Say a genie were to appear today and ask me for three words I associate with the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, I’d choose: magic, poeticness and colour.
Currently in its 20th edition, the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival has moved through various locations, namely Couvre Port in Vittoriosa, the Garden of Rest in Floriana, Fort St Elmo in Valletta, Fort Manoel on Manoel Island, and MCAST in Paola. Wherever it has been held, one word I’ve consistently heard from our audiences is magic.
While the setting contributes to the atmosphere, the true magic of this festival lies in the way poetry takes a stand, in the way words move through space and stay with us, and in the connections built between languages and people.
This brings us to poeticness. Poetry isn’t just a matter of lines and stanzas. It’s found in prose, music, movement, light, and film. These are all art forms that Inizjamed embraces. Literature is part of a larger conversation and does not stand on its own.
Just like colours do not stand on their own; their complementary nature often tells us a lot about the colour itself. If I had to choose one colour to represent the Festival, I would say blue (or according to Kassia St Clair’s palette: “ultramarine”). It’s the colour that reminds me of the Mediterranean Sea. But why stop at one, when the whole spectrum is available, right? The Festival is a celebration of cultures and languages, of textures and rhythms, of different tones and perspectives. This year more than ever, colour feels like the right word to illustrate the “indescribable feeling” of the Festival.
It was around 2020 when a friend first mentioned Kassia St Clair. I read her book The Secret Lives of Colour and was struck by the way each short piece opened up a world; every colour carried its own story and history. Five years later, through a couple of connections, we realised we might be very close to inviting her. Kassia St Clair is indeed one of our guest authors for 2025. A fitting moment for a festival that continues to explore the power of the spoken word in all its shades.
This edition will see a number of changes. We’ll be holding the festival all over Malta and Gozo and also hosting guests from across different literary genres. Our guest authors hail from six different countries: Ubah Ali Farah – an Italo-Somali novelist and poet; Carmen Camacho – a Spanish poet; Omar N’Shea – a Maltese essayist; Simone Spiteri – a Maltese playwright; Kassia St Clair – a British writer; Maud Vanhauwaert – a Belgian poet; and Michael Zammit – a Maltese poet.
If Aladdin’s white attire were a colour from Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour, I’d say it would be “whitewash”. In her book, she ties this colour to illnesses like influenza, typhus, and the plague. In trying to fight them, “volunteers desperately searched back alleys for bodies, tended the sick in swiftly erected, camp-like isolation hospitals, and began furiously whitewashing the streets and houses in the infected areas.” Whitewash was a cheap paint “made from a mixture of lime (crushed and heated limestone) and calcium chloride or salt, combined with water” that had disinfectant qualities. And so, here I am thinking that whitewash might also be the colour of the festival − a remedy against apathy, neglect, and lack of drive.
The 20th edition will be held in partnership with Arts Council Malta and the support of Verspolis. The Festival is also collaborating with Spazju Kreattiv, and is being supported by APS Bank, l-Għaqda tal-Malti – Università, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di La Valletta, the National Book Council, and Teatru Salesjan.
For more information, visit Inizjamed’s Instagram and Facebook pages or the official website, inizjamed.org. Tickets for all events are available at showshappening.com.
