Bejn Bejnejn
by Walid Nabhan
L-Eżodu taċ-Ċikonji (“The Exodus of Storks”) by Amman-born Maltese-Palestinian author Walid Nabhan has just been published by Peter Owen Publishers in an English translation by Albert Gatt. It is Nabhan’s magnum opus and has been on my TBR list for some time. I had previously come across another novel of his – L-Iżvijati – and had been struck by the way he uses the Maltese language, as if he has dismantled its constitutive elements and put them together again. A good example is the title of his 2019 collection Bejn Bejnejn. If I had to translate these two words, I would render them as “In-Between”, or “Between two places” or, perhaps, “Neither here nor there”. But the truth is, I have never heard the expression used by anyone before I saw it on the cover of this book.
Bejn Bejnejn is an odd assortment of sixteen short stories (at times bordering on flash fiction) which left me with mixed feelings. Nabhan is at his best when exploring the theme of identity and cultural belonging. In this regard, the highlight is the title piece which closes the collection. A mixture of essay and fiction, it is a very personal exploration of what it means to be both Palestinian and Maltese (and, up to a point, a foreigner in both places), how language reflects culture, and how the sense of belonging/unbelonging feeds into an author’s willingness to criticise his country – whether that of origin or his adoptive one.
There are other poignant pieces – such as Destinazzjoni (“Destination”), which speaks of the plight of migrants and refugees and their perilous journeys; Meta Bikkejt lil Ommi (“When I made my mother cry”) a nostalgic work of auto-fiction based on chilhood memories and Insensittivita’ (“Insensitivity”), a touching story which speaks of the fraught relationship between a woman and her stepson.
Perhaps my sense of partial disappointment stems from the fact that the collection starts with I thought
were two of the weaker stories. Pamela
is a ghostly tale based on one of the tritest tropes in the genre, with some
gratuitous sexually-charged descriptions thrown into the mix. Ir-Rewwixta tal-Ħebża, originally
Nabhan’s contribution to a volume of tribute pieces to lawyer and historian Dr
Giovanni Bonello, recounts a short-lived attempt at revolt at the time of
Grandmaster Ximenes. The story presents
an interesting protagonist in “Ġanni l-Fieres”, the conflicted baker chosen to
lead the revolt, but the use of “modern” words derived from English (for
instance, “jaffordja”) made it difficult for me to enjoy this as a work of
“historical fiction”. There is yet
another genre piece in Fatati mat-Triq (“Ghosts along the way”) in which
a truck driver gives a lift to a young woman from his hometown to the city,
past the haunted ruined village of Ħerbet in-Natūr. Most of the story focuses
on the internal battle in the driver’s mind as to whether he should take advantage of the woman’s openly seductive behaviour. The
supernatural element is kept for the climax, in which an apparition warns the
protagonist not to stop in the haunted village and urges him to leave that
place immediately. Read simply as a scary story, it’s not
particularly impressive. But the ghost’s
cryptic warning that the protagonist should leave a place where he “does not
belong” seems to echo the wider concerns of this collection, populated by
individuals who are “neither here nor there”.
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