Es Sidr
by Omar N'Shea
Following the death of his mother, Josephine, Omar N’Shea discovers among her belongings a file containing a stash of letters she had received from his estranged father, Otman. A Libyan national, Otman was employed at the Es Sidr oil terminal and had met Josephine in Malta in the late 1960s, at a time when, as Otman notes in one of his letters, “Malta and Libya were drawing close” just like the young couple. The one-sided correspondence (Josephine’s replies are absent) charts a turbulent long-distance relationship, punctuated by Otman’s brief visits to Malta. This relationship led to an unplanned pregnancy, a short-lived shotgun marriage, and the birth of the author – a son whom Otman explicitly repudiated in his letters. Otman visited Malta some years later, briefly enough to leave vague impressions in his son’s memory, but no further contact followed. By then, Josephine had embraced her queerness and settled into long-term lesbian relationships. Otman, meanwhile, had been raised jointly by his lower working-class maternal grandparents and by his mother, in a milieu that included queer and trans women.
Otman’s absence nonetheless haunts N’Shea’s journey into adulthood: whether through the photographs displayed in his grandparents’ home or in his mother’s occasional reminiscences, which remained unexpectedly generous towards a man who had, by most accounts, wronged her. More significantly, despite Omar’s efforts to distance himself from his Libyan father, Otman’s genetic legacy continues to mark him. His appearance betrays his North African heritage, reinforced by his Arabic given name and his registered surname – a pseudo-Celtic variant of Otman’s family name. This sense of otherness is further intensified by Omar N’Shea’s eventual recognition of his queerness, at a time when coming out as gay in Malta was far from easy.
The discovery of Otman’s letters forms
the starting point of Es Sidr, in which Omar N’Shea seeks to exorcise
the ambivalent presence of his father by confronting it head-on, warts and all,
as revealed through the correspondence. Es Sidr was first published in
instalments in the online literary journal Aphroconfuso, the brainchild
of authors Loranne Vella and Joe Gatt. Aphroconfuso has since supplemented
its online presence with a series of attractively designed paperbacks, one of
which is N’Shea’s Es Sidr, now reissued as a book-length essay.
Omar’s account of his personal “his-story” is set against the wider backdrop of Malta’s political upheavals in the 1970s, particularly the years leading up to the country’s transformation into a Republic in 1974 and the gradual withdrawal of the UK’s colonial presence. This was a period during which Prime Minister Dom Mintoff and the Malta Labour Party in government sought closer ties with Libya, a political strategy intended not only to cultivate new and alternative alliances but also to throw down the gauntlet the American/European superpowers recalibrating their interests in a shifting Mediterranean geopolitical landscape. While there remains ample scope for further academic research into this phase of recent Maltese history, N’Shea offers a number of compelling insights drawn from primary-source research. His account also considers the queer scenes of Malta and Libya in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, which he experienced firsthand.
The long-essay form that combines memoir, history, and sociological reflection is not new internationally, but it remains innovative within the Maltese literary context, where – with a few notable exceptions – many writers continue to adhere to traditional demarcations between fiction and non-fiction. For this reason alone, Es Sidr, as an example of boundary-blurring literary non-fiction, is a refreshing contribution that deserves wide readership.
It would be unfair, however, to suggest that Es Sidr should be read solely for the novelty of its form. It should be read, first and foremost, because it is so well written. I admired the way N’Shea shifts register seamlessly and seemingly effortlessly: from poignant, confessional passages about childhood to meticulously researched political history; from frank references to sexual experience to extended engagements with socio-anthropological theory on identity, class, and gender. Particularly striking are the moments when the academic voice yields to the poet, resulting in sudden, lush flowerings of language. Some images achieve an almost cinematic intensity – the shore birds wading in Libya’s shallow waters, for instance, which open and close the book and recur throughout like a leitmotif. That N’Shea successfully sustains this polystylistic approach ultimately reflects his enviable command of Maltese and demonstrates (if any proof were needed) that, in the right hands, the Maltese language is anything but limited.
In Es Sidr, the micro becomes the
macro. N’Shea’s work traces an individual’s search for personal identity while
simultaneously speaking to a postcolonial nation in search of its own and to
marginalized communities whose voices were often absent from local literature.
The book possesses academic gravitas, yet its more intimate passages are deeply
moving in ways that purely academic writing rarely achieves. It is a work to be experienced.
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