STORIES ON (TENTATIVE) SURVIVAL

In the coming weeks, Horizons Publications will place on the market Mario Azzopardi’s VAMPIR, his third collection of short stories for young adults in as many years. Patricia Gatt previews a disconcerting anthology which makes no apology for parading Generation Y’s anxieties and frustrations.

Labels are a misnomer, a fast track created by marketers, used to pin down multiple attitudes, habits and consumer spending habits in a hugely diversified world. Where youngsters are concerned the monikers keep rolling: the postwar Baby Boomers gave way to Generation X who in their turn brought forth Generation Y.

Informally referred to as Gen Y, this appellation attempts to group together those born between 1982–2000. Researchers have concluded that while Gen Y is the most materially provided for and entertained ever, this group is disillusioned by the emotional and social fallout of their parents’ materialist aspirations, with boredom looming as a significant cause of concern. In dealing with Gen Y there have been calls for adults to be convincing as, in contrast to Gen X, this generation doesn’t value style over substance. Even though today’s youth are very sophisticated users of the latest technology, they are not impressed by prepared talks and spiel; they value spontaneity and interaction. What is being communicated to them has to be pertinent in both content and style. There is a relational factor involved too in that communicating with this generation necessitates openness and understanding.

Precisely these are the qualities Mario Azzopardi evokes in his third collection of short stories Vampir u Stejjer Ohra (Vampire and Other Short Stories) aimed at young adult readers. The links between the short stories are both easy to make and exasperatingly complex as a great deal is going on beneath the surface. We are again in the presence of a group of bright yet susceptible youths. Azzopardi captures perfectly the mixture of self-assuredness, lack of self-confidence, insecurity, anxiety and visceral emotions such as vindictiveness and the upheaval incest brings about in personal identity.

Much young adult material on offer in English is a hybrid of different genres ranging from fantasy about futuristic themes where technology is so pervasive that microchips have been implanted in people’s brains to tales about self-conscious vampires who fall in love with kooky teenagers. Azzopardi’s short stories also focus on hard hitting themes, albeit with a twist, reflecting the diversity of the teen experience. His exploration of incest in L-Istorja ta’ Sarah (Sarah’s Story) is harrowing yet sensitively handled. Sarah’s attempt at dealing with the shocking news that she was conceived incestuously when her mother’s brother repeatedly forced his sister into having sex with him is disturbing, yet the protagonist seems to accept her mother’s decision to speak out when Vladimir V, the defendant, faces trial for violent rape on another teenage girl. The plot could be read as a vehicle for Azzopardi to explore complex issues surrounding rape and the age-old, yet hazardous, view that somehow young women are asking for it. What’s more, Azzopardi subverts one of the conventions of young adult literature in that this piece does not aim for a positive resolution: in a characteristic Azzopardi ploy the story ends intertextually with a quotation from the trial as reported in a newspaper. Readers are left to figure out for themselves whether Sarah, a smart and self-aware university student, will find the inner strength to overcome the taboo laden circumstances surrounding her birth besides having to deal with a mother who’s also severely traumatized.

Rape is also probed in Charter Flight, though in this case it features as a weapon of war, where it’s used to humiliate the enemy through the systematic assault of Ngira Kahindo, the African teen whose narrative is being told, and other female members of her family. Charter Flight seems to have been inspired by the periodic newspaper reporting of irregular migrants who, after being granted asylum in another country, leave Malta with the restrained hope of a stable future. Azzopardi unpicks the self-serving generosity in such gestures to highlight the economic forces at work in such trans-national schemes: human solidarity is subsumed by the reality of exploitation. Ngira Kahindo’s ambition after being traumatized by the violence of war, rape and murder is to find employment as cleaning staff in a private residence or hotel. In contrast, her profoundest aspiration is to narrate a fairytale, which at present defies all form, to her children and grandchildren.

For most of this disconcerting collection Azzopardi’s writing is full of verve and versatility. His ability to mesh together the code-switching conversations of Maltese teens, political propaganda newspaper headlines much favoured by authoritarian regimes, the dramatic intensity of football reporting, printed and TV news reportage illustrate a lightness of touch in the handling of very emotive subjects. North Korea’s qualifying for last summer’s World Cup in Johannesburg and that country’s national coach’s surreal admission that he received tactical advice from Kim Jong-il on invisible mobile phones ostensibly invented by the Most Revered Leader himself serves as a springboard for a story that pits the individual against chilling authoritarian power.

L-ghassies tax-Xibka (The Guardian of the Net) sharply contrasts such bizarre enunciations with the very real tragedy of an individual goalkeeper, who has to prove his worth to himself, his young wife and son and, ultimately, to the political regime that fetishizes sport as a symbol of national pride. When the burden proves to be too heavy, the goalkeeper commits suicide. Azzopardi’s temperament differs from that of Nick Hornby’s, or for that matter Peter Eszterhazy’s, when writing about football. The splintering of the goalkeeper’s ego is rendered by means of the use of surreal motifs that owe their origin in the use of masks in the Asian theatre tradition. The language that lays out the final scene has more than a hint of stage direction to it.

Azzopardi consistently seeks to create an international cast of characters. Far be it for him to limit himself to an array of Maltese adolescents. Readers might baulk at this strategy, thinking that there can’t possibly be any points of contact between their own experience and that of an athlete on the brink of mental collapse who’s representing a dictatorial political system. However, if one had to transpose a totalitarian political regime with the concerns raised by Google’s chief executive about a future scenario where people would have to change their names to get away from their cyber past, the story’s resonance is immediately evident. In addition, the author is keen to depict a mixture of insecurity, disillusion, exploitation and defeat in the face of extreme tribulation and the human will to overcome and survive. Surely, this is universal human experience.

Xenetti mhux Editjati (Unedited Scenes) links together a group of disparate characters who, in their fragility, have allowed themselves to be pushed around. Alienation is the compelling theme of this piece: Alistair, an Easy Rider for the 21^st century, is killed in a motorcycle accident, Brenda’s sexual rebellion, narrated by a testosterone-addled teen with no regard to her emotional state, is an attempt to come to terms with her parents’ break-up, the anonymous girl terrified of sexual assertiveness who gives birth prematurely and doesn’t want anything to do with the baby.

Framing these characters is Christ in Gexwa ta’ Nazrat u l-Ghasafar (Jeshua from Nazrat and the Birds). Inspired by the synoptic view of Christ, and heavily reliant on fantasy, the story focuses on Christ, who according to the prevailing psychobabble “has issues” – a meaningless term that is simply trotted out to label challenging life situations. In Azzopardi’s version, Christ is as hung up as any adolescent because he doesn’t really know who his biological father is, yet he is also quietly self-confident as he has a sense of purpose and a questing intelligence that sets the scene for conflict with the establishment. Once again, Azzopardi resorts to a technique he has also employed in Skizzi tal-Karnival – a blend of narrative structure evocative of a play, transcripted conversations and authorial interruptions. Azzopardi seems to be following a respectable list of writers (Philip Pullman in the novella The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ comes to mind) who have been interested in extrapolating the authentic from the abstractions Christian culture has created over time.

In a different vein the bloodsucker craze has well and truly taken over the market of teenage fiction. Vampir (Vampire) plunges into the fray by changing tack: readers are invited to witness the grotesque portrayal and parody of a TV programme about a mechanized German vampire, Olaf Lichtenstein, who faces viral opposition from the anti-vampire camp. Unperturbed by the uncompromising attitude of the faction that feels threatened by these fantastical creatures, Olaf’s creators grasp the dynamics in an instant and set out to manipulate the proceedings. This vampire has no precedent in the Twilight series or the bloodsuckers of the 19^thcentury; rather he is a masked bigot, a fake media invention bent on bumping up the ratings and attracting a larger amount of advertising revenue.

All in all this volume, in the trilogy of short stories Azzopardi has written so far for the young adult audience, develops themes dealt with earlier while concurrently introducing a range of more daring subjects. The author sets out a family’s disintegration, narrated from the standpoint of a teen, or incest, fake celebrity culture, loneliness, rootlessness and racism. We also come across the simple aesthetic pleasure of a reworked fairytale (Il-Princep Zring, The Frog Prince) which starts off with a lengthy exposition on the frog’s fate in oriental culture and ends with the realistic denouement of a Frog Prince who is still hell-bent on vengefulness. This collection makes no pretence of providing answers but takes us on a journey with a luminous cast of adolescents living on the edge who ultimately win our respect through their sheer determination to survive.

ENDS.