A packed music hall
at the Creativity Centre in
Conducted by fellow poet and
short story writer Immanuel Mifsud, the interview, which took 75 minutes,
disclosed details about Azzopardi's childhood and young adulthood,
including the way his immediate relatives obsessed him with "moral
guilt" and the perception of "a punishing, tyrannical God".
Azzopardi explained how he
became obsessed with blood-stained iconographic images and how he still keeps
drawings of death masks which he produced when he was merely three years
old. He was answering a direct question about why there seems to be
so much "morbid references to illness and death" in his literary
works.
A firm believer in the
biographical relevance in works of art, Azzopardi also described his father's
long hospitalisation in a ward for terminal patients in 1966 (the year he died)
where the writer could witness, besides so much human pain and agony,
regular deaths and "corpses being ushered out from the ward in zinc
boxes."
Azzopardi also explained that
"the maimed and the infirm" in his works may also be taken as a
running metaphor illustrating social ills.
The interviewer also zoomed
in on Azzopardi's defiance and criticism against his own country. Azzopardi
explained that he does not want to harbour any illusions about the bigotry and
hypocritical platitudes of so many people. He is uncompromisingly in opposition
to the way, for instance, that the local Church has treated the
masses over so many years, centuries even, advocating they should be
"only given soft food to masticate since their gums were yet immature."