Reading ‘Air’ in the History of Palestinian Radio in Malta 1982

Amany Al-Sayyed^[1]

doi: https://doi.org/10.58117/890r-m772

Keywords: Palestinian, history, erasure, anti-colonial, love, rupture, resistance

Introduction

What is Palestine, Dad? I was twelve when I stood alone in an Edenic cemetery, silent and green, in Patterson Burnaby, asking this question to my father’s grave, tearless, unable to cry. Lover of historic Palestine, Hussein Al-Sayyed, died on January 1993 (year of the Oslo accords agreement, see Figure 1) four months after our arrival as immigrants from Malta where I grew up. He died from lung cancer, silently, in St. Paul’s hospital, surrounded by a big empty space in the room. There was no mass funeral. The man’s legacy was somewhere far away, not in Canada. When I grew up after his death and returned to his city, Beirut, where he grew up, I searched for his story amongst ruins in the refugee camps. I met the last of his remaining relatives and was gifted his things, the artifacts they kept of him, what they remembered him by, like his signed books and photos. I sat in my room in Beirut when I first read his stories and looked at his photos in places with people I did not know. I boiled with fury when I read these lines:

“ حينما تغادر الوطن

^[2] تعرف كم هو اليف

You’re supposed to be here, dad. All this love in your heart and you left me?

I close my eyes as I lay in bed surrounded by his legacy, could not dream or see or imagine my way through it

I walk blindly in your city:

ولكنه حين يصبح جريحا

لا تعرف كم انت موجع

ولا تسطيع ان توقف ذالك النزف^[3]

الذي ينزف من اعماقك

I fall asleep to his voice on the radio from 1982.

History

During the catastrophe of 1948 in Palestine, my father was displaced with his family to the southern refugee camps in Lebanon named Ein El helwe and Rashidiyye. Growing up in Lebanon, he worked several jobs, including an Arabic teacher in an all-girls school in Beirut named Choueifat. His distinction in the history and form of language, as demonstrated in his career as a published writer and Arabic teacher, earned him a broadcasting job in Ghana, West Africa. This was when the national radio station in Ghana was recruiting affluent intellectual Palestinians to represent Arab news as part of the African Unity Project^[4]. Radio Broadcasting in Ghana was set up by the OAU (Organization of African Unity) in 1963 under the auspices of socialist president of Ghana, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. The organization was established in Addis Ababa with 32 signatory governments. Its primary aim was to promote unity and solidarity among the African states and to act as a collective voice for the African continent.

The Organization of African Unity (OAU) was committed to the eradication of colonialism and white minority rule across the African continent. Following independence, many African states expressed a growing desire for greater continental unity, although they differed on how this unity should be achieved. One influential approach emphasized the idea of a “collective voice” rooted in popular mobilization, a concept shaped in part by the experience of the Algerian War of Independence. It was within this context that Frantz Fanon became one of the first thinkers to examine the political and psychological impact of radio under colonialism. In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon argued that radio played an integral and transformative role in producing what he described as “essential mutations in the consciousness of the colonized” (1965, pp. 69–70).

Before the Algerian armed struggle, Fanon observed that many Arabs relied on unreliable and fragmented sources of information. This situation changed dramatically in 1956 with the rise of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the armed movement fighting for Algeria’s independence after more than 120 years of French colonial rule. Led politically by President Ahmed Ben Bella, the FLN launched The Voice of Algeria, a radio news program produced by exiled members of the movement. At the outbreak of the war in 1954, very few non-European Algerians owned radios, as radio had largely been perceived as the voice of the colonial world. However, the FLN’s broadcasts transformed radio into a revolutionary tool. Fanon described this shift as expressing “a desire of the Algerian to enter into the vast network of information, to introduce himself into a world where things happen, where the event exists, where forces act” (1965, p. 78). As transistor radios became increasingly available throughout the 1950s, even in remote villages, people gathered to listen to revolutionary broadcasts that fostered political awareness and collective resistance.

So began a war of waves.

In the 1980s—twenty years after the war in Algeria—the Algerian government funded a radio station that covered news of the Global South which continued to struggle against imperialism and colonial rule. This station was not the voice of the FLN, yet it echoed similar revolutionary values, including the struggle for independence of developing nations, as well as uniting against imperialism/colonization. The Island of Malta, which had fought for its independence from British rule for many years, hosted this station, which was called “Radio Mediterranean.” My father took up his final broadcasting job there in the 1980s.

Before this situation, my family earned a living in Ghana for over fifteen years between 1962 until 1982 before moving to Malta. Despite the absence of sound-recordings from Ghana’s radio archives in my father’s voice, the press card below confirms his role as a journalist, dated October 1966. Therefore, this Ghana-Malta transition raises the following question: How was Radio Mediterranean a natural transition from Ghana, and why exist in Malta?

Malta: The Space In-Between

Palestinians in the Air

As a child growing up in Malta, I felt that this small Island was paradise. Everyone was kind to me. I have no memory of witnessing marginalization, racism, supremacy or pure evil from the Maltese or the immigrants alike. I felt a strong sense of belonging from kindergarten all the way into my adolescence; I learned perfect Maltese, fell in love with boys in my grade, and made friends from all over Europe and North Africa. My teachers made sure to remind me of my character consistently: “Amany, don’t let anything in the world wipe away your smile.” Sunday school meant Arabic and Quranic lessons taught by kind Sudanese teachers. In elementary school, I learned music from an Italian opera singer; I spoke Arabic, English, Italian, and Maltese perfectly; I wrote my first play, performed my first dance, and got A’s on all subjects. The Mediterranean Sea is where my father taught me how to trust him. We swam together in the deep blue sea with no safety nets—just a girl and her dad swimming from one deep end to another relying solely on their bodies to move through. Malta is where important politicians from the Arab world enjoyed parties at my family house and where the grape vine tree wrapped its arms around our entire home with love. In brief, Malta was pure harmony, never in dissonance for a moment. For this reason, it never occurred to me that the blue sky above me was literally a militarized space of the Cold War where broadcasts ranging from army radio to religious evangelists filled the air. I didn’t know that dad reported about it all—death, corruption, Zionist genocide, and endless military destruction on his people living in the Middle East and abroad. Maybe air was the only space left for him to recreate an imagined homeland, perhaps to heal all Palestinian broken hearts in exile.^[5]

Before its independence in 1964, Malta was a British Crown Colony from 1814, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and served as a crucial naval base for the British in the Mediterranean. During this period, it transitioned from its previous rule by the Knights of Malta to becoming part of the British Empire. Tucked between North Africa and Europe in the middle of the Mediterranean, Malta fought for and gained independence in the 1960s from British rule, marking a significant shift in the island’s political and economic landscape. In 1983, Malta joined the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a coalition of newly independent countries, primarily from Africa and Asia, that sought to remain independent of both the US-led Western bloc (NATO) and the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. Around the same time, Malta also decided to join the European Commonwealth, a group of 56 sovereign states designed to prevent future wars in Europe by fostering deep economic and political ties among its members. This engagement on the international stage became particularly significant when studying how Malta brokered a post-colonial identity based on both economic benefit and interest in marketing itself as “liberation” friendly. This complex historical moment reveals itself most clearly in Malta’s public broadcasting service scene in the 1980s, where power (economic and liberatory) operated and moved in the air through the medium of radio. Broadcasting in Malta during this era was monopolized by the state and monitored by the Malta Broadcasting Authority (MBA). The MBA’s role was to foster a unified national discourse, but it quickly faced criticism for bias and lack of legal authority. For example, between 1983 and 1986, it legally had no power to act for three and a half years, yet it continued to operate in ways that appeared to align with or oppose the government as it saw fit, including authorizing or censoring station acquisitions (Spiteri 2014). This was the exact moment when the Middle East entered the Maltese broadcasting scene. Several stations operated outside the MBA’s formal contracts but were licensed directly by the government. Radio Mediterranean was one of them, funded by the Maltese and Algerian governments and sponsored by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Office in Malta. With a balancing act between liberation and European modernizing discourse, other Arab stations also entered the scene. For example, a station called “Voice of Friendship and Solidarity,” funded by Libya and promoting Gaddafi’s Green Book (1975). It was licensed by the government rather than the MBA. Another venture, the Voice of the Mediterranean (VOM), a Libyan Maltese shortwave station designed to bypass local censorship, was also government-licensed rather than contracted through the MBA.

Reading Palestinian Air

To understand Malta as an in-between space is to see it as a threshold between worlds, suspended between continents, empires, and identities. I invoke Eva Horn’s analysis of air as medium that reveals—through environing media discourse—how broadcasting is never merely technical; it is environmental, political, and atmospheric. Horn argues that “air is a medium that connects bodies, climates, politics, and imaginaries—it is never a neutral element” (Horn 2002, p. 12). Radio Mediterranean, situated in the Mediterranean’s contested aerial space, thus existed within what Horn might call the political ecology of air: the sky as a site of power, transmission, and control. In other words, what was communicated through this type of airspace via the transmitters (see Figure 3), culturally and politically, even post-independence, was created for confusion, invisibility, and impossible to map. In his seminal work titled The Map is the Territory (2011), philosopher Bernhard Siegert problematizes a linear reading of geographies on the ground and in the air as mere content. He writes that media spaces are “cultural techniques that produce the distinctions through which political subjects become thinkable in the first place” (p. 1). Under this lens, Radio Mediterranean’s one-hour broadcast becomes both a space for surveillance by the Maltese state and where Palestinian voices could change the world. Growing up in this “voluminous” colonial space as a liberation movement is almost like spiraling upwards, metaphorically like an orbital habitat:

Every aspect of the environment turns and folds the sightlines and spaces back in on themselves. Living here might be like living in a small valley, where the views all turn upward and hostile conditions block all paths to the next habitable space. Yet if we could make ourselves aware of this constant motion, we would understand that we are “on” a vessel instead of “in” a static place (Scharmen 2011, p. 2).

Such movements through the airwaves are hard to capture. I have evidence to prove it.

Janine/ جينين

The outside world swiftly unraveled the carefully ordered childhood I had known in Malta the moment I arrived in Canada as an immigrant. We migrated in the 90s because my father wanted to offer my older siblings better educational opportunities. I was enrolled immediately at Eric Hamber High School on Oak Street. I loved art class, Picasso, and Van Gogh. The teacher allowed us to remake famous paintings our own way, and it didn’t matter how childish our brushstrokes were. The point was joy. One day, the classroom door opened, and a girl with the biggest smile walked in. She had sparkly brown eyes, curly black hair down to her shoulders tied up in a ponytail, and a short, round figure just like mine. She looked like my twin.

I liked her spirit right away.

She came and sat next to me at the table where I was completing my version of Starry Night. Mr. Brown said I was doing a great job.

“Hi,” she said. “Wow, that’s pretty. I love it.”

“Thanks, are you new?”

“Yeah, just transferred. My name is Janine.”

“Hi, I’m Amany.”

Janine (she continued while I was painting the sea blue) is the name of her mother’s town in Israel. Her dad (she continued while I painted the sun yellow) is Palestinian with an Israeli passport. After high school, her plan is to go back to her village to discover her namesake. “Okay,” I said, and continued painting circles around the sun.

We became friends. Janine was a proud girl who knew she belonged to a place beside Canada. She had a clear story about her namesake—that Jenin is a city in the West Bank. She knew the law automatically granted her citizenship to the state of Israel through the Law of Return and her mother’s religion. She perceived herself historically. By contrast, I didn’t. At the time, I knew nothing about how Jewish acquisition of land meant the loss of Palestinian homes. I didn’t know that Jewish emigration from the “slums” of Europe and North America and the advancement of the Jewish people in the diaspora meant the vanishing of the indigenous Palestinians into the slums and ghettoes of their own land. I didn’t know that the British Mandate was playing favorites like an unjust parent in a blended family, choosing to empower the Zionist project over Palestinian legitimacy. I didn’t know what settlements were. I didn’t know of the U.N partition of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, fertile plains given to the Jewish state and the desert to the Palestinians. In short, I viewed the world as a newborn. I wanted to believe forever that equality, love, and security were granted to everyone. Janine came and sat next to me in class while I drew my version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I was so proud of my work.

Reading Rupture

In “The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement” (2016), anti-colonial Palestinian archivist Hana Sleiman asks: What is the best way to read absence in Palestinian memory? And how do we analyze non-linear memory/archives of liberation movements? Sleiman suggests that we “read archives along the grain: read the archive’s (re)distribution, (ir) regularities, (in)consistencies, (mis)information, and omissions.” She argues that such reading “treats moments of archival fabrication or omission as entry points to understanding and exposing agendas of power[that can be] read along the archive’s constructed categories, to understand the circuits of knowledge production in which power operates” (p. 13).

Notable is the fact that there were two political parties running for leadership at the time of the authority’s creation. The first one is the Labor party which is has evolved from a socialist platform focused on workers' rights and social services to a modern, center-left party that aims to be inclusive of all social classes. The second party is the Nationalist Party which started radio broadcasts from overseas – from Sicily mostly - to presumably broker votes in Malta post-independence. It was a conservative, pro-European party that has historically advocated for close ties with Europe and full membership in the European Union. Competing for power via opposing narratives on Malta’s identity – Post-colonial or European - these two parties took their fight to the air. The Socialists complained that the Nationalist broadcasting authority was biased and allowed Maltese citizens to transmit from abroad in Malta (which led to legal ramifications), and it allowed stations from Libya, Algeria, and Palestine to broadcast from Malta to the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East. A close reading of Figures 4 and 5 proves that it was almost impossible to read factually who was doing what from where, funded by whom, and for what reasons.

Father’s Poetry

I now bring in my father’s poetry from Radio Mediterranean, as delivered on the cassette, focusing specifically on images of the absent-present. My aim in turning to poetry is to trace how the language of liberation is forced to contend with a state discourse that drifts away from accountability, reorganizing meaning into a system that ultimately speaks in its own favor. Below is a snippet from the unearthed recording, in Arabic, of my father’s poem titled Exile, played during the cultural section of the program:

In the spirit of internationally renowned Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, the land becomes a metaphor of shadows, shores, and ships longing to anchor themselves in “ports of affection.” In a nostalgic tone, the poet seeks a country in “her eyes” and in so doing, accepts his eternal exile, the forever distance.

As I continue to confront my Palestinianess through my father’s images, I return to where I started a decade ago—a shadow in Beirut burning with fury at her absent-present father. Under the weight of a colonial education that never taught me my ancestry, and the lingering silence of a historical and geographical education on Palestine, I found myself unable to move forward in writing this research. For a decade, my voice was buried under this painful reality. I remember questioning whether the “sensory interaction occupying the space between the artistic work and spectator” (Simpson 2014, p. 20) includes the space between me and him. I remember feeling that my sensory relationship with his voice resembles a milieu essentially produced for an external ear, and not for a daughter/kinship. Was I unable or able to recognize myself in his voice and work?

Critical Education

For the longest time, when I met my teacher-friends for coffee in Beirut, I’d tell them about my upbringing in Canada and the superstar teachers I’ve had. Later, I’ll understand that these quiet heroes guided me in anti-coloniality after my father died. Top on the list are Derek Gregory from human geography at the University of British Columbia, then David Chariandy and Paul Matthew St. Pierre from the English department at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. I distinctly remember David telling me, when I registered for a second time in his course on Caribbean literature, “Amany, you’re always such a treat to have in class.” He loved my comments, my presence, and my contributions to the conversation. His daughter is now thirteen years old, and her father recently published a novel addressed to her titled A Letter to My Daughter (2018). David is a Canadian novelist, essayist, and academic known for his writing on race, migration, and diasporic life. He was born in Scarborough, Ontario, to immigrant parents from Trinidad—his father of Indo-Trinidadian descent and his mother of Afro-Trinidadian descent. David was the first teacher at the University of British Columbia to introduce me to race theory, identity and belonging for minorities and immigrants. A few months ago, in Beirut, I read his latest book and in the first chapter, he mentions how confident his daughter is in her body, that she possesses a worldliness distinct from his own, crossing borders comfortably and encountering new people in different places. I think to myself it’s been thirteen years already since sitting in David’s class. I never realized at the time that his class was my first literary confrontation of my own worldliness. I continue reading, and I get to a paragraph about Lebanon’s Khalil Gibran. The poem is sung by a musical band of Black women who give it meaning in translation: “Your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but they are not from you, for their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow.” David says he loves these words. As a father, he hopes to pass on his wisdom to his daughter from his experience and his past. I think of how my father’s wisdom and his memories remain within me too. For the longest time, I hated that all these stories I never asked for were buried in my womb. I remember how I’d complain to my teachers, including David, about wanting to be normal: “Why would you want to be ordinary, Amany?” their eyes would tell me quietly, when you’re so special? You know so much about places you haven’t seen…

Conclusions towards the future

I end this paper on this note, and on the power of the poetic word to continue confronting Palestinianness via my father’s voice. I continue remembering a colonially erased story via the illegal occupation of Palestine. For the future, I will turn next to my father’s three unearthed novels to conduct a literary analysis using the same reading methods in this paper, with a new ability to close my eyes and imagine him – and Palestine - with deeper love and eternal respect.

Author Information

References

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Notes

1. American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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2. “When you are forced to leave the homeland/you understand how friendly a companion it is.”

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3. I intentionally choose not to translate the poetry and to use it aesthetically instead of intellectually.

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4. The original and most significant "African unity project" in Ghana's history was driven by Kwame Nkrumah in the late 1950s and 1960s. Nkrumah envisioned a politically and economically united Africa with a common currency, central bank, and shared infrastructure, believing this was the only way to achieve true independence from foreign powers. His efforts were a primary force in the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963.

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5. What radio specifically is doing for this story is a strand I’ll pick up in another essay as it deserves full analysis elsewhere.

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