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by Tara Kennon

“Sabiha! Sabiha!” It means “beautiful.” That’s the first word of Maltese I learned. Every time I walked down the narrow dusty streets of Lija, the village where I lived for five months in Malta, every elderly man, middle-aged worker, and seven-year old boy within sight let me know in no uncertain terms that I was indeed sabiha. The second thing I learned was “Daesh Darba.” It means, “You only live once.” Is it any wonder I felt golden and free, somehow both delighted and delightful? Here I was with sand in my shoes and the sun in my eyes, waking every morning to the sound of bells from an ancient church and dancing away my weekends in a club built into the side of a cliff on an island called Gozo. How can you be accountable for anything that happens in a place with a name as ridiculous as Gozo? The bakery where I spent ten cents every morning for a round loaf of steamy bread was as ancient as that church—and I saw the old women baking my bread over a fire with real flames. The stove in the house I rented had real flames you lighted with a match, and I didn’t know how to cook with actual fire. I was terrified of burning myself on the stove’s flame because I’d never had to let my skin come this close to fire just to boil water on my electric range back home. I was startled by the sound of real bells because I spent my whole life responding to the beep of electronic ones. I didn’t know what to say or exactly what to think about the bells that seemed to never stop ringing or the flames that barely kissed my fingertips because I didn’t even have the words to define the raw realness that was smoldering all around me. I only knew two things: that I was beautiful and that I would only live once.

“Titghallem.” I think the closest English equivalent of this word must be “to learn.” It is a word that operates on two separate levels; it describes the way you acquire academic knowledge while sitting in a lecture class and it also describes the way you suddenly comprehend new things about the universe while dodging cactus branches and wild cats on the rocky jogging track behind your house. It refers to what happens in that moment when you first taste cherry wine or dive head-first into the salty water of a place called Golden Bay and realize that it’s enough to only live once as long as you make that once worth living. It describes the way you grow to understand a million new things about the very self you live with for twenty years but can’t hear clearly until the heat melts away all the cumbersome decorations muffling your own voice and church bells drown out the sounds that have been distracting you from the few whispers in your life that may speak the truth.

I went to Malta because I wanted to see what life looks like through a cultural perspective that is different from the fundamentally Western social foundations that have always surrounded me. What I didn’t realize was that I had to build a new emotional vocabulary in order to understand what I was able to see through this strikingly different lens. I went to Malta with the understanding that everyone on the island spoke English. There is some truth to this concept—thanks to British imperialism, nearly every Maltese citizen under the age of sixty is capable of communicating in grammatically correct English. What I didn’t consider before I left home was that even though they can speak English, most Maltese prefer not to. Even when they did speak my native language, my new acquaintances didn’t say words the way I was used to hearing them. I spent my first day of University orientation with an uninterrupted headache that surely came from straining every cell of my brain to understand what the English-speaking guide was trying to tell me. Exhausted, my American roommates and I stared at each other blankly across the dinner table that night and chalked up University Lesson Number One: “Just because they speak English doesn’t mean you can understand.”

I made a few Maltese friends who were willing to teach me the meaning of any word I wanted to know, but they couldn’t be with me all the time. I saw my friends when we all flocked to the northern town of St. Julian’s to party in the streets from Wednesday ‘til Monday, and I begged them to teach me every word they knew. But the magical ever-present interpreter I longed for never materialized. I had to learn the words for myself. When I say “learn,” I mean “titghallem.” I mean that I acquired an intellectual understanding of each word’s meaning and that each new word gave me the power to glimpse a sliver of life that I had never before seen.

“Tkun f'sensik:” There is no noun for “awareness” in the Maltese lexicon. Instead, the Maltese say “tkun f'sensik”—to be in your senses. Awareness in Malta is an active personal experience, one that takes place through a heightened consciousness of your own senses. It involves a willingness to embrace the sensory perceptions you experience instead of hushing them and distancing yourself from the rawness of the world in hopes of living a safe and tidy life. Henry Miller once said that, “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” That’s the type of “aware” we’re talking about here—aware in the way that you never stop noticing, in a way that connects you to the essence of each fragment of the world around you and makes you feel like your heart is beating in time with the pulse of the cosmos.

I walked from my house to the street corner four mornings a week to catch a pale blue bus to the tiny and disorganized university where I enrolled in lectures on literature and language—and I felt every stone under my foot along the way. The soles of my shoes were no thinner than they were when I lived in the states, and the pebbles were no sharper; yet I was acutely aware of every stone beneath my foot.

I’d not been aware of many pebbles before I lived in Malta. I was busy—too busy, maybe—so I developed ways to quickly assess a situation and respond to it with the finely tuned auto-pilot feature of my mind. I got used to things quickly and stopped thinking about them because navigating the red lights and u-turns of my daily life didn’t demand much thought. I didn’t give my real attention to much of anything because I simply didn’t have to. I lived with the assumption that things were, for the most part, what I expected them to be. I was completely aware of what type of coffee drink was trendiest, but when I turned on the stove to boil water, I never even noticed the heat. I found myself in the parking lot at work every morning and could not remember the drive.

When I first moved to Malta, I felt the hot still air against my skin at every moment and I heard the palm fronds constantly rustling above my head or outside my window. I smelled the car exhaust that mingled with the perfume of flowers on overgrown jasmine bushes and drifted through the narrow streets. I tasted the salt left on my lips after I splashed my face with the cool water that was pumped from the sea into my sink. I lay on the beach and was aware of each grain of sand that stuck to my legs and my face; I felt the searing sun heat my body from above while the warmth absorbed by the earth below transferred from the ground to my skin. Things were not as I was conditioned to expect. It was as if the mediator between myself and the Earth had disappeared, leaving me to personally negotiate my relationship with the world.

“Temp ta' gzira:” It means “island weather.” The Maltese say it as a half-joke, rolling their eyes to the sky and sighing. It is an explanation for everything unexplainable. It means, “This too, shall pass.” Malta is so tiny that marathon runners on the island have to run a zigzag path because a straight one just doesn’t fit. It floats alone in the middle of the Mediterranean, a hundred miles from Catania and a hundred miles from Tunis. The island has no mountains, no rivers, no lakes or canyons or deserts. Weather systems blow over Malta on their way to Africa or continental Europe with seeming disregard to the sandy little brown island below. They dump their rain, unleash their winds, and let loose their sunshine with burning intensity—but they never linger. Raindrops and sunshine follow each other so closely that a rainbow forms over Malta nearly every other day. Lightning flashes out of the blue, violent winds turn calm seas frothy, and sunbursts overpower the most oppressive clouds in less time than it takes to pull off one of the thick knit sweaters you can buy in a fishing village on days the sea is too rough for sailing.

The sea surrounding the island is moody and capricious; the winds that blow around it are temperamental. The water moderates everything. It cools the breeze that winds through the streets during the melting days of summer and warms the rains that fall every few hours during the cooler winter months. There is something unexplainably healing about the way the harbor takes the sting out of the sharpest pain and the waves of the bay cleanse your heart of anger while they cleanse the rocks of the dust that was blown there from the Sahara and baked in place by yesterday’s sun. If eyes are windows to the human soul, then the water is a window to the soul of Mother Nature. Some days the sea is rough, tormented and anguished. Other days, it is smooth and clear and perfectly jade green. It changes quickly and you can’t explain it. The sea is everywhere you look, pulling away one weather system, pulling in another, and moderating the ones that rage over us all.

It was a steamy summer night that would end in a sunrise rainshower when I first heard anyone use “temp ta' gzira” to describe something other than the weather. I turned the corner of the street outside the house I had moved into just days before and started on my way to a festival in the next village with my neighbor Nadia, a Bangladeshi student who had been studying in Malta for three years and felt it her duty to show me the ins and outs of island life. I blinked, I jumped backwards into a jasmine bush, and I looked to Nadia for direction. Was this for real? Thirty men dressed in red kilts marched in formation down the narrow street outside our house. Their leader beat a huge white drum while the others stared straight ahead and lifted their knees with each beat. “Temp ta' gzira!” Nadia laughed. “You’ll get used to it,” she assured me. “This place is crazy—random stuff just comes and then it goes and we don’t ever know why it was here. Don’t worry about it. That’s why I love Malta—you always run into things you can’t explain.” When she found me crying a few weeks later and I couldn’t rationalize the tears in my eyes, Nadia offered me the same words of assurance. “It’s probably just temp ta' gzira,” she said. “You know, stuff comes over you sometimes and you have to realize that you can’t always get your way through it with logic. You have to just accept it and let it take its course—it will blow over soon.”

“Kattolika:” In Malta, “Catholic” means almost the same thing as “Christian” because, aside from a few crumbling Anglican chapels left over from the days of British colonialism, Catholicism is the only type of Christianity on the island. “Qabel Kristjan” means “Before Christian.” It describes the pagan forces that shaped the spirituality of the island hundreds of years before the ancient roots of Christianity even began to take hold in Malta’s sandy red soil. The two powerful forces of Catholicism and pre-Christian pagan spirituality are inseparable in Malta—you can’t define one without the other. You can feel them both pulling strongly in the air when the setting sun makes white rocks look orange and when stormy winds make blue water into strands of khaki-colored foam. The white marble statue of a Saint in the alley derives part of her poignancy from the fact that the alley is named for Osiris, goddess of the sea. If every brightly-colored luxa fishing boat did not have the bright Eye of Osiris painted on its hull for protection, the ritual prayers uttered over the boats by robed priests would have less value. The plastic statuette of the Virgin Mary displayed in the front of every public bus would lose some meaning if it were not invariably obscured by a faded Playboy air freshener.

There’s something both breathtakingly holy and undeniably pagan about Malta. This is a place of many miracles, my taxi driver told me once. He told me the story of the WWII bomb that dropped in the Mosta village church during a Sunday service and landed without ever exploding. You can go there and see it now, just like any other tourist attraction. You can also go see the deep cave in Gozo where they say the sea nymph Calypso lived, where she sang the songs that lured Greek sailors to their death on the craggy outcrops just offshore. Who can visit that beach and deny the existence of a powerfully alluring force?

There are so many churches in tiny Malta that you could attend a different one every Sunday for an entire year and still not see them all. Malta is the place where St. Paul was shipwrecked and wrote the letters you can read in the Bible. It is also the place where the pre-Christian epic hero Odysseus was shipwrecked and lured ashore by Calypso and the enchanting sirens whose magical voices were impossible for mortal men to resist. Her mesmerizing song convinced him to make an eight-year pause on his journey home from the Trojan War. That man had will power if he could tear himself away after eight short years. Calypso’s harmony floats through the air today and mingles with the voices of nuns singing the liturgy from behind convent walls. This open mingling of purity and passion creates some kind of energy on the island that never stops crackling in the air. The wild and the holy parts of human existence are concentrated and let loose so that the messy complexity of life is in your face every second in a gorgeous and inescapable way.

“Wahdi:” I never knew a word like this before, but I never needed a word like this until I lived in Malta. It literally means “alone.” In conversation, it implies an aloneness surrounded by others who are alike. At home, I attend one of the most ethnically diverse universities in the nation. I am surrounded by people who are different from me—and different from each other. It is one thing to be different in an environment where everyone is different; it is another thing altogether to be different in a place where you are surrounded by people who are in so many surface ways identical to one another. I am not used to being the only blond walking through the crowded boulevards of the capital or the only student in class who doesn’t understand the professor’s jokes. Until I understood that I was “wahdi,” I could not figure out why the grocer in the village where I’d made my home for months assumed that I was a tourist on vacation or why the taxi drivers would not believe that I wanted a ride to Lija instead of to the resort district.

There is a type of aloneness possible on islands that is not possible anywhere else. It is isolation that is re-enforced by the thrillingly irrevocable knowledge that you are surrounded on all sides by hundreds of miles of water. Salty waves and stretches of calm blue sea separate you from everything in the world except the few things and people immediately beside you.

Sometimes this realization hit me during the moment after I closed my eyes and before I fell asleep at night, when the moon shone through my gauzy curtains and the warm breeze blew through my huge screen-less windows in circles that made me feel like the room was spinning. Sometimes it hit me when I stood up from my wooden bench after a class lecture and felt strangely disoriented because at 5-feet 7-inches, I was taller than all of the people standing around me. My mind would suddenly be overwhelmed by a visual image of where I was geographically situated in relation to the other 26 billion people on the Earth. I was standing on a relatively microscopic brown rock that was floating smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. A rock – a rock that is connected to the rest of the world only by a few airplanes, an unreliable ferry, and a few dozen phone lines that are so over-used that you are lucky to receive more than one call in a week. I was living my life on a rock so removed from what I knew as civilized society that people at home thought I was talking about a coffee drink when I mentioned its name.

This image of aloneness was so real that it sent shivers along my skin—shivers of excitement, not fear. I felt as though I knew a secret the rest of the world might never be able to find out. There were moments when I felt miserably lonely and unspeakably frustrated with the “unconnected” society surrounding me—until I realized that it is more valuable to be connected to the pulse of your own life and the heat of the universe than to be connected to a million lifeless television channels. Yes, I was momentarily left out of a civilized society of mechanically cooled buildings and electronic beeps. Instead, I was letting the hot sun burn my shoulders while I dozed in the lime grove outside the President’s palace and I was waking gently to the sound of those ancient church bells. I survived just fine, thank you very much, without an answering machine or my own telephone. I didn’t die without e-mail access in my room, or stay at home because I didn’t have a phone book filled with the names of friends who had known me for years. I was finding ways to make my own energy, and was stealing some from the spark-filled air.

“Al-hamdu li’laa:” It’s an Arabic phrase, actually, one that the Maltese abandoned centuries ago when their language diverged from Modern Standard Arabic. I picked it up in Arabic class, soon after I learned to see letters in alien-looking squiggles and hear words in strings of unfamiliar sounds. It literally means “Praise be to God,” but it is not always used in a religious sense. In daily speech, it is the appropriate response to “Kif int?” in Maltese or “Kayfa hal?” in Arabic—it is what you say when someone asks “How are you?” and you don’t want to tell them how you really are. It is a polite way to avoid the hackneyed “Fine, thanks” and the rude “Not telling.” It means something like “No matter what state my life is in, it is a state sent to me by God who is good – so I can’t complain,” or perhaps more accurately, something like “Well, I can’t be that bad because obviously I’m still alive and the universe is still in order.” I’ve never found a better way of responding to “How are you?”

I wanted to say “Al-hamdu li’laa” when my mother called me on a crackly phone line Sunday night and woke me from half-delusional feverish sleep while bugs ate my fruit and the heat melted my candles before I could light them. I didn’t want to tell her that I was swallowing prescription fever reducer and anti-dehydration pills I had bought over-the-counter in French from the chemist down the street because he didn’t speak English and didn’t care if I had a prescription; I didn’t want to tell her that my faucets were spitting rust when I tried to wash my hair or that my skin was burned from the salty water and my fingernails were tearing off every morning. I didn’t have the words to explain what it felt like when my teacher glared at my light complexion and referred to me as one of “Hitler’s Aryans” or when my neighbors warned me on the day of my arrival that the Maltese girls at school would probably not talk to me because they had learned from Hollywood movies that American girls are determined to steal their boyfriends. I couldn’t explain what it was like to climb the white cliffs to Hasan’s Cave at sunset, to watch the sky change color from a boulder over the Blue Grotto, or to realize that I had formed true friendships with people I thought I would never speak with twice. I needed more words to say all of that.

I had to say “Pretty good, thanks,” even though I didn’t think that expressed what I really had to say. Yes, I was struggling—but I was learning to trust that life can be exciting and gorgeous even when it seems most difficult. I was learning to strike a match every morning to make coffee without feeling terrified of the flame. I was not “Pretty good.” I was frustrated and miserable; I was dizzyingly happy and endlessly exhilarated. I was learning the words I needed to understand what it means to be truly alive at every moment because, as they say, you only live once.  §

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Tara Kennon is a writer living in Chicago, loving the snow, planning a trip to India, and still searching for the perfect answer to “how are you?”