Originally published in 2001 – 24 years ago

With her second volume of poetry being launched today, this is a woman who has had to learn the hard way what she really wants out of life.  Josanne Cassar met Maria Grech Ganado for lunch at Rubino’s

“I’ve been writing since I can remember, even as a child. I always had an innate ability to get the metre right and to rhyme.  But my mature poetry is hardly ever rhymed; if it is rhymed it’s for a purpose. I use a lot of internal rhyme, not consciously, it just comes out that way.  In fact very often I have to change words because they rhyme too much.”

In her poetry, as in her life, Maria Ganado is deliberately ‘different’ and abhors conformity.

We were seated at a corner table at Rubino’s and several friends as well as former students stopped by to say hello and wish Maria well.  She is friendly to everyone and is genuinely pleased to meet people she knows.

A published poet in Maltese locally and in the English language in magazines abroad, Maria has also won awards for her work.  But her winning poem in a writers’ freelance magazine is shrugged aside. “Even though I won, I don’t think it was a very good poem; there’s no sincerity in it, I just put it together for the competition.”

The Ganado name is one of which Maria is understandably proud, with several members of the family having made their own bit of history. ‘Uncle Herbert’ wrote Rajt Malta Tinbidel while her own father Walter, a respected professor of medicine, wrote medical papers and had started writing the history of Malta.   It is a family filled with writers: Frank Ganado wrote plays in Maltese, Albert Ganado was interested in Maltese history while Joe Ganado wrote a great deal about law.

“When I started being published, Maria Grech is a rather anonymous name, so I added the Ganado because most people know me that way, and because I wanted to carry on the writer’s name from my father’s side.”

It was time to order our first course, and our host Julian Sammut quickly convinced Maria to have fettucine with pieces of  liver, while I had the potato and leek soup.

Born in Lija and bred in Floriana, Maria describes her childhood as being “extremely happy, it was magic”.  Her carefree, idyllic summers were spent in Gozo, the birthplace of her mother.  

“The best way to describe my life is the story of the Happy Prince.  My childhood was in the walled garden, everything was light and I knew nothing of what happened on the outside.”

Protected? I suggest

“Over-sheltered” she responds.  “When I think back I always had the tendency to experience things very intensely, at an extreme pitch.  I used to cry very much, for example when I went to an opera.  My parents couldn’t drag me out, I used to be sobbing so hard!”

Talking to Maria is like talking to an open book.  She will tell you everything about herself, without much prompting and without any inhibition, flitting from one thing to another without so much as pausing for breath.  

She was a dreamy, absent-minded child.  When her mother once asked her to take out the dustbin, she kept on going with it on the bus all the way to Valletta, because she was so wrapped up in her thoughts about something else. 

“When I was 17, I went to Perugia and I had a foreign boyfriend; he was my first great love.  Actually I’ve had about three or four first great loves, but for different reasons.    And I remember he told me that, ‘although you’re a very happy girl, there was always this hysterical part in you which cried for something else, which didn’t actually pertain to your life’.  Looking back now, if I could have changed anything in my life, it would have been the rigorous Catholic upbringing I had.”

Like most of her generation, she was dutiful and obedient.  Her parents told her that if she helped others, studied, did her duties and obeyed, she would be happy – she did and she was.

On reflection, she realises that her happiness was a result of being asked to do what she truly loved anyway: literature and music were her passions.  The fear of Hell and punishment were so ingrained in her that she could not imagine committing any kind of sin.  ‘Stealing’ a few peanuts to be like her school friends caused her so much anguish that she wept all night.

“If my parents didn’t leave enough of a tip when we were at a restaurant, I would get very upset and accuse them of being dishonest. I was always having hysterics!  My first French kiss was at the age of 24!  I remember crying all night, not being able to sleep and waiting until 6am to go to Confession.  I don’t think the others were as impressionable as I was.  The terrors I lived with because of the fear of ‘sex’!”

As a young girl with a vivid imagination, she relished books by Enid Blyton and Georgette Hayer (“whom I adored”).  Her favourite book, however, was The Scarlet Pimpernel, and she used to make up all these stories in her head about being in the army of Bonnie Prince Charlie until an English soldier came along with whom she fell in love.

“I’d have all my hair underneath my beret, and of course he couldn’t be better than me at swordplay! On the other hand, because my mother had brought us up that a man has to be superior to us in everything and not to settle for anyone who isn’t, I would trip over a root while we’re fighting, and my beret would fall off and he’d discover that I was a girl!”

She laughs as she recalls her own girlish romantic fantasies, “while everyone else was having fun with more concrete fantasies!”

This romantic nature of hers meant she seemed to be constantly searching for the ‘ultimate’ love of her life.

“I was always ‘in love’ but I kept changing the person I was in love with.  It wasn’t until I really fell in love that I realised what a capricious butterfly I was.   I’d be crazy about someone and then when I got to know everything and one or two weeks passed and there was nothing new to learn, I got bored.  Sex hardly came into it, it was just holding hands.  Now that I know myself so much better, I realise that what I was doing was holding a mirror to myself through the relationship.  I’d love someone for his looks, or because he knew music, or he recited poetry to me and we’d walk by the sea. Or I’d love someone ‘coz he had lots of problems and he was moody and I was trying to work them out.  Unfortunately, I am very attracted by men I can’t understand!”

(Hmm, aren’t we all?)

After reading for her BA in Malta, she went to Cambridge and did another BA there.  

When Maria first caught a glimpse of a handsome young man named Louis, her cousin warned her: “he’s good-looking, he’s intelligent, you don’t stand a chance!”

For the romantic Maria, that was all she needed to hear: “That did it.  I chased him unabashedly and unashamedly for four years.  I was crazy about him,” she laughs now as she recalls her own behaviour.

They eventually got married even though they were such polar opposites: he was very reserved and she was intent on being ‘herself’ at all costs.  As he started becoming more involved in his career, which put him more and more into the public eye, she found it more difficult to withstand the strain of having to comply with what was expected of her.

“I tried very hard to be a shadow and I couldn’t.   When he started pouring all his energies into Air Malta, and was never around and I had no way of amusing myself except for changing nappies, that was when the trouble started.  I was an embarrassment to have around because I tend to say what I think (I’m doing it here).  Of course I was proud of him, but when you have had three children in two and a half years and there’s no one to talk to all day and he comes home and heads straight for the television…for me, that wasn’t a relationship.”

With hindsight, she acknowledges that it wasn’t really anyone’s ‘fault’.

“I suppose it was a clash of two very strong personalities.  Miskin Louis, imagine coming home to find me after a day at home with the kids, all wound up and raring to go.  Well, miskin hu u miskina jien (poor him, and poor me).  I used to look very dowdy when I was bringing up the children, I was just surviving from day to day.  In the morning I’d wake up and cry, not knowing how I would get through the day.”

It was only after Francesca, Luisa and Xandru had grown that she learnt how to drive, went back to teaching and ‘the old Maria’ came out again.  She was 40 years old and in her own words “still good-looking” so it was extremely flattering when a few of the boys in her class developed crushes on her.

“They found me fun, which was so nice, after all those years of just cooking and housework. That’s when I started writing my poetry.  But this is where I think my Catholic upbringing failed me, because although I was enjoying my life again, I felt all this guilt!”    

She tries to put into words her feelings of being torn between her family and her need to establish her own identity.

“When you’ve brought children up and left everything for about 15 years, it’s very difficult.  I was out of circulation completely by which I mean that I could not follow up something in my own right.”

For a woman who had studied and taught and even had her own TV programme before getting married, what she saw as the eradication of her identity was even more difficult to swallow.  She began to tire of being spoken only in terms of being ‘Louis Grech’s wife’.  Later, when Xandru started gaining his own popularity, it annoyed her that she then began to be referred to solely as ‘Xandru’s mother’.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely proud not only of Xandru but also of my daughters, but I was brought up in a family where to be an individual was encouraged.  We weren’t brought up to fit into roles, but to find out what our potential was and to cultivate it as much as possible.  Let’s put it this way: a man has the role of a father, but he also has his career.  So why should a woman, just because she gets married, cease to be anything else? My father once told me, ‘why did you get married if you wanted a career?’  But I didn’t want a career, I wanted to be able to mix!”

She expresses this best in her poem, Iżda Mhux Biss, which she recited for me:

‘Jiena ta’ ħbiebi, ta’ qrabati,

Jiena bintkom, fuq kollox ommkom,

Fuq kollox naf, jiena ukoll għalikom u bikhom jien, ukoll,

Iżda mhux biss

Għax jiena mara, iva u le, għalhekk b’daqshekk ma nafx x’jiġifieri

Għalhekk għalija basta l-waqt li nsir naf …

Maria’s poetry is both personal and universal.  Her poem Gaia is about the earth, but can also be read with another meaning, that of a woman.

“Biex kburi stajt tirkibni u ttaqqalni…”

She describes her life more of a ‘struggle’ rather than a ‘fight’ for her rights.  She points to the paradoxes inherent even in the Church.  On the one hand, the Bishops keep on saying that the woman’s place is in the home with the children. But then you find a parable which says that God gave you talents and if you don’t use them, double and triple them, He will send you out of the kingdom. 

“If God didn’t want women to use them, why did He give them talents?!” she asks indignantly. “Why should I have these talents, so they torment me? A lot of people use to say, ‘why don’t you go out to work? Other people have done it with three children.’ Unfortunately, with my manic depression and all my illnesses, I needed someone to push me.”

Completely frank even about this, Maria has already spoken before about a condition most people would want to hide.  In a frank interview she had given Gillian Bartolo last year, she had spoken with breathtaking frankness and courage about how her manic depression had overtaken her life, until she was diagnosed and given treatment.

“To me those years just merge into each other.  I think things came to a head at my uncle’s funeral. I cried so much, out of all proportion, that my father had asked the doctor to come home to see me.  My father thought I wasn’t being a good wife by fighting and crying all the time, but the doctor told him that what I had was nobody’s fault.”

Maria tells of episodes when she would threaten to commit suicide in front of her three young children , “it’s horrible I know” she says quickly when she sees the expression on my face.  “I regret that I didn’t enjoy their childhood, I was always ill, I was always so scared, because I cannot be responsible for anyone.   I don’t know by what miracle they turned out so wonderfully,” she exclaims, shaking her head.

I’m sure you must have done something right, I assure her.  

She discovered that the only way not to go mad was through her writing.  Maria would write and write, sometimes even until 3am, finding it therapeutic.

While her experience sounds similar to other women in the 60s and 70s, she dismisses the notion that she could have gained solace from the fact that feminists were talking about the same thing.  “Do you think I had time to read?  Anyway, it’s more Marxist if you ask me.  ‘From every man according to his ability, to every man according to his need.’   I mean, does he exclude women?  It’s the same as blacks being inferior to whites.”

The passing of years have tempered her views about the inner conflicts she went through and she can now rationalise her emotions more objectively.

“I went through a period when I blamed Louis for all of this.  Everywhere I went, I would just go on and on about it.  Now I feel sorry for that, although I realise that it had to be, I had to let it out of me.  Now, I’m not bitter any more.”

It was time for our second course: Maria had chosen prime fillet of beef with roast vegetables and salad while I had the lampuki pie.  The food at Rubino’s is delicious as always, and Julian is always on hand to ensure everything is to your satisfaction.  Which is why people keep coming back.

In 1995, Maria went back to teaching full-time at Junior College and part-time at University.  With the children now adults, she started making her own life.  Unfortunately, the marriage disintegrated even further, and today she lives on her own.   

“Love can either make you happy or it can hurt you, but it’s still love,” she says of her relationship. “I don’t really believe in free will.  I make a free decision, but it’s made with my character, which I didn’t choose.”

She is obviously someone who thinks deeply, constantly analysing herself and her actions.  But Maria is also a joker, ready to laugh at her own failings and weaknesses, acknowledging that others probably find her quite ‘odd’. Her transparent honesty is almost childlike; she will say things which those who are more savvy would keep to themselves.  But it is this startling ability to be so candid which makes her so likeable.

“Once I was at the Governor’s place and I had gone without wearing stockings.  It was hot and I didn’t realise that you’re always supposed to wear stockings; I can’t stand protocol.  I was feeling so embarrassed that when the waiter was serving me, I knocked over his plate of peas, bang, the peas flew all over the room! I’ve always been extremely clumsy.”

At the age of 58, she admits to getting along better with younger people: “we are on the same wavelength”, and certainly her way of looking at life suggests that she has always been ahead of her time.

“I anticipated the kind of woman who looks at life as an adventure and who wants to think and who gets bored very easily, by at least one generation.”  

The irrepressible girl who sees the absurd in everything is still very much in her.  She regularly falls off the podium while she is lecturing with her characteristic enthusiasm, then she picks herself up and continues talking.

Today, between her lectures and her writing, Maria Ganado leads quite a busy life.  She is eagerly looking forward to launching her second volume of poetry entitled Skond Eva this very evening.

She seems content, particularly with the simple luxuries of her now independent life: “for the first time in a long time, I can wake up whenever I like.”