Beyond the Knights: Why Malta Needs a New Mythos of Deep Listening

Language, Deep Listening and the Need for a New Maltese Mythos
By Lara Pace, Valletta

On any given evening in Strait Street, the chatter ricochets from Maltese to English, with sudden detours into Italian, French and the occasional Arabic greeting. Tourists hear music; locals hear history. Yet beneath the polyglot surface, something subtler is happening: people are listening for a story bigger than themselves. In a country where 400,000 souls are crammed onto 316 square kilometres, the question of what we are listening to—and what we are willing to retell—has never been more urgent.

Malta’s old mythos is etched in honey-coloured limestone: the Knights, the Great Siege, the miracle of St Paul’s shipwreck. These tales built the ramparts we Instagram today, but they no longer hold the emotional weight of a nation grappling with climate anxiety, migration flows, and a post-pandemic identity crisis. The sea that once protected us now rises against us; the limestone itself is literally dissolving. A new mythos is required—not to erase the old, but to widen the circle of who gets to speak inside it.

Deep listening, a concept borrowed from conflict-resolution circles, starts with the body. At the Valletta Design Cluster last month, 30 residents—nurses, gamers, fishermen, nuns—sat in a circle and practised what facilitator Maria Vella called “ear-to-stone listening.” Instead of responding immediately, participants were asked to repeat what they had just heard, as if the words were fossils they were brushing clean. A retired dockyard worker described the sound of metal on metal in 1978; a Syrian teenager echoed it back, adding the clatter of pots in her refugee tent. By the third round, both had discovered a shared rhythm of hammering that neither had noticed before. The room felt, briefly, like one organism breathing.

Language is how we turn private experience into shared myth. Maltese, Europe’s only Semitic language written in Latin script, has always been a master code-switcher. But today its elasticity is being tested. Young influencers pepper TikTok clips with “ml-EN” hashtags, while elderly villagers still greet each other with “Ħelow!” The result is linguistic vertigo: we speak more tongues, yet struggle to name what unites us. Dr Antoine Cassar, poet and linguist, argues that the Maltese mythos must now include “a grammar of hospitality” built into every verb. “If our conjugations can accommodate second-person plural, why can’t our national story accommodate second-generation migrants?” he asked during a recent public lecture at Spazju Kreattiv.

The community impact of this shift is already visible. In Gżira, the NGO Kopin runs “Story-Lab” workshops where Maltese teenagers and Nigerian asylum seekers co-write comics. One panel shows a half-fish, half-human creature swimming beneath Manoel Island; the tail is painted in kente cloth patterns, the face wears a Maltese festa mask. The comic is now a mural on the Gżira seafront, tagged #WeAllFloat. Passers-by stop, squint, and smile—not because the image resolves centuries of tension, but because it creates a pocket of shared wonder.

Yet deep listening is not a feel-good exercise; it is a civic muscle. When Planning Authority hearings devolve into shouting matches about high-rise shadows, what’s missing is not better microphones but the willingness to hear the fear behind the decibels. The same applies to the debate over English-language medical degrees versus Maltese-medium primary schools. Both camps intone “quality”, but rarely pause to ask: whose voice counts as authoritative, and whose is reduced to background noise?

The good news is that Maltese culture already contains the seeds of a new mythos. Consider the festa: ostensibly a Catholic celebration, it is secretly a choreography of neighbourly rivalry, brass-band improvisation, and pyrotechnic excess. No single narrative owns it; everyone is both spectator and performer. If we can transpose that spirit from village square to national stage, we might craft a story capacious enough for solar-panelled rooftops and traditional fishing boats, for blockchain startups and limestone balconies.

As the sun sets over the Grand Harbour, a group of teenagers—some born in Valletta, some in Lagos—are recording a podcast titled “Mythos Reloaded.” Their theme music layers għana folk guitar over a lo-fi beat. The first episode drops on Freedom Day. Will anyone listen? Deep down, we already are.