Immanuel Mifsud and the Son Inside the Father

Part of: The Deep Reader

Voice, shame, and family memory in the opening of In the Name of the Father (and of the Son)

Before the father cries in Immanuel Mifsud’s In the Name of the Father (and of the Son), the sentence has already made him a son. “On your mother’s grave.” The narrator could have named his grandmother, identifying the dead woman through his own place in the family. The possessive places the loss first with the man he addresses. A father stands before his mother’s grave while his son watches him, and the relations that usually establish who is older, stronger, and responsible for whom begin to overlap. The sentence gives the father a childhood beyond the narrator’s experience.

The Soldier Caught Crying

The son repeatedly insists on his attentiveness, and his memory of publicly announcing his father’s tears makes the watchfulness uneasy. Knowing the smallest departures from a familiar manner also means knowing where to catch its owner unprepared, and Mifsud lets the son’s intimacy retain its capacity to embarrass. The account of a loved parent includes the child’s part in humiliating him, with the adult narrator now able to describe the shame he helped produce.

The prohibition against crying then passes through several speaking positions. Amid the remembered instructions comes the brief declaration “I’m a big boy.” It sounds like a child reciting the lesson about himself, surrounded by the father’s questions and commands. Without separating every utterance into neatly attributed dialogue, Mifsud makes the rule travel from one speaker into the other. The boy can carry on enforcing it when the father has finished speaking, with his shame supplying the punishment.

The son’s recurring “I like” attaches itself to the physical sensations of crying, then to disobedience and fear. Each return prolongs an activity that the paternal commands demand should stop. Even the reader’s breath has to accommodate the son’s insistence, as the repeated phrase permits one more admission. Pleasure complicates the expected language of injury: the child relishes what humiliates him, and the relish itself makes him more ashamed. Fear survives inside the defiance, so that the passage cannot settle into an uncomplicated declaration of independence.

“You cry too, soldier” retains the father’s military identity while making him share the condition for which the boy has been rebuked. Accusation and an invitation to sympathy remain audible in the same address. A narrator who can embarrass his father, absorb his commands, and challenge him gives the affection resistance; the reader has to follow these conflicting impulses before the tears acquire their full force.

The Father in Song and Self-Portrait

A different rhythm accompanies the father’s self-image. In the French translation, a passage from Lili Marleen leads into brief glimpses of his appearance. Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca occur beside Tripoli and Benghazi; the sequence reaches the familiar smell of shaving soap. The juxtaposition compresses cinema, war, and domestic memory into a way of picturing one man.

The proper names do much of the compressing. Bogart lends the father an available screen image, while the North African place names bring geographical distance into the same swift sequence. Placed so closely together, the names briefly color one another, without a historical explanation interrupting the act of remembering. Shaving soap then makes the remembered figure close enough to smell. Mifsud can move between a boy’s fascination with masculine bearing and the ordinary routines through which he knew his father, holding both scales within a few lines.

As the refrain returns among the fragments, the father’s remembered pose seems to come with its own tune. The quoted stanza interrupts the prose, and the refrain binds the scattered impressions to a recurring cadence. A song, a face resembling an actor’s, and a manner of dressing carry wartime associations into a child’s family memory, although he never experienced the events. The father’s appearance acquires the glamour through which his son has learned to see him.

Mifsud then composes a self-portrait in the father’s first person. Across a long accumulating sentence in the French version, his military, religious, and working-class identities press together. Among the claims of endurance comes the childhood expedient of wearing one shoe at a time to make a pair last. The practical ingenuity is painful to imagine, because it requires accepting discomfort to postpone a further expense. Toughness acquires a material history here, one the son has to accommodate alongside his recollection of the older man’s demands.

Clause follows clause with the energy of a man who still has another hardship to name before anyone judges him. His allegiances occupy the same grammatical movement: Catholic obedience and socialist identification belong to one life, along with the pride of having worked and survived. Where the son’s short repetitions make room for forbidden feeling, the longer declaration accumulates the father’s reasons for demanding respect. The demand to be heard takes a different rhythmic form for each speaker.

The father’s insistence on his own hardship complicates the son’s authority over the portrait. The older man’s discipline has injured the child, while his labor supplies reasons for taking his pride seriously. Through the longer paternal sentence, we spend time with the older man’s reasons, even after the son has shown what his discipline cost. Affection can therefore include an argument with the father’s understanding of himself, without reducing his life to the lesson the son now wants to draw from it. The imagined voice also leaves a limit: its eloquence belongs to the son’s act of writing, and cannot settle what the father would have said in reply.

The Diary’s Promise

The publisher’s description encourages an expectation that the father will emerge through the revelations of his wartime diary. I would have welcomed more of that documentary encounter. The prologue, however, announces the movement away from the notebook toward the son’s reflections, making the publisher’s emphasis a source of disappointment that the book’s own introduction already qualifies. The diary and the voice composed around it promise different kinds of access to the father.

By promising to preserve the diary extracts’ mistakes, the prologue commits to keeping the father’s written language distinct from the son’s literary command. The irregularities retain evidence of how the older man could express himself on paper. Beside the sustained speech that the son composes, the uncorrected diary wording preserves another measure of the father’s voice. Tenderness encourages the writer to imagine, while the document retains language he has promised to leave alone.

The prologue also quotes a doubt about whether photographs of a beloved mother will speak to people who lack the mourner’s attachment. Family importance alone cannot transmit feeling to a stranger. Rhythm, the passage of a command between speakers, and the mixture of accusation with affection supply experiences the reader can follow without having known the father. By borrowing the question, Mifsud makes his writing answerable to readers beyond the family, whose attention the remembered life still has to earn.

In the prologue, the son rereads the notebook on the evening of his father’s funeral while rocking his own infant. The two actions place him inside both relations at once. His new responsibility gives him another position from which to imagine his father, while grief keeps him in the position of a son. The small possessive at the grave has prepared the overlap between mourning and parenthood. The man whose crying once astonished a child was standing before the loss of his own mother; the writer who now tries to give him speech is holding another child in his arms.

Sources

Immanuel Mifsud. “At the Addolorata,” from In the Name of the Father (and of the Son). Translated by Albert Gatt. European Union Prize for Literature, undated online excerpt. English quotations follow this excerpt.

Immanuel Mifsud. Je t’ai vu pleurer. Translated from Maltese by Nadia Mifsud. Gallimard, “Du monde entier,” 2016. Publisher sample: prologue, pp. 11–14; opening, pp. 15–20. Discussion of the longer self-portrait follows this translation.

Roland Barthes. La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie. Éditions de l’Étoile / Gallimard / Seuil, 1980, p. 100. Quoted in Mifsud’s prologue, pp. 11–12.

Parthian Books. In the Name of the Father and of the Son. Publisher’s description, accessed September 5, 2026.