Draft:Sleep and Cry No More

"Sleep and Cry No More" (Ninni la tibkix iżjed) is a Maltese Christmas carol in the style of a lullaby; it is probably the best-known traditional carol in the Maltese language. It was written and published in 1864 (in Algiers) for Maltese settlers in Algeria and Tunisia by Fr Indrì (Andrew) Schembri, SJ, though the original tune may be older. Fr. Schembri (1805-1875) was a Jesuit sent as a missionary to French Algeria in 1849, where he lived in camps (douars) among the natives. As the Maltese emigrant community in North Africa grew, he started to minister to his fellow Maltese, spending the last twenty-five years of his life in this ministry. At the time, Maltese diasporas in the Mediterranean were poor and faced many difficulties.

The first Maltese emigrants were often single men, who opened seedy or shady bars and started unionizing the local porters and port workers, and were stigmatized as "potential troublemakers". Given their south-European origins, the Maltese were not given a free plot of land by the French administration, as were the Swiss and German migrants; they had to work for the north-European colonists and save money to purchase their own land. However, as women arrived and the diasporas grew stronger, the Maltese eventually became important intermediaries between the French/North-European colonists and the local Berber and Jewish communities, given their semitic language and customs, and their ability to grow crops in arid climes, and gradually became richer. However, their liminality became a problem as some sought to climb the social ladder, and many second-generation migrants decided to shed their Maltese identity completely to become "more French than the French" in North Africa, and hence "completely white", "completely western", "completely European" besides being "Latin Catholics", though maybe not so pious as in Malta; some aligned themselves with the anticlerical liberals of the day. Visits to the communities by Maltese priests and religious were important in this complex identity struggle, as were songs like Ninni la tibkix iżjed. Another famous Maltese Jesuit who occasionally ministered to these communities a generation after Schembri's time was Malta's pioneer archeologist, Emmanuel Magri SJ (who died unexpectedly in Sfax, Tunisia, in 1907).