Heritage in translation

Save for his venerable age, my neighbour George is not someone you might associate with heritage. He has never written on Carapecchia, circulated e-mails to save the Ricasoli cannon, or rooted for a classical façade for the Opera House. And yet, when he invited me into his beautiful 17th-century home to admire his collection the other day, I couldn't help thinking how wrong first impressions can be.

George doesn't collect Maltese silver or Giannis. His pride, rather, is a small number of Good Friday statues. None of them would make an antiquarian's pulse work overtime - indeed most are recent - but his eyes light up when he points out their various nuances. Every year he takes them out of storage, lines them up in Golgotha sequence, replaces the withered olive twigs with fresh ones, and then spends the best part of two weeks taking them in. They are his heritage and he is proud to, quite literally, look at them.

Which raises some questions. What is the difference between George, telling me about how he had the Redeemer's cross restored by a Cospicua craftsman, and me, oohing and aahing like a decent anthropologist should not? How does his pride in his collection affect our understanding of heritage? Why is it that, in spite of George and a thousand others, we are often told that we Maltese lack appreciation of our heritage? The answers I think lie, first, in the many meanings of heritage and, second, in how they are lost and found in translation.

There are at least three ways in which we approach vernacular heritage, i.e. the type we see on our streets at Good Friday, or on my neighbour's dresser. The first is to dismiss it as 'popular culture' and proceed to the rarefied world of opera, ballet, and Old Masters - that are, presumably, of the 'high' equivalent. The second is to immerse oneself in it, as all dilettanti (aficionados, not to be confused with the English 'dilettante', which implies superficiality) do, unselfconsciously and passionately.

The third is to consume it indirectly in a - shall we say middle class? - way. Jeremy Boissevain has argued that tourism made vernacular heritage popular, or at least tolerable, among the middle class, by opening up a new route for its consumption. Put simply, heritage is approached not directly, as with dilettanti, but circuitously via the tourist encounter. The tourist gaze transforms it into an acceptable instance of 'local culture' which can and should be consumed wherever one travels. Paradoxically, local culture ceases to be local and begins to appear quaint.

I think Boissevain is right, but I would add two to the list of antidotes used by the middle class to detoxify, so to speak, vernacular culture and its implications of pettiness and rusticity. Both are delights to relish at our feasts and processions. The first is photography and filming (to some extent techniques borrowed from tourism) which enable us to engage with heritage while keeping our distance, through the deceptive transparency of a lens. The second is humour. The proverbial tongue-in-cheek transforms our countenance and therefore our gaze, from straightforward to less so.

This is the drift when the man from Sliema (you know what I mean), camera prominently slung around his neck, shares a chuckle with his wife at the expense of the Zebbug 'prophet Isaiah'. We might add a third: my oohs and aahs, expressing awe and therefore my lack of familiarity, my distance.

The equation works both ways. The keepers of the heritage (invariably middle class and not uncommonly rent seeking) tell us that our fortifications and such are crumbling away, and chide us for not minding that much. The idea is that the people at large are alienated from their heritage. That's probably right, but I don't see much difference between the gulf separating the middle class from the vernacular and that between the rest and 'high' culture. The non-Sliema do to the demi-bastion what the Sliema chap does to Isaiah.

The one great exception to this game of distances is the C/church. The word 'knisja' (church) can mean the Church as a formal institution, the mass of people who subscribe to it, or a building used for worship. The meanings overlap in such a way as to create a continuity between the people and architecture, to the extent that discarded matches and dismembered clothes pegs become excellent elements with which to build scale models. Churches are not just heritage to be treasured, they are places that are used, and owned, collectively. The church dilettanti discussing the artistic merits of their titular painting effectively bridge the distance between vernacular and genteel. The key, I repeat, is use.

Take the chapel of St Cecilia in Gozo, a gem of rustic medieval architecture that is falling to pieces as I write. The reason for the neglect is that it is de-consecrated and no longer a place of worship. It has slipped from being used and therefore a part of the people (il-knisja), to being an artefact of heritage which must be preserved in spite of the people.

It follows that, in the case of the St Cecilia chapel, the simplest route to a successful restoration is re-consecration - though ideally not before the beams and roof slabs are sorted. Things are trickier, of course, with forts and redoubts, which cannot exactly masquerade as sacred spaces.

One way of overcoming distance and alienation in such cases is to put these places to good regular use, which should not preclude the commercial. Recent decades have seen the restoration (give or take a few garish cottagey props) of the grubbiest of crumbling village houses even as they graduated to profitable 'houses of character', and I suspect that the chocolate-cake-and-views corner has done more to foster a sense of pride in Mdina than all the brochures and guides put together.

I know many will disagree with this, just as swords were rattled when someone suggested that the Birzebbuġa redoubt should be restored and used as a pizzeria. The reason is probably an old-fashioned resistance to conjoining heritage and business, possibly the dread of the great unwashed (and hungry for their capricciosas) taking over 'our' hallowed historical places.

Meanwhile it's business as usual for George, who now has some months to replace the Good Friday theme with that of the Immaculate Conception. His is a very decent miniature replica of the real thing, and he thinks of both as his very own.

mafalzon@hotmail.com