Body in the library

In the classic detective mystery set in a wealthy family's mansion, the body in the library is a corpse, the job of the police is to prevent people coming in and contaminating the evidence, while the sleuth's job is to stop the corpses piling up, allow the innocent fiancés to get married and the rehabilitated valet to begin life afresh under a new identity and a more benign master.

In the Parliament Ground Floor Mystery, however, the formula has been scrambled to suit the democratic age of people power and CCTV.

The scene is now set within transparent walls in a huge public square.

The police are there to welcome as many people as possible. In straight-to-camera confessions, the valet, his gender reassignment surgery already booked, cannot wait to become his real self, "valletta".

There is just one snag: The corpse is now the environment itself. It is a dead space, a wonderful twist in the tale for our ecologically-conscious times but a problem for the sleuth who must find a way of stopping the new Parliament's ground floor from being so repeatedly, stumpingly dead, every day, that it prevents the city from ever being rehabilitated (under a new identity and a more benign master).

Back in the real world, it seems to me that the government has an acute awareness of the problem of how to make a hive of public activity out of the ground floor of the new Parliament building. Otherwise, we would not have had shiftiness on how the space will be designated.

We know that Renzo Piano submitted several options while apparently favouring the idea of a public library. The government has stated that the space will house a museum of Malta's political development. Last weekend, in a radio interview, the Prime Minister was reported as saying that the space would be dedicated to what distinguishes us as a people.

The government seems sceptical that a public library would attract many people; presumably it wants tourists to number among them and cannot see why they would want to borrow books or how they would find the time to return them. But its own proposals are a recipe for failure.

It will not just be low attendance that will sink them. Apparently, for the museum of political development, what is planned is not a permanent exhibition but frequent exhibitions, three or four a year, drawing on much archival material that has gone unused. Beyond the broad Maltese public's tepid interest in such material, no matter how varied, there lies a larger practical, curatorial problem.

An exhibition requires narrative: plot, pace and proper allocation of roles. How can you have a proper narrative in a country that is so split on the plot that it has five national feasts and no agreement on which is the most important?

The square in front of the Office of the Prime Minister is dominated by a huge monument to Manuel Dimech, an objectively minor historical figure relative to the two prime ministers, Sir Paul Boffa and Giorgio Borg Olivier, whose monuments are pushed to the margins by Dimech's. Yet, if Dimech's statute had to be relocated, the country would be convulsed by debate.

There are other such questions of improper allocation of roles in the national mythology. Would any exhibition in the new Parliament building be able to challenge them? Or would it have to collude with the myths designed to help us get along peaceably rather than to throw light on the past?

Even if the public were remotely interested in a museum of political development, the country might not yet have the right degree of political development to have a proper museum of that kind.

As for a museum about what distinguishes us as a people, the least said the better. It sounds like a museum of national traits, shared by all of us but by no other people. Anthropologists gave up on ethnic trait collection several decades ago. Try finding exclusive matching traits between Alexandra Borg Olivier and Agatha Barbara, or Lawrence Gonzi and Dom Mintoff, and you will have some idea why the project is a chimera. Or worse: because if it gives credence to the idea of indelible national traits, it would play into the racists' hands.

I would urge the government to revisit the idea of a public library. It need not be just a lending library - or indeed just a biblio-theca. It can house digitalised recordings of great public speeches and of Maltese music and an archive of the films about or shot in Malta (and of public interest).

Such a space would be of interest to certain cultural tourists, without the time to navigate their way to the University. The proximity to the Centre of Creativity could be exploited to organise public readings and other cultural activities. It could be organised as a highly social space for readers - an oasis for reading and refreshment, where people can acquire the joy of reading and browsing.

And as an architectural symbol - the ground floor of Parliament, an organic extension of the Centre of Creativity - it would radiate, at City Gate, the image of an attractive kind of polity: based on learning, open to self-transformation.

ranierfsadni@europe.com