‘Gonzi drops in at Żejtun PL club.’ It sounds almost casual, if it weren’t for the fact that it shot to the top of the week’s ‘most read’ within hours.
The Nationalist leader sipping a beer at the Labour holy-of-holies in Żejtun? In Private Eye speak, shurely shome mishtake?
I doubt many of those who are younger than 30 or so will understand what the stir is about. Tal-Barrani happened in 1986.
Żejtun’s last stand, when a wedding party (including witnesses Eddie Fenech Adami and Guido de Marco) was savaged in the main square by a crowd of Labour thugs, goes back to 1989. To a time that is when people still bought typewriters and Berlin was divided by a wall.
Besides, the geography of Maltese politics of that time will probably be quite unfathomable to the new generations. The partisan ‘fortresses’, of which Żejtun and the Dockyard were prime examples, have long been dismantled one way or another.
The reason is not demographic, but rather that politics works differently these days.
The Żejtun ‘Berlin wall’, with its implications of fixity and monolithic blocs, has given way to on-the-move Sunday morning marquee meetings and endless rounds of musical chairs on television. Chances are young people will simply not grasp the notion of no-go areas.
Even so, last Sunday’s visit was significant in many ways. To my mind it raised a number of questions about forgiveness, memory, and reconciliation.
As it happened, the January 7 issue of The Times Literary Supplement carried a long review of three new books on the philosophy of political forgiveness.
The reviewer argued that a general understanding of the term and its actual dynamics are surprisingly difficult to work out. That’s also why the marriage between political forgiveness and complete closure seldom works.
In the case of Żejtun, two things at least stand in the way.
First, I’m not sure it’s at all legitimate to forgive in the absence of justice. As far as I know not a single one of the goons who fired rounds and bit off people’s noses ever spent a day behind bars, at least not for those offences. In fact, quite a few of them had the cheek eventually to parade their newly-found respectability all over our faces.
Second, there is a sense in which the image of the PN leader shaking hands with his PL quasi-counterpart in Żejtun is a bit of a sleight.
The overwhelming majority of Labourites spent the 1980s in much the same way as the average Maltese, listening to Duran Duran and fiddling around with Rubik’s cubes. They were not in the least interested in shooting Nationalists or torching każini.
That’s why it was later so easy for Alfred Sant to consign the troublemakers to the dustbin where they belonged.
I am not quite sure that forgiveness between parties is what’s required here. I’d much rather have seen the marmalja locked up and Labourites generally not forgiven for things they never did. But that’s probably my political naivety speaking.
It can be very useful not to identify individuals. That way il-Laburisti will always be to blame.
How about memory? Scorsese’s Gangs of New York comes in handy here. We learn that Bill the Butcher was very fond of keeping the memory of Priest Vallon, whom he had killed in street combat, alive. He had even arranged a sort of shrine to the memory of an enemy he apparently thought highly of.
Wise old Bill. By commemorating Priest Vallon he was really reminding everyone of his own greatness in killing him. His little honour game was, in his own words, a ‘spectacle of fearsome acts’.
Lawrence Gonzi does not wear a glass eye. Nor does he knife people at will or surround himself with opium-puffing topless prostitutes. (Il Cavaliere might want to check out that last bit.)
When he does draw a sharp and pointed object from his pocket it tends to be cardiac-surgical equipment. So no, I am not about to compare him to Bill the Butcher.
The rituals of forgiveness as practised in Żejtun last Sunday, however, bear some resemblance to Bill’s own liturgy. In shaking hands and forgiving, the Nationalist leader is also reminding us that there is something to forgive.
Forgiveness becomes a spectacle of the memory of fearsome acts. To keep the 1980s alive, that is the rhetorical question.
Third, reconciliation. Ever since Eddie Fenech Adami cooked up the delicious and filling ‘national reconciliation’, anyone who has aspired to be anything has wanted a slice for themself. The keenest bidder must be Joseph Muscat, who seems to like to make himself in Eddie’s image in any case.
I loved Muscat’s speech on Raymond Caruana and Karin Grech a few weeks ago. There are ‘no Labourites and Nationalists’ he told us, no ‘first- and second-class martyrs’. He then proceeded to propose a minute’s silence in memory of Raymond and Karin.
I don’t for a second imagine Muscat was being cynical. Or that Gonzi’s detour down the reddest-of the-reds bar was an act of hypocrisy.
My point is that the notion of national reconciliation happens to dovetail very neatly with bipartisan division. It’s as if we need to keep reconciling ourselves nationally till kingdom come. In this sense the rituals of reconciliation double as a liturgy of political dualism.
Readers might object that I’m reading too much into this, that it was simply a case of Gonzi ‘dropping in’ at the Żejtun club, as The Times put it.
That reminds me of a question so beloved of humanities undergraduates: It’s all very well to say that an Antonioni film or a Swift parable works on so many levels, but did the artist actually intend it so? The staple answer, as in this case, is that intention is quite beside the point.
mafalzon@hotmail.com