Drowning sorrows at the band club bar

What revisions have the past week’s events in our Medite-rranean neigh-bourhood caused you to make to your assessment of a few weeks ago?

An image flashes in my mind at your question: It is a photo of our National Poet, Dun Karm, dressed up as an Arab, taken during a trip to Tunisia and reproduced in Ġużè Cardona’s biography of the Monsignor. It seems to me to encapsulate the ambivalence of the standard relation of Maltese to Arab.

On the one hand, it felt plainly natural for our National Poet to slip into Arab clothing. On the other hand, it looks pathetically comic.

As you know, last Saturday week, among other abler performers, I spoke on the rarely treated topic of Dun Karm’s genius as a comic poet. It was the 50th anniversary of his death, at St Philip’s Band Club in Żebbuġ.

Dun Karm was the Honorary President of this club which claims to be at the origin of the typically Maltese band-centred festa tradition, and he himself personally contributed multifariously to the festa.

In early years, sonnets written by him in Italian and printed on polychrome bits of paper were showered down like confetti from the church steeples as the saint’s silverware statue was taken out for procession in the streets.

A brilliant succession of hymns composed in later years are still blared out and chanted by the band and choristers today. Dun Karm had become deeply interested because of our language in the complexity of Maltese-Arab relations.

Soon after my talk, a gentleman with an even more ancient look than myself, with hair that looked like a silver-filigree bird nest, clutched my right arm, claimed acquaintance with my grandfather Antonio, born in Alexandria, and asked me:

“How come our leaders and their egghead advisers (here he prodded my chest with a gnarled finger) swallowed the Arab dictators’ line that democracy would result in their countries falling under fanatical Islamists, bent moreover on destroying Israel?

Surely current events have proven all of you to have been amazingly gullible. The revolutionaries seem rather to be taking Turkey, where at present an Islamist Party rules within the framework of a secular state, as their model.”

Before I could attempt an answer, a gorgeous, apple-cheeked young Żebbuġija clutched my left arm, claimed only to know me on Xarabank and asked: “What do you think of the latest Curia directives on our feasts?” Between them, Silverhair and Philippine or Pippa or whatever her name was steered me to a table where there were plenty of glasses and a whisky bottle.

Silverhair continued in his sonorous voice: “Should you, our leading Churchmen, not have taken up more seriously our vocation, confirmed by the Popes, to promote dialogue with Judaism and Islam?

Is it not my duty according to protocol at this point not to allow you to cut a macho figure by giving up all our space to your male buttonhole holder, however venerable, and forgetting the young lady?

It is that at this moment my mind is more taken up with Libya than with our festi; however, I did say last Saturday week that if I had understood correctly to what document my second interlocutor was referring, its brunt was to include a police inspector into a co-ordinating board for the festa which would have the parish priest in the chair.

The move seemed to me to be exactly the opposite of what the government had been trying to do to improve the management system of our country – to separate the operative from the regulatory functions.

I have previously argued there is an inner contradiction in trying to regulate feasts, which have an essentially carnivalesque dimension, with rules that go into detail even more than the Rabbis used to.

It is like proposing a recipe for a soup with arsenic as its main ingredient. To put the kind of envisaged people, with an innate bent towards Puritanism, to organise a festa is like appointing Taliban to run a Western women’s swimsuit competition.

So let us turn back to our Mediterranean neighbourhood problems. What do you think we should be doing?

I had thought that it had by now been generally acknowledged that when there were clear cases of massive violations of human rights in the strict sense of the term, or in other words when issues that were “a common concern of humankind” arose, the principle of non-interference by others with the exercise of a state’s sovereignty had been abandoned, but it seems that I was mistaken.

At any rate, I reiterate that precisely the critical situation that we are plunged in is the moment for urgently pursuing the two-pronged strategy that has been canvassed but shelved for too long.

The first is pressing ahead with a serious proposal for the establishment of a Euro-Med zone of prosperity such as had been excellently formulated by the experts appointed by the Mediterranean Regional Council for Sustainable Development.

The second is for the littoral countries on both sides of the Mediterranean not to allow themselves to be held back by their Nordic partners from setting up or consolidating structures that can empower them to take the most effective action in their own interest.

Such structures would be autonomous although rigorously complementary to those of the European Union itself.

If both parts of such a strategy may have seemed utopian before the Libyan tragedy struck panic even beyond our close neighbourhood, today they have become a matter of the most practical urgency.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.