Women having festa fun

So, our feasts haven’t been ‘restored’ after all. At one point two or so years ago I was really beginning to wonder if the dour brigade were about to have it their way.

But a loud collective raspberry by the dilettanti, certain distractions, and several months of dust seem to have consigned the optimistically-named ‘Restoring Feasts Together’ document where it belongs.

Just as well. I ran into some kind of evening bash at the feast of St Lawrence the Martyr in Vittoriosa the other day and it was terrific. I never imagined people could relish the thought of a human barbecue so much, especially not when it involved a man they didn’t know personally.

I sort of recognised many of the faces there from my evening walks. I usually see them going about their daily business in town all perfectly reasonable and respectable. But give a Maltese a saint and a few beers and the effect is, shall wesay, profound. These people were really, properly, hugely enjoying themselves.

Not least the women who mostly came screaming, covered in paint, and legs astride on the shoulders of what I suppose must have been especially helpful fellows.

I found them particularly attractive for reasons that went beyond the proverbial honourable. In fact, I would like to think my motives were entirely anthropological.

Let me stick my neck out. I’ve a feeling that one of the main reasons why the men in black so want to ‘restore’ feasts has to do with women. Boringly put, women have started to take part in feasts in new ways.

The novelty includes their having fun in public places – not any old fun but the loud, theatrical, and in-your-face type. In this field as in others, women have come out as mammals capable of pleasure and keen to show it. Horror of horrors.

An old-fashioned take on the Maltese festa would likely forget all about women. At best it might ‘raise’ them to some other-worldly wonderland of fleshless femininity.

Rather like the virtuous, formulaic, and quite lifeless women perched on street pedestals in fact, and in some cases the statue of the patron herself.

At first glance that looks like a reasonable-enough analysis. Surely the elements that make up a feast – rivalry and making fireworks and putting up bunting and such – are men’s things? It is mostly men who populate the various committees, particularly at the top end, and it is also men who get to carry around the statue on the big day.

Women, when they figure at all, seem to be happy with their minor role as ‘helpers’ (the word has actually seeped into the Maltese language). Rather like men who ‘help out’ with the housework, meaning they dabble in things that don’t properly belong to them.

But there are at least two problems. First, it may never have been true that feasts are men’s things. One of the clues is in the spaces. It may be that we were looking in the wrong places all along. The streets and square are just two of the many places where festa happens.

Women begin to seem much less pedestal-bound once we add the domestic space to that list. As we most certainly should. The family home, all spruced up and door ajar for the pleasure of passers-by, is as important a part of festa as the blokey street decorations.

It’s also where the annual ikla tal-festa (a meal at which the extended family converges on the old family home, rather like Christmas) takes place. These and others are crucial aspects of festa and they happen to be very much a woman’s world.

We’ve all heard apocryphal stories of women refusing to cook on the day, just because they originally came from families who supported a rival patron. This may not seem like much but I’d argue it’s as much part of festa rivalry (pika) as the mass of men shouting ‘magħna ma tagħmlu xejn’ (‘nothing compares to us’) in the square.

Even the word ‘helpers’ is probably inaccurate. I doubt festa funding would be the same without the enormous contribution of women ‘helpers’ who tap into their rich local networks to raise money. Hardly dabbling, in other words.

The first point therefore is that traditional (for want of a better word) understandings of festa have mistakenly tended to push women to the margins or write them out altogether.

The second bit is that the women’s worlds I have just described are just part of the story. It seems to me that women are no longer happy to fundraise, clean the house and cook for the family. Increasingly, they are taking to the streets and squares not as spectators but rather as producers in their own right.

They’ve also started to do things traditionally reserved for men, such as sit on festa committees and in some cases even make fireworks (I think there are currently 13 women with a licence to do so).

Call it tokenism if you will, but many male-dominated circles of dilettanti are only too happy to break the mould. That’s because they understand that gender-segregated feasts are all too easytargets for the hostile part of the population.

I really love the way these dilettanti have stood the reformers’ arguments on their head. The game they’re playing is called ‘If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’. And they’re playing it very well indeed.

The upshot is that festa no longer segregates men and women into definite spaces. Go to any marċ ta’ filgħodu and you will find yourself in the middle of a heaving mass of humanity of unspecified sex. Which I suppose is what the reformers mean when they sermonise us on rampant ‘abuse’.

Much of what we hear about the need to bring God back into feasts and so on is really about an ancient fear of women having fun, especially when they’re underdressed, a few shots over the limit, and in the company of men.

I wish I could say I’m surprised but it’s an old story really.

mafalzon@hotmail.com