Of all the fanciful and bizarre exhibits at the Brussels International Exposition of 1897, one in particular stood out. A section of the royal park at Tervuren was set up as a kind of living diorama and contained a simulation of a village of about 60 Congolese people. The exhibits were expected to go about their daily lives as they did back in the Congo. Thousands of people turned up to gape and prod, and the exposition was a hearty success.

Part of the backstory was the vicious colonial experiment of King Leopold II of the Belgians, who in 1885 had appropriated a vast area of the Congo as his personal playground. The interestingly named Congo Free State was a textbook case of shameless pillage, exploitation and mass murder.

The other bit was an even longer history of brazen racism in which specimens of exotic-looking ‘savages’ were exhibited at European courts and such higher circles. By the late 19th century, so-called ‘human zoos’ had become the accepted and indeed anticipated main attraction at exhibitions and fairs.

Surely it is needless to point out that such human zoos are now a thing of the past. Except they aren’t, and we live in one called Malta – thankfully without the skull mea­surements and slavery and genocide, but a human zoo nonetheless.

The Times carried a story and an online video the other day about the Msida festa ‘as seen through Estonian eyes’. It seems that one Aleksandr Belugi chanced across the festa in Msida and “turned his chance discovery into an audio-visual love letter to his newly-adopted home”. Interviewed by the newspaper, Belugi made all the right noises.

He said it felt like he was meant to be born here. The Maltese took the beauty of their island for granted – and that didn’t just apply to the Blue Lagoon (yawn) and “amazing beaches”. He planned to make more videos, because he “wanted to give back to Malta and show its beauty through the camera’s lens to the rest of the world”. He added that “everyone needs to know where Malta is and everyone needs to go there at least once”.

I have in mind the constant obsession (in theory at least) with our legendary hospitality, with quaintness, and with what tourists think and say about us

Let’s leave aside the minor logistical matter of seven billion pilgrims converging on a 316km²-shrine. The point is that the video was dull, unimaginative and mediocre – a staple amateur snapshot, really. And yet, it made the headlines in a leading newspaper. The reason for this twist is that the film was about Malta, and made by a foreigner who went on to add a desirable caption.

Belugi’s filming and editing skills do not interest me in the least. It’s the second bit I find intriguing.

The things we say about Malta, and about life here, often leave me with a creeping sense of a gigantic mise-en-scène. It is part semblance of a tourist resort and a travel advertorial on continuous loop, part perennial anxiety about our rightful place in the world.

First, the resort and advertorial. I really think we should have kept the old coat of arms – the one that showed a rather lovely sandy corner complete with prickly pear, dgħajsa, farming implements and sunburst. It did the job brilliantly, because that’s how Malta is represented most of the time.

I have in mind the constant obsession (in theory at least) with our legendary hospitality, with quaintness, and with what tourists think and say about us.

Someone once told me an amusing story about a bus driver who had stopped the bus in the middle of the road to rescue a bottle in distress at the roadside (empty bottles could be redeemed for two cents at the time). Only several of the passengers stood up and protested that by his behaviour “indaħħqu n-nies bina” (it makes us a laughing stock). What they meant was that there were tourists on the bus.

Now it is well known that tourism (the ‘tourist gaze’, as someone called it) can cause people to think of themselves and behave as a kind of tableaux vivants. All touristic places experience it and the case of Malta is certainly not unique. The difference is that Malta is small enough for the malady to spread. It is as if the entire country is a resort. More accurately, resort-ness has been a key notion in representations of the nation since at least the 1960s.

The second type of anxiety is closely related but has deeper roots. It can be great fun to google something like “put Malta on the map”. What you get is hundreds of newspaper stories that tell of how snooker players, ceramists, olive oil producers and an Estonian student who pointed his mobile phone at a festa, inscribed the island cartographically and brought it to the attention of the world.

The assumption seems to be that Malta is not naturally on the map, and that the only way it can get there is by means of a perpetual struggle for greatness. We have constantly to remind ourselves how much talent (and potatoes) we produce, how much of it we’ve exported, and so on.

Again, there is nothing terribly unique about this. It is an anxiety of all peripheral places – peripheral to a powerful economic centre thought to lie somewhere in northern Europe and North America, that is. India, for example, is not exactly small, but it is obsessive about the man with the longest nails, the hairiest woman, and the rest of a huge cast of world record holders who put the country on the map.

A rather harmless human zoo, then, and one in which we can happily perform without having to leave our homes in the Congo. These days, visitors to the exposition travel, and they make shaky videos about the splendid lives of the natives and the beauty of their homes.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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