Godfrey Farrugia (Ed.), 2016,
The Maltese Village Festa: A traditional yearly ritual, Malta:
BDL, 571pp.
In 2009, the Archdiocese of Malta issued a consultation document that went by the good-natured name of ‘Nirrestawraw il-festi flimkien’ (‘Together, to restore feasts’). What followed was a mini-revolution by a legion of festa people who saw in its 25-odd pages a direct threat to what they loved above all else. As one clergyman put it at the time, the proposals were so much rope with which parish priests would hang themselves. In the event, the document was shelved, the necks spared, and the point made to the gods that they could only underestimate human zest at their own risk.
There is something tautological about a book that celebrates festi. One might imagine that the festa itself is bunting enough. But, celebrate festi this book does, especially through its protagonists. Patrick J. Fenech’s photographs are often splendid and always arresting. Fenech, whose earliest affections are bound up with the life of a third-century Greek called Helena, who later migrated to Birkirkara, has been documenting festi for decades. This book is the result of that labour, and its contents a reminder that a perfect love needs no restoration.
‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ is the best word I can find to describe a festa. Take materials, in this case the studied cacophony of papier mâché, silver, wood, stone, gunpowder, textile and paper. Each is the product of a caste of specialised craftsmen that go by the generic ‘dilettanti’. Except, dilettanti do not dabble. Rather, they pour time, knowledge and passion into their crafts, and mould everything into a whole that is somehow vertebrate. Perhaps, the strongest metaphor of the festa is the banda (brass band) itself: the bandsmen and -women chat, smoke, and drink as often as they play, yet the result works.
It is the smells of incense and gunpowder that stir the deepest feelings of the festa
Fenech’s photography does ample justice to this improbable cocktail of materials and people. Muscle and papier mâché become indistinguishable as dilettanti heave statues about the streets. Gold thread weaves its way seamlessly through vestments and ganutell flowers, in shots that seem to have stepped out of the Catholic haute couture scene in Fellini’s Roma (but with a straight face). Marble and marbled wood play a game of spot-the-difference and challenge the viewer’s understanding of permanence. And so on. The book is over 500 pages long, but I got the sense that it could profitably have gone on for another 500.
The festa, then, is photogenic. And yet, it presents the photographer with a challenge: to somehow capture the smells, sounds, and tactile sensations that are at least as important as the visuals. Tellingly, Fenech writes in the Introduction that it is the smells of incense and gunpowder that stir the deepest feelings of the festa in him. The result is a set of photographs that overcome the limitations of the medium, to the extent that I often found myself looking for the signs of droplets of sweat on the lens.
The book looks at the festa broadly, and duly casts about. It includes a good number of beautiful, old photographs from the Ellis archives. The more recent shots document home interiors, band club façades, streetscapes, processions, fireworks, statues, church rituals and revellers at the intoxicating marċi ta’ filgħodu.
Throughout, the sense is that the festa is an event that turns mundane convention on its head. For example, home interiors that are usually private spaces are opened up and become exhibits, and their occupants tableaux vivants. (The everyday humorous Maltese expression for someone who forgets to close their front door is, “Mela ġej il-marċ?”)
Godfrey Farrugia, a festa enthusiast who moonlights as a member of Parliament and government whip, does a respectable job as editor. Photographs – and excellent captions – aside, the book also contains six essays by a very knowledgeable group of people. Carmel Cassar looks at the history of the festa; Vicki Ann Cremona provides a thought-provoking piece on the value of ostentation; Jeremy Boissevain weighs in with his fieldwork on festa partiti; and Raymond Saliba and Jesmond Manicaro write about fireworks and the festa interna respectively.
There are, it has to be said, some slips here and there. First, the word ‘village’ in the title is misleading. The festa is by no means exclusive to villages and, in fact, a good chunk of the photographs in the book were shot in the harbour cities.
Second, and given that the photographs are the book’s main attraction, Fenech’s name is conspicuous by its absence on the front cover.
Third, Boissevain died in June 2015 – which makes the dedication odd and the bionote inaccurate.
These shortcomings do nothing to detract from the beauty and value of a book, which is well worth buying. It is a landmark contribution that tries, and generally manages, to bring together the cerebral and the visceral. Certainly, it helped me understand why the 2009 Church proposals so riled the dilettanti. They knew better than others that, as Paul Sant Cassia so eloquently puts it in his prologue, “festa is not really jollity and briju, but an attempt to conceal, for a brief moment, lost time which waits for no man or woman.”
