Any discussion on the President of the Republic must start with a trip to the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. In that part of the world, the word kumari roughly translates as ‘living goddess’. It relates to a rather unusual practice in which girls, usually at around six, are chosen to become special beings. Kumaris are expected to leave their normal childhood behind and to live secluded lives as goddesses.
Following a rigorous selection process, they are ritually purified and confined to their family homes. Contact with devotees takes place in a room that is set aside for worship. Kumaris are believed to have special powers of foresight and healing. They are a living link to the gods, and those who worship them experience maitri bhavana, which is a spirit of tender loving kindness to all.
Blood is a kumari’s only proverbial heel. It is thought to be so polluting that any bleeding, even that from the smallest pin prick, will rob the little girl of her powers. As expected, her supernatural career ends when she gets her first period, at which point she goes back to a normal life.
Age and ritual fine print aside, the resemblance to the national living goddesses (and gods) is uncanny. Presidents of the Republic are drawn from the ranks of partisan politics, usually when they’re right in the thick of it. There is a rigorous selection process which includes such sacred considerations as perceived threats to the party leadership, in-house scheming, and such.
No problem with that, and in any case this is not an attack on the presidency, which is an office I respect (in moderation). Rather, what irks me is the vacant and frankly unconvincing nature of the metamorphosis itself. Overnight, the anointed is plucked from the heat of party politics (politicians in Malta often use the verb ‘nimmilita’ to describe what they do) and ritually transformed into a kumari-like national living deity.
They find themselves suddenly having to be – and, more importantly, appear to be – above it all. Words like ‘party’ and ‘Opposition’ become ritually impure and are replaced with more edifying ones like ‘nation’, ‘the people’, and ‘unity’. And so on.
The President seems to have little time for details like freedom of expression
The extent of the metamorphosis varies from deity to deity. Most settle into a quietist dignity of office and go through the hand-shaking and ribbon-cutting motions without excessive spectacle. Others, thankfully a minority, take what is essentially a ritual status a tad too literally, and proceed to lecture and sermonise us at every turn.
Take President Marie Louise Coleiro-Preca’s latest encyclical. First, a word on style. There really is no need to surgically attach ‘social’ to every other word. We know that social violence, the social fabric, social dialogue, social media and social communication are all profoundly, well, social.
Nor is there a need for the rhetorical and insufferable ‘Maltese and Gozitans’. The nation is called Malta and its citizens Maltese. That includes people who live in Swieqi, Qrendi, Comino, Gozo, and so on. There is no such thing as the President of Malta and Gozo. Anything in that vein is rhetorical and a filler – good for killing time between songs on breakfast shows and little else.
I don’t think these are trivial matters, because the least we can expect of the Office of the President is the use of good form in official communication.
Perhaps optimistically, we might also expect some clear thought. Certainly there was no such thing in Coleiro-Preca’s missive last Sunday. Her drift was that the social media should not be used to foster social violence, and that there was not much to be gained from shattering people’s lives (her words). Besides, such misuse called into question the “solidarity for which Maltese people are renowned”.
Let’s leave aside the dubious accuracy of this last bit of self-praise. (Renowned where exactly, and in what ways?) The President went beyond the usual sermon and called on us to “condemn” this online violence, and on political parties to refrain from protecting those who were behind it. This last bit makes it clear that the two violence-crazed people she had in mind are called Glenn Bedingfield and Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Question is, how exactly might we go about condemning these two and others of their imagined kind? Should there be some kind of pogrom? Should we banish them from the kingdom of the pure and worthy? Should we ostracise them? Or should we just force them, on pain of a huge fine or a prison sentence, to be nice or close down their blogs?
Maybe it’s just me, but I think that all of these methods involve violence of the worst possible kind. The President seems to have little time for details like freedom of expression. She lives in a world of nannying in which sanctimonious institutions force people to be nice to each other. The option is to let them be as unnice as they will, and to let them bear the consequences of that – but San Anton didn’t get that memo.
Writing blogs or columns or whatever else is not about building national unity or cultivating the solidarity that Maltese and Gozitan people are renowned for. Speaking for myself, I care not a jot about the renown of the nation, and I also think that national unity is a dangerous notion that is typical of fascist States.
As for kumaris, I tend to see in them the normal girls they once were and the quarrelsome, messy, and at times bloodstained childhood they were made to leave behind.
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