In discussions about Valletta’s candidacy as Europe’s Capital of Culture in 2018, it goes without saying that any programme will present itself as listening to the past while eyeing the future. But that banality harbours a central difficulty for the design of a stimulating programme. Doesn’t a cultural past like ours need to be ignored – other than as tourism’s cash cow – for us to have a real future?
Doesn’t a cultural past like ours need to be ignored – other than as tourism’s cash cow – for us to have a real future?- Ranier Fsadni
The question is crude but its assumptions are not. One is that if Valletta 2018 is to be successful, then we need to understand “cultural capital” in two senses: as a city and as something bankable, as a cultural home and as personal cultural assets we can use to develop our ability to live well with others and ourselves.
Valletta as cultural capital, if it is to be successful, would have to serve both functions. It would have to represent a form of creative, cosmopolitan conviviality. But it would also have to serve as a place where one learns how to participate in such creativity, not least by reflecting on the future. A real creative centre is one that takes and gives its energy by stimulating its visitors to consider what is possible and what one can become.
Can the cultural past that Valletta represents connect so intimately with the real sources of our future? Yes, but we cannot see why unless we face up to the three great discontinuities between our present and even the recent cultural past.
The first is cultural. We inhabit a world culturally dominated by global English. However, up to the 19th century, French and Italian between them had a greater claim than English to being the languages of elite culture – of diplomacy, cuisine, ballet, music, opera and more – not just in continental Europe but also in the then increasingly colonised Arab Mediterranean.
We find it hard nowadays to get our minds round this. We misunderstand the insistence of certain early Maltese nationalists on the “Italianate” nature of Malta, at a time when that term was roughly analogous to “Hellenic”. For them it signified, among other things, a cosmopolitan cultural connection versus a little islander syndrome. Much as those nationalists conducted a battle towards British colonial cultural policy, their counterparts today would actually be those Maltese who insist on the importance, to our identity, of the English language.
It’s not that ironic really. Because of its strategic maritime importance Malta was historically always ensconced in far-flung global networks. An island, yes, but a central base in the sea connecting West to East, both far and near. A keen awareness of a broad cultural geography has long been an essential part of a certain way of being Maltese, although geography shifted in tandem with power.
That strategic importance eventually waned, as did that of the Mediterranean Sea as a whole. Here lies the source of the second discontinuity, the economic. Between, on the one hand, a cultural patrimony produced at a time when the region was an economic and cultural centre and, on the other, the dominant way of seeing and evaluating it today. The latter was learned at a time when the region had become economically peripheral and culturally colonised.
It is a way of seeing that “Mediterraneanised” the Mediterranean, just as it orientalised the Orient. It is the Northern European tourist’s gaze, recasting the area as one of cultural exoticism and longueurs, where the patrimony is fun to visit but difficult to live with, a burden weighing down progress, where the heir is enslaved by the inheritance. It is a viewpoint that obscures as much as it reveals but it largely governs how many of us explain society to ourselves.
The third discontinuity is political. There is tension produced in understanding a cultural past, which assumed an unapologetic social hierarchy, when our age demands unapologetic egalitarianism. The past may have been “multicultural” but it wasn’t democratic. So what kind of guide can it be for a multicultural democracy?
Broadly, two reactions are possible to these discontinuities. One is to shrug and accept that there is no real way of bridging them. Of course, the past will be “celebrated”, in the cultural programme, but it would be effectively represented as re-enactment – a living museum experience.
A second reaction is possible, however, based on recognising that while the past is another country, some of the cultural questions that preoccupied it are still with us. At different periods, on both sides of the Mediterranean, we find a cultural ferment driven by the impact of science on culture. Disputed images of West and East informed music, literature, painting and the performative arts. Cultural borrowings from the far East and West circulated widely, giving rise to various reinterpretations.
A cultural programme that, in part, restores to us a sense of those earlier creative ferments and their works would help us keep a better perspective on the history of our present and the possibilities of our future.
ranierfsadni@europe.com