What would festa look like if it were gentrified? There are two reasons why I ask. The more casual is a conversation I had with a colleague. Admittedly not exactly your average marċ ta’ filgħodu reveller, he told me how as a child he found the street decorations in Ħamrun ‘very heavy’.
The fact that festi nowadays come with billboards, colourful booklets, and a thousand sub-committees doesn’t necessarily mean they are gentrified- Mark Anthony Falzon
Judging by the twitching muscles as he struggled to keep his face straight, I figure he meant ‘unspeakably gaudy and likely to cause permanent damage to the eyesight’.
The second and more tangible reason is a book someone gave me called Sicut Lilium. Published a couple of months ago by the Our Lady of the Lilies Musical Society of Mqabba and edited by Charles Farrugia (the national archivist), the volume looks at the historical making and present face of devotional practice in that village.
Perhaps unexpectedly for a book produced by a local band club, it oozes quality in every direction.
The contributions are well-researched and not at all parochial in breadth, the standards of writing and production top-notch, and the whole thing generally a pleasure to handle and read. But that’s not why I mention it here.
Rather, it’s because one might look at it as an instance of festa pushed onto the fork, so to say. In two ways.
The book isn’t ‘heavy’. Its cover and pages are as less-is-more as it gets south of Milan and it would be comfortably at home on the tweediest of academic bookshelves. Besides, a good chunk of it is written by scholars looking at Mqabba from outside, as it were – rather like Jeremy Boissevain, the super-tall Dutch anthropologist studying the little villagers of Malta.
Then again, it’s an item of indigenous production. The life force behind it is still a band club locked in eternal rivalry with the local opposition.
One might think of it as a sophisticated psychological weapon in an arsenal which includes church silver, statues, masses of bunting, and a kamra tan-nar renowned for its awesome firepower.
Sicut Lilium and its (very much achieved) genteel aspirations are in good company. The caricature which comes to mind every time the house parts company with its foundations is of a hirsute and ample-waisted man in a flannel undervest chasing about a field, letting off fuses that are considerably longer than his own.
But that’s just that, a caricature. These days it is also increasingly tempered by the image of a well-groomed, soft-spoken and highly articulate medical doctor who dislikes the term ‘dilettanti tan-nar’ (fireworks enthusiasts) and prefers the more accomplished ‘imgħallmin’ (masters of their art), who describes rockets and petards as a ‘multi-sensory experience’, and who is not easily outwitted by waffle of decibels and damage to hearing.
Godfrey Farrugia is not a man you’d associate with flannel undervests. He will also forgive me for saying he is anything but macho, at least not in the vulgar sense of the word. All of which helps me approach my question.
Three caveats are in order. First, gentrification is not to be confused with organisation. The fact that festi nowadays come with billboards, colourful booklets, and a thousand sub-committees doesn’t necessarily mean they are gentrified.
Second, gentrification doesn’t easily translate into class. The OED definition is “to renovate and improve so that it conforms to middle-class taste”. But taste is very seldom a fixed or easily-known quantity. Most of the time it’s a type of performance or spectacle and linked only in circuitous ways to the social standing (whatever that means) of either the performers or the spectators.
Third, audiences can be deceptive. It is as incorrect as it is tempting to attribute the presence of, say, tourists or medical doctors at a festa to gentrification. It’s not presence that matters but rather location.
A few weeks ago I was talking to someone who comes from a very traditional background in Siġġiewi but who has also travelled the world, earned a doctorate, and quite effortlessly grown into a manner which is definitely not flannel undervest. She told me she loves her old San Nikola and that she was looking forward tremendously to the festa.
But she also gave me a smile and a wink, and that’s not because she was pleased to see me. Her humour was her way of distancing herself from the festa even as she told of its pleasures. Humour, along with photography and body language and a host of other things, is a wonderful distancing technique. So much for fakes, we can now move on to the genuine article.
I’ve never quite bought the frankly sociologistic idea that festa exists to bind communities together. I’ve yet to test this in the field but I doubt that the real reason why the marċ ta’ filgħodu people get soaked in vomit and body paint is that they believe in healthy communities. I suspect it’s rather the all-round experience that floats their boat. Aesthetics, in other words.
The key battleground of a genuinely-gentrified festa would be the notion of value. We would no longer be able happily to take in the sea of faux baroque, the red and yellow umbrelel (baldachins), the planċieri (bandstands) that would make a rococo revivalist blush, the street decorations that look like we were trying to make contact with another planet.
Instead we would discuss things like authenticity, good measure, the canons of contemporary sculpture, and such. We would get all serious and ethnographic, possibly patronising and judgemental. Above all we would try to regulate,regulate, regulate.
And what a staid world that would be. Much as I enjoy listening to the perorations of the Godfrey Farrugias,it’s the thought of the flannel undervests, beer-crazed revellers, and heaving Ħamrun streets that brightens up my morning.
mafalzon@hotmail.com