Against the grain

Who said Europe would open Malta to diverse and more open societies? MARIO AZZOPARDI says 2006 will give us more of the same: unfettered mediocrity, bigoted Christianity and more junk TV.

A goat grazing on the remaining grass on Regional Road, sweating in the south wind, inhaling fumes emitted by heavy vehicles burning hot tarmac, ruminating paper, plastic and dust is Mario Azzopardi’s latest provocative image of Malta, dull, uncreative, mediocre Malta, at the beginning of 2006.
It’s from his poem The Goat of Regional Road, to be published in a bilingual edition later this month in his book of new poems The Politics of Poetry, collected and studied by Charles Briffa. A metaphor for drab, soulless Malta that went on free-for-all development without any sense of direction, in a cultural void vacated by artists, authors and intellectuals, who left the public agenda to be set solely by politicians and the Church.
It’s a sad picture, the one explored by Azzopardi, the 61-year-old left-wing poet, theatre director and columnist. Within its frame, it has shining in vulgar brush strokes episodes of high-pitched anti-immigration hysterics, an equally hysterical anti-IVF war, the birth of a fascist far-right movement, a crusade to entrench the ban on abortion in the constitution and the total collapse of public broadcasting, all happening during our first year and a half in the European Union.
And what’s even more depressing is that nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed on a cultural and intellectual level since Malta’s entry into the EU – an event much anticipated by Azzopardi himself for its supposed liberating experience for conservative Maltese society.
“You should look at Europe on two different levels,” he says. “We had political and economic expectations, and we also had expectations of opening up to Europe in our mentality. As an author and a person committed in culture, the first thing that strikes me is the almost total absence of artists in all that you mentioned. Definitely the intellectuals did not set the agenda, they did not present their vision of Europe, but apart from that, they were also conditioned by the sway of politicians and the media.
“It was the same before we joined Europe,” he says. “We don’t have the notion of what an intellectual stands for and how he can work in society. With the exception of a very few, I think we have academics, not intellectuals. Ironically the thing that stood out most from academia is precisely the leadership of a new reactionary and conservative movement,” he says about the birth of Alleanza Nazzjonali Repubblikana – the anti-immigration alliance evoking what Azzopardi calls “archaic language, stoking the old sentiment of ‘values’ that seems to never die here in Malta. We call them ‘values’. This is another area we have to start seriously contesting. What are our values? To remain quiet? To swindle behind everyone’s back? To make a whole scene in a march just because you think Africans are going to invade us? What values are we talking about?”
Despite his public campaigning for Malta’s entry into the EU, he had also publicly expressed his fear that it was “joining Europe wearing the ghonnella” – the traditional headgear worn by Maltese women in bygone years – a metaphor of culturally and civilly outdated and irrelevant Malta within Europe.
“I think that in many cases that’s just what happened,” he says frankly, with a tinge of bitterness. “We’re not mentally prepared for the European experience. Just consider the resistance, the fortress mentality, to divorce, to abortion – to the extent that we wanted to entrench its ban in the constitution, and we’ve also started opposing in vitro fertilisation. How can you be, conceptually, part of the European secular family when you keep behaving as if you were a Vatican agency? We can’t keep acting like a Vatican agency just because it is politically convenient. There is no space for our outdated ‘values’ in this tidal wave of ideas coming from Europe. It just doesn’t make sense to remain in the fortress, or we will be simply written off.”
Azzopardi has enough fuel to sustain his anger – a whole year of anything but what he considers Europe’s cosmopolitan, pluralist values. Case in point is immigration – a great field of theatrical and artistic projects by Azzopardi with children immigrants, involving cultural institutions, social welfare agencies and the education ministry. Yet, since he is no longer at the education ministry’s policy unit, all the initiatives were stopped.
“What happened instead is that we got our first march to get rid of Africans in our society,” Azzopardi says. “Even the government followed suit. When did we first make a name in Europe? On the immigration issue. We were reactive, we’re never pro-active. We always said we’re a bridge between Europe and Africa, but in what way did we serve as a bridge? We were faced by a crisis: we panicked and were scared by some 2,000 immigrants. Were it not for immigration we wouldn’t have spoken at a European level, we wouldn’t even have made our presence felt.”
Indeed, isn’t it ironic that the Nationalist government which steered Malta into Europe happens to be so reactionary and conservative when it comes to liberal European values?
“When you think about it, the lobby for joining was never on the intellectual ticket, always on the economic and political ticket. The PN never said Europe was necessary to open up our society on an intellectual and cultural level. It was only about the political and economic expediency, so as far as our ideas are concerned we’re bound to remain defensive and irrelevant.”
Azzopardi is wary of the fertile grounds for fascism here. Even more of concern is the Christian language the fascist exponents are using and the Nationalistic rhetoric so close to the PN – both historical platforms of popular imagery for the Maltese.
“They’re using the same terminology, not just the symbolism: family values, the patria, and religion. Again, what family are we talking about? The families in court feuding for their inheritance for years between brothers and sisters? If you remove those cases you would solve the court backlog problem. It’s easy for the new alliance to be racist because the Maltese have always been racist: it’s now an extension of a deep-rooted sentiment.”
Speaking of deep-rooted sentiments, it is the bigoted Christianity of the Maltese that sparks in Azzopardi perhaps the most critical of flames, from pagan violent feasts to l-Istrina and the CHOGM luxury cars sold in the name of the poor and the moribund.
“We have manipulated the very idea of virtue to suit our shallowness: we’ve pitted saints to fight one another; we’ve traded with heaven for favours promising gold and diamonds in return for ‘grace’ (grazzja); we’ve gilded holy statues and icons and decked them with precious stones to protect us. And now we have perverted charity to gamble for cars, jewellery, gold watches and luxury cruises. Charity Maltese-style has become one big grotesque travesty, a parody, a massive lottery exercise staged as a carnival with orgiastic energy and sanctioned by the leaders of our island. The perverse spectacle, claiming ‘national solidarity’, includes nauseating voyeurism. The lame, the terminally ill and even the dead are screened to punctuate the charity carnival cum gambling spree, which is brought to a close with a strip show.”
It is also odd that the issues confronted directly 40 years ago by the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju – co-founded by Azzopardi against tradition and romantic values by presenting new literary and artistic forms with the 60s abroad as its wider backdrop – have now resurfaced on the political agenda but there is now nobody to confront and debunk them on an artistic and literary level.
“The difference in today’s generation is that it refuses to speak to the public, it is just not interested,” Azzopardi says. “We’ve heard statements made repeatedly that ‘we’re not interested in politics’. I believe that every creative act is a political act. You cannot just write for the sake of writing, that way the author would be no different from those who write prayers on holy pictures. Creative writing has, it must have, several political and social implications. In the sixties we addressed the public. We found our audiences by the sea, in village squares, in the countryside, on the church parvis, inside the churches… wherever you can leave an effect. There was a movement consciously intended to mobilise people and make them aware of what was happening. Today if you go for a book launch or an art exhibition, you can predict beforehand all the 40 or 50 people who will attend. Always the same circle of people – that says a lot about the artists’ relevance.”
As if to add fuel to the fire, I tell him Malta’s popular icons are Xarabank, l-Istrina, Becky, Tista’ Tkun Int, is-Sur Gawdenz, the Eurovision… and to make matters worse all this junk is propagated on the national public broadcasting television station.
“I’ve written endlessly about this mediocrity,” he says with a sigh. “At the end of the day, is a politician interested in the intellectual development of the people? Of course not. Do you ever hear a politician speaking intellectually in parliament? Ever heard of a parliamentary speech that edifies you? I’ve heard MEPs quoting their authors and poets. But over here our artists and intellectuals have abrogated their responsibility as agenda setters of the public sphere, so naturally the political, ecclesiastical powers have ignored them completely. Look at the TV talk shows, even on the national station: how many of them touch on the cultural aspect? None of them. Why? Because they don’t believe in it. So you have public broadcasting using its most powerful platforms, talk shows, which incidentally are all farmed out to private companies, ignoring totally some of the most essential discussions, banalising everything. So we should not be surprised that people end up watching Becky and is-Sur Gawdenz. What do you expect when you systematically treat the people like idiots? When people are paying their TV licences to be treated like kids? We’re just investing in prime-time banality.”
As an educator, Azzopardi pins down Malta’s cultural and intellectual backwardness to a stale educational system that is reproducing a stale generation of young people. He sees no redeeming factor in the upcoming generation.
“They’re terrorised to speak,” he says. “The students I teach at university are totally conditioned by the system, they have a phobia for exams. The first thing they ask themselves when they look at you as their lecturer is whether you are a potential exams threat. That is their absolute priority. We’re a living example of Paulo Freire’s banking theory” – that is the teacher ‘deposits’ in the students a capital of data and knowledge, and the student is academically rewarded for reproducing that capital uncritically.
“Education should be creative, thought provoking and entrepreneurial, but all it is doing is reproducing itself repeatedly. We’re investing nothing in research: nobody at the dockyard to study how to diversify, nobody at Denim to analyse new trends – in my opinion this all boils down to a rigid, stale education that systematically kills creativity. Our students are only rewarded for reproducing their lecturers’ notes. Our education is not liberating, it’s oppressive. Any idea that does not fit what is already pre-established is dangerous or irrelevant, and this has serious repercussions across the board.”
Azzopardi’s rage against the establishment and the Maltese status quo never dilutes as he gets older. Yet as a declaredly left-wing author, he still feels comfortable writing his column on the PN’s newspaper, possibly the most partisan thing on earth after Manwel Cuschieri. How can he live with that?
“Because there’s a climate of live and let live,” he says about the PN. “I’ve been writing in the PN’s papers for the last 12 years and I was never censored. In its first two years my column created controversy, now it seems it has been accepted and expected. You cannot do that with Labour. With Labour you have to tow the line, I know what I’m talking about.”
A cynic might say the establishment has placated him by providing him with a harmless niche. “In Malta you’re harmless if the politicians can ignore you; that doesn’t take away my moral obligation to speak and say things as I see them.”
Do you feel ignored by politicians?
“Maybe, but I know they read my column. I’m definitely not ignored by the readers, I receive a lot of feedback. To the question of whether what I stand for can ever materialise concretely, I think the answer is no. For that to happen you have to become a politician and I’m too free to associate myself with a party in that way. The thing is, if there is a voice, it can be isolated and put in a niche, as you put it. If there are 20 such voices, they cannot isolate them. If there are 40, they cannot be ignored at all. If only there is pressure from artists, authors, musicians, then it would be a different story. But there is no intellectual lobby.
“Fortunately right now I feel the independent press is a pace setter, it’s a force to be reckoned with, a force that compels us to think alternatively, independently of the establishment. Naturally it doesn’t have legislative power but I see it developing as an alternative power.”
His highly critical views about Alfred Sant as a political leader are well known, but how does he explain the fact that the Opposition consistently fails to attract non-traditional voters to elect it to government?
“The fundamental mistake of the MLP is that it keeps preaching to the converted. It keeps speaking the language of the grassroots. Labour knows that its mass of followers is probably the most culturally disenfranchised, emotional, that does not rationalise things but give you emotional loyalty. And Labour is only interested in appealing to that mass. What’s worse is that the General Workers’ Union is also going down that lane, and the more Tony Zarb screams and appears close to Sant, the bigger the persuasion deficit of the Labour party.”
Azzopardi expects more of the same in this new year. “There seems to be no opening, no alternative prospects,” he says. “Someone needs to ring the alarm bell, but I don’t know who.”
He will be certainly doing his bit, as the publication of his book of poems draws nearer. “It’s a statement of what I believe is committed literature,” he says about his poetry. “I still believe that every literary act is political, even if it says nothing explicitly political, because silence is political.”