Billboard island

To the visitor, these odes to Fidel, Che and the revolution are deliciously exotic, besides being visually very striking. Most of it, of course, boils down to unadulterated propaganda but there is something so up-front and in-your-face about the messages on the billboards that they are somehow endearing when looked at from a visitor’s perspective.  Indeed, one splendid mural reads “Sin Propaganda, no hay movimiento de masas”, which hardly requires translation. No subliminal messages, spin or beating around the proverbial bush: perhaps this is the refreshing thing about the Cuba’s approach to political marketing.

The other day, I was having a brief Facebook chat with a friend, currently in Brazil, with whom I had travelled to Cuba. He wanted to know whether anything much had happened in Malta over the holidays and I could only think of the “Id-Divorzju – marda iinjettata f’mohh iz-zghazagh taghna” cartoon billboard which the combative parish priest of Zebbug put up in the locality, only a few months after his confident “Id-Divorzju: Alla Ma Jridux!” one had created a bit of a stir.

Now, the almost knee-jerk reaction to this kind of news on social networks is usually a mix of shock, incredulity, a hint of anger, perhaps a tinge of frustration and a smattering of easy irony which often ends up following the much-trodden path of the ‘Only in Malta’ variety.

But I found myself admitting to my friend that there is something attractively exotic about the parish priest’s billboard which prevented me from feeling terribly angry with the whole thing. At which point, my friend remarked that as a recently returned migrant, I was probably approaching the Zebbug billboard in the same way that I looked at the ones in Havana: in other words, the attraction of the exotic had trumped the fairly sad underlying reality. 

Which explains the fact, perhaps, that I quite like the billboard but simply can’t stomach the silence, wordplay, fence-sitting and delaying tactics which several politicians and other opinion-makers are deploying on this whole divorce issue.

Proper debate in this country is a rather rare commodity. Where exactly does it happen?

La Repubblica

This might partially explain another distinctly odd thing which occurred to me over the past few weeks. For the past five or six years, I have been a staunch fan of the Italian daily La Repubblica – that brilliant melange of news, culture and in-depth analysis which seems to me to be a prime example of the ‘European mind’ which Professor Henry Frendo examines in his latest publication.

And I have bought copies of the newspaper wherever a welcoming café, restaurant or park bench would allow me the leisure of a good read.

But something quite extraordinary has happened to me since I travelled back to Malta. Reading La Repubblica has started to feel somehow alien, as if the debates and discussions in that paper make sense in Paris, Copenhagen and Brussels but are somehow less immediate and relevant when read in Malta. 

It’s as if Maltese reality is, in terms of the debates and discussions which aliment Europe and the rest of the world, somehow sheltered from it all. Or rather, we now have all the means required to receive the news but there remains a strange deficit in the way be relate to that news. Malta is no North Korea or Belarus – where uncomfortable news is filtered out by the regime. Nonetheless, the island seems to inhabit an individual reality all of its own making which plays out to its own specific rules and can only be deciphered using its own particular codes. From radio stations, to television, to newspapers and the discussions which excite the man in the street, we have a very particular brand of discourse. In this perhaps, we are still quite isolated.