Exoticizing Discoveries and Extraordinary Experiences:

 'Traditional' music, modernity, and nostalgia in Malta
and other Mediterranean societies

Tradition as 'Discovery' of 'Marginality': Għana and Folklore Mark II
 

If folklore has become marginalised, so too has its subject, għana. Yet recently a new phenomenon has been occurring with respect to the 'traditional' - its 'rediscovery'. The rehabilitation of traditional rural architecture, the festa, the carnival, etc, has received attention elsewhere, and some is now almost 20 years old. But it has also belatedly affected għana. Indeed the elite appears keen to discover għana as a symbol of marginality. The following is a recent example of this 'discovery':

"I first heard għanja many years ago, in a field below the ramparts of Rabat. I was lying on my back at the time, in the flower-specked grass and hot sun when, as if from the stone of an old dry wall, a strangely repetitive yet subtly alternating sound floated toward me. Almost, but never quite shrill, a man's voice, no longer young, came from what sounded like a long, long ago. A sad song it was and the guitar between the laments gave contrast, punctuating each delivery of what seemed to me to be the sound of a heart in torment.

It was, at the same time, familiar, remembered, but not quite recognised. Had I heard it somewhere, in another place? Africa perhaps.....[ ] [ ]

It would appear, though nothing is certain, that the Moors in their eight-century spread, took their Berber roots, song included, with them and somewhere along the years in places like Malta, semi-isolated, slow to alter, the primitive origins held fast and maintained their strong grip.

Maltese għanja - chanted poetry - is unique in its present form. Unpopularised, it reperesents perhaps the last defiant shout of a proud individuality and the commonplace.

Għannejja, the singers with their improvised rhythms, call and respond to the other. Epic melodrama. Lost loves. Tragedy. Satire. Humour. All the stuff of life and of theatre, resistant to time and the magnets of commerce. (Markland, 1996, 39, my emphasis)

 
This article appeared in Sunday Circle a glossy magazine supplement published monthly by The Sunday Times (of Malta), a conservative and Catholic and the most widely read Sunday newspaper on the island. The article appears to have been written by an English author for a Maltese audience and is presented almost as a discovery. The very process of an outsider writing on an intimate aspect of normally shunned local culture both exoticises and legitimates it.

There is much of interest here. There is little on the contemporary nature of għana, or its history. It does not tackle even the first problem one encounters when discussing the phenomenology of listening to għana - whilst it is popular among aficionados and is an acquired taste, for someone not brought up on it, a first hearing can be an unsettling experience. In this account the emotion is transparent and emerges in spite of the lack of comprehension. In short, the music of the voice as emotion rather than the content emerges as significant, whereas the text, the extemporization, the play on words, the metaphors and tropes are what is particularly interesting in għana. The article errs in suggesting that għana deals with "all the stuff of life and of theatre". In fact the themes treated are usually banal and pedestrian especially spirtu pront. Nor is għana unpopularised. It has long been popular among aficionados. Indeed it has become increasingly popular and recognized among a wider group of people. And it has long been affected by "the magnets of commerce": recordings were made since the early 1930s, tapes are produced and circulate including overseas, and most singers would wish for more, rather than less, recognition through the marketplace. Some can command high fees. Nor is it 'the last defiant shout of a proud individuality". Indeed the individuality is controlled and overt virtuosic individuality is usually condemned (Herndon 1987). Yet the traditional commensality and competition has changed. Some singers (7) now view themselves as poets, as innovators rather than carriers of tradition.(8)

To understand musical practices in many Mediterranean societies, such as għana (Malta), rebetika (Greece), tchiattista (Cyprus), arabesk (Turkey) and flamenco (Spain), one must thus locate them within the disciplines that discourse on 'tradition', from folklore to the contemporary mass media. Such disciplines have long been influenced by the relationship to elites in their project of national culture construction. In these societies popular culture (including music) often fitted ambiguously within the model of official culture (Herzfeld, 1987). In Malta għana was sited 'between folklore and concealment' (Sant Cassia, 1989), i.e. whilst it clearly was 'folkloric', the middle classes never held it up as an example of their official export-model culture. This also appears to be the contemporary status of tchiattista in Cyprus especially in its song duel forms. Tchiattista operates between folklore and non-display in Cyprus, partly because the model of legitimate Culture, worthwhile of preservation and display to outsiders, derives from mainland Greece. Laographia (folklore) in Cyprus is generally either Greek or Turkish laographia, rather than Cypriot, although many aspects of Greek and Turkish Cypriot material culture were relatively similar. (Greek) Cypriot middle classes still trace their cultural roots from Greece rather than Cyprus. Thus mainland Greek popular music rebetika, laika, etc, is acceptable in Cyprus (although these types of music had their own trajectories of resistance, concealment and acceptance). Tchiattista associated as it is with a semi-literate older 'peasant' (horkathikhi) generation which most Cypriots wish to distance themselves from, is not.

In Turkey 'arabesk is considered to be the music of labour migrants from the SE of the country, a backward and exotic orient existing as a revealing anomaly in a Westernized and secular state' (Stokes, 1992: 8). Arabesk is associated with 'the arab world', which the Turkish elite (who have long interiorised orientalist perceptions in the Saidian sense), wish to suppress or shed along the Attaturkist goal of secularism and modernity. Yet as Stokes points out in his rich analysis, such music is liked by certain segments whose role is to uphold secularism (eg army officers). Nor is it the music of the gecekondu (shanty towns) any more than anywhere else. He suggests that the association 'is a metaphoric statement' about 'social liminality'.

By contrast għana, as popular culture, appears to be achieving a different profile in the contemporary politics of culture in Malta.(9) Intellectuals now visit popular bars and restaurants, attend festas, Good Friday processions, etc.(10) 'Popular culture' is now de rigeur. Intellectuals and students participate in Carnivals, especially in Gozo, Malta's sister island, which are more ludic and playful than the Valletta carnival long under rigid state control and sponsorship. This created problems with villagers who were initially flattered. The warmness soon wore off. They confronted the lecturer/researcher with the accusation that they had 'ruined their carnival' (Cremona, 1995; 92). As Boissevain has wryly noted: 'Tourists often from anonymous northern European suburbs and bent on a vigorous fortnight of something totally different, are particularly drawn to the ludic insider events. They want to play, to take part in the very events that the locals have devised to get away from them' (1992;14). Yet these were not northern Europeans but local middle class youths who appeared to be acting as tourists in their own society.(11)

We can now more fully appreciate the background and implications of the depiction of għana in the Sunday Supplement. What seems to be occurring is that whilst there has been a veritable inversion of the significance of 'traditional culture' of which għana has always formed a resistant and resilient part, this is much more along the lines of a process of 'discovery' and 'marginalization' as occurred with the Gozo carnival. What is critical here is the mutual confabulation of the category of 'the marginal', and the experience and recounting of its 'discovery'. The process involves the following steps:
 

 
Għana, like the Gozo carnival, becomes a symbol of marginality, paradoxically invested with a residual power - not so much power from the past, but power that has survived inspite of the past, and which is likely to 'disappear' because of the onslaught of the 'modern world'. The ultimate sign (and trick) of modernity is to resist its implications, by salvaging that which proclaims itself salvageable. Għana is thus 'discovered' through the construction of the category of 'marginality', which at the same time it is held up to embody or represent. As an 'otherness', it is no longer an intimate otherness, but a part of an exotic otherness from the wider category of world music, and exoticised by its association with other examples of 'traditional' music, dance or even performance. In the next section I suggest that much wider forces are involved in the revitalization of rituals than Boissevain suggests.

Introduction | The different genres of għana | Approaches to għana | Għana as 'Tradition' | Tradition as Preservation
 History and Folklore | Tradition as 'Discovery' of 'Marginality' | Revitalised rituals, or Reperceived rituals?
Exoticizing Discoveries and Extraordinary Experiences | Conclusion | Notes | Bibliography