There’s one moment in the Harry Potter series when, amidst the celebrations of the Quidditch World Cup finals, the Dark Mark - a symbol evidencing dark wizard activity - appears in the night sky. I find this chilling because it is the moment when the common man in the street - the mes and yous that is - are forced to realise what they may have wanted to close an eye to: that it is time to take up arms against the evil wizards of the Dark Lord or perish ... or,well, do both. Of course in Harry Potter there are wizards who know it all and know it better than the rest: the "aurors" whose aim it is to capture dark wizards and witches. It is they who sense the evil wizards and launch their war, much before the smaller-minded lot (our type that is) understand that something is amiss ...
Vigilant and hell-bent on their witch hunts, our local censors seem to be doing just that: taking arms against the many forms of an enemy that aims to offend, undermine or destroy our collective morality. Like the little fish in the Harry Potter series, I am not yet sure about the exact nature of this enemy and I have no idea when the war really started, but looking back I think the first time it really struck me was when, after one Carnival weekend, some guys were dragged to court for dressing up as Christ and fooling around with statues of Christian saints.
A few years back I would have immediately reacted with scorn and run-off-the-mill anti-Roman Catholic Church conspiracy theory malice to this. Now, I believed, the situation merited the benefit of the doubt: maybe the encroachment of other cultures on European identity made this the right time to uphold the letter of the Law when it came to the status of the Roman Catholic religion on our island. If tagging the line of a slightly old-fashioned Roman Catholic outlook could help safeguard our identity against amorality, it was OK to give it a try. The Dark Lord may not have been there, but really there was no harm in the aurors erring on the side of caution every now and then. After all, this was just a reminder that our laws stress that we are not free to dress up as religious figures or to be offensive around religious statues: if this incident spelt the loss of a liberty, it was one which I felt we could all do with and that, on paper, we never had the liberty anyway.
I was more surprised by the criminal charges facing the editor who dared be responsible for Li Tkisser Sewwi. Not that it did more than amuse me at the time: here was this lucky bastard getting a break, without talent needing to have much to do with it. Every nitwit I knew who’d never read a page of ‘real’ literature (other than the little corners of his O’Level Literature syllabus that Cliffs notes failed to reach), was suddenly asking where he could get his hands on this story. People I thought should know better were buying the soon-after published novel by the same author out of sheer sympathy, or maybe in the hope of more ‘backdoor’ action … or both. To be honest I couldn’t really get what was so bad about Li Tkisser Sewwi that necessitated legal action. I mean they could have been nicer to the guy, rapped him lightly on the knuckles and said something like, ‘Listen, dear boy, less obscenity next time, a little less ass and absolutely no activity round the backside’. But all in all I was not bothered by the Vella Gera episode either.
Then of course when an evil voice on Facebook cried out to assassinate the head of church ... we all reeled. OK, maybe not quite all of us, and maybe he didn’t really mean it like that. How ‘evil’ that voice was remains debatable, but still we all know that behind the over-vigilance of a Mad Eye Moody there’s always wisdom of experience beyond the conception of mere muggles. So maybe it was just as well they gave the silly boy a good slap on the hand.
As for Stitching, apparently evil has a penchant for launching its attacks on the moral uprightness of a tight-knit (and had Vella Gera not dared make us doubt otherwise, tight-arsed) community by targeting the self-proclaimed ‘lovers of art’. These haunt the local, most boring (or just plain weird) productions, not out of love of art as much as out of the hope that these productions would turn out boring or weird enough to authenticate the artsy status of the audience.
Yet for the first time I was seriously doubtful: so one character masturbates at a picture of a naked woman in Auschwitz, but how does that, on its own, say anything of the play’s ‘message’? What if central characters in the play grow sexually perverse? Surely there is a vast difference between what a play stands for and what its characters do? And even then, surely a mature audience would not simply be carried away by anything a play chooses to stand for?
I was unsettled ... but only temporarily. After all, I reasoned, even as he saved their son from them, the Dursleys thought Harry was making up that bit about the dementors having been let out of Azkaban, hadn’t they? People who know better must protect those who don’t from their own lack of vision: and that is what our censors believed themselves to be doing. Besides, the artsy lot would probably find something boring and weird to watch in a week or so anyway. So maybe our democracy could survive the banning of Stitching, especially since it was a production most of us would not have given a fig about had it not been banned in the first place.
The volley of vile attacks on our public morality did not lose their grip on Gozo. There was Alexander Stankovski trying to attack the cloistered innocence of our sister island with ... well ... for one, with a rather over-large penis which looked gratuitously like ... a penis. Our protectors stepped in, banned the offending painting, and - lest we’d figured out how to use Google - we were safe again ...
Until the tourists hit our islands and started showing off nipples that is. Nipples! In this so vigilant, so cloistered, so unobscene, so missionary-in-position, so never-up-the-ass island of small phalluses!! Anyway we had this nipple situation - topless sunbathing to be precise - and these cute, little MTA supervisors were sent to clean up the beaches ... until skinny dippers started to kind of mushroom all over St George's Bay and had to have their asses duly arraigned, found guilty, and fined in court.
It’s not that hard to survive the censor's onslaught though. The emerging rules are simple enough for any fool to be able to pussyfoot around without getting into trouble: artists should learn to bypass all obscenities and never go ‘too far’ in depicting ‘degrading realities’, Carnival fun should be limited to buying one of those rattle toys and dressing up as a Ben 10 character, one should never mention the pope on Facebook (stick to safer subjects like the President if you really have to be offensive and of course if you’re a woman sunbathing in Malta just accept that you have to end up all beautifully bronzed but starkly white-boobed. So overall, unless you are too ugly to get any action and have no access to internet porn so that the stuff on the beaches is all you ever get, none of these spells any great loss or any real threat to democracy, right? And when the dark arts do strike back, we’ll all be fine having such a reliable team of censors watching out for our public morality -a rather too vigilant team perhaps, because one is occasionally left to wonder if this Minority Report attitude to all possible attacks on our morality is protecting us from anything in the first place. In fact it seems to me, lately, that much more energy is being spent fighting artistic and otherwise unreal depictions of immorality – which we can gain access to anyway, anytime we like - than fighting the shockingly rife, real-life immorality which is screaming at us from all angles.
Come to think of it, the World Cup final has come and gone and we haven’t quite seen the Dark Mark in the sky over any theatre or on any suspicious artists’ wrists have we? I mean not in the same way we’ve seen a clear general auditor’s report on one particularly worrying issue lately? In short, we hardly have proof that there are evil wizards on the other side of our aurors really. And hang on ... remember the best of aurors, Mad Eye Moody? In truth, if the Harry Potter saga teaches us anything about witch hunts, it is to never trust our own aurors until we know whether they’ve been imperisued and by whom and why. There may, indeed, be a mischievious imp laughing his head off, somewhere, at the success of his Imperius Curse on our censors … or, more worryingly, maybe the guy with the wand making our aurors dance to his music, is himself the evil wizard with bad intentions in our story? There is, indeed, a third option which is that there is no Imperius Curse involved, and that these censor guys have no ulterior motives.
If this is the case, the worst we can say is that they are much too tight-assed … which explains why Vella Gera’s story got them so bad in the first place, I suppose. But we shouldn't stop at calling our censorship system tight-assed: it is only healthy to debate on whether it is time to change our censorship laws for one, but it may also be just as healthy to ask what this system says about the Maltese public.
Do we, as a people, need censorship of this type? Do we have the ability to bring an analytical mind to a work of art, and anything else for that matter? The State clearly believes we don’t. For it seems to me that a State that terms itself democratic, and yet feels compelled to protect its people from adult works of art by the type of censorship we have seen of late, is only acknowledging its belief that it’s people are incapable of evaluating such a work. In so doing the State is, of course, also acknowledging its own spectacular failure in educating its people to experience a work of art. There may indeed be just such a failure pervading our educational system itself but it is very sad that the State’s answer is censorship. The aurors we need are not censors but Dumbledores: educators. If the problem we face is a general public which cannot be regarded as mature as its censors are in dealing with a work of art then, surely, education - not censorship - is the way forward. If, on the other hand, the problem is an evil - an unthinking, materialistic ignorance that is leading to decadence and loss of values in our society - maybe one should fight this unthinking ignorance, rather than blame all art that explores the resulting decadence (and any errant nipple) for it.
Sadly, it may hardly be said the current educational system is doing much to achieve this end. With artistic appreciation being given increasingly minor roles to play in school curricula, it is not even remotely trying to do this. Mature audiences can hardly be created out of schooling systems that often make do without music appreciation, and which reduce Art and Literature to optional subjects or with syllabus contents which force lessons to hurriedly skim over works of art, merely making sure that children get the basic storyline by stuffing summaries down their throats in the hope that they’ll be able to churn them back out on exam papers.
What could better serve the next generation, instead, is a sincere rethinking of the teaching of the appreciation of the arts, which in itself would require a few people up there to re-evaluate their beliefs about the relevance of artistic appreciation in the first place. Empowering our next generation with the knowledge that will allow them to look at a work of art and really evaluate it, will require authorities to give the arts their dues in school curricula. It will also require what has so far seemed quite unthinkable in schools: taking to class great, good and bad works of art - and I don’t mean ‘big penis’ bad! Rather, I mean what we commonly term ‘trashy’ works. Students need to be able to value good works and also weed out the worthless. They should be taught to foster and bring an analytical consciousness to works, to understand how the devices employed in a work of art plays on their sentiments, to decipher between the different voices in a piece, to analyse complexities in character motivations, to realise that works are often rooted in politics and, ultimately, to forge their meaning of a work and evaluate the relevance of that work of art to their own sense of being.
It will not be an easy lesson to teach, but then it can’t continue to be that easy to keep the ‘corrupting art’ from the ‘innocent’ anymore, especially given that most of our people do kind of have access to the internet. It could be a lesson well worth teaching, and should help create an audience which the State can regard as mature enough to freely experience adult works of art if it wants to, and which can view these works and criticise their artistic worth - which is more than mere censorship caters for. More importantly, it could help create in our people an analytical mindset that could be employed well beyond the realms of art. It could teach the little fry to see and react to the Dark Mark beaming clearly from the Auditor General’s reports, from unjust and disproportionate court sentences, from heavily mismanaged tax payers’ money - and all this despite how hard some people will try to side-track their concerns with minor issues. The development of a public which is better at analysis will make it less gullible and less likelly to be taken in by whatever is thrown at it. Why, it could even make our country that mythical ‘better place’ by giving our voter a ‘better’ head!
Particularly as the success of our educational system keeps being measured by false indicators, like money spent on school infrastructures or the amount of interactive whiteboards pouring into public schools, I’d really hate to think that any decision-maker would have ulterior motives for continuing to choose censorship over education when it comes to the arts.
One may choose to believe there to be a politically-motivated, evil master-plan to maintain this self-perpetrating ignorance, and to alienate people from serious issues, behind the current situation. I’d rather think the case is exactly what it seems to be: a few, well-intentioned censors making a silly mess of things together with education policy-makers who have priorities other than the arts and who cannot appreciate the role of education in making such censorship quite redundant. Whatever the reason behind it, however, I fear the censorship brigade is not serving the common good. Even if individual cases of censorship do not, in themselves, spell the end of local democracy our censorship system is too comfortable with the current stalemate and with upholding its own power to refuse Maltese audiences the right to adult art instead of seeking ways to educate the people to be able to appreciate such art in future and be worthy citizens of a worthy democracy.
Some of us, of course, are quite bothered by all this and so are either gaily employed in writing a sequel to Li Tkisser Sewwi, in the hope of overnight notoriety, or happily playing Harry Potter in this minor saga against the censorship brigade by organising silly little protests, symbolic funerals and protesting on Facebook statuses but, let's face it, the games and antics of little boys only ever changed the world in fiction! In actual fact, it's probably time to seriously go beyond playing Harry Potter, and also time for others to feel embarrassed at having ever felt chivalrous in playing aurors in this way. We really should get down to the business of making Hogwart's a place where the teaching of the Arts makes the defence of the people against any type of art greatly redundant.
Sincere thanks go to Balky54 for his cartoon and to is-Syd for his illustration. Thanks guys!
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