Censorship in Malta: from ‘Li tkisser sewwi’ to a carnival pastiche

Censorship returns. Ten years after a novelist faced jail for a short story deemed ‘obscene’ at law, it looks like Malta has come full circle.

Now under a new liberalised regime, the new censorship laws are being tested by a bizarre carnival float whose designs offended public sentiment by juxtaposing the Archbishop with two horned cherubs and the name ‘St Joseph Home’ – site of the historic sex abuse that took place in the children’s home – as well as inserting an LGBTQI rainbow in the pastiche. Did we fail the first test?

Definitely the context is different. In 2009 novelist Alex Vella Gera and editor Mark Camilleri faced a possible six months’ imprisonment for writing and publishing Li Tkisser Sewwi – a  short story related from the perspective of a male chauvinist rapist, which ultimately exposed the brutality of sexism.

Just a few months earlier, theatre company Unifaun’s attempts to stage an Andrew Nielsen play, Stitching, were thwarted by the Stage and Film Classification Board, resulting in a Constitutional case that the producers of Stitching were to go on to lose.

But instead of a chilling effect, the two cases of blatant repression on seasoned artists served as an awakening for the artistic community, culminating in a mock funeral for free speech.

The dark side exposed

The evocative image of the University of Malta rector’s beadle seen dumping piles of the left-wing newspaper Ir-Realtà placed in the university’s hallway to be taken for free, had exposed the darker side of a conservative Malta. The police report filed by rector Juanito Camilleri led to a court case, which was ultimately thrown out by the law courts in a landmark sentence in 2011 which upheld freedom of speech.

Riding on the crest of a more liberal social climate ushered by the watershed divorce referendum, the newly-elected Labour government proceeded to undo anachronistic laws limiting freedom of expression.

Criminal sanctions for “vilification of the Roman Catholic religion, and other cults tolerated at law”– an offence that previously entailed imprisonment of up to six months – was removed. The 1975 obscenity laws invoked against Vella Gera and Camilleri, which generically outlawed any expression that ‘unduly emphasised sex, crime, horror, cruelty and violence’, were removed.

But a decade after Li Tkisser…, the artistic community is itself faced by the moral dilemmas posed by universal distaste towards a carnival float, which was not allowed to carry the words ‘St Joseph Home’ or be banned from the national carnival defilé organised under the auspices of the culture ministry. Newly-appointed minister José Herrera insists the case has got nothing to do with censorship, but legal advice that the float is “defamatory and constituted hate speech” – ostensibly for linking Archbishop Charles Scicluna to a history of sex crimes in the St Joseph Institute, Malta’s singular case of major child abuse in a church institution. “If a student at a church school is caught dealing drugs, we shouldn’t perceive the archbishop as a drug dealer just because he is the head of the institution… There is always a limit, and we shouldn’t tread maliciously on others,” Herrera said.

But his interpretation was shot down by the anti-censorship campaigner and National Book Council chairman Mark Camilleri, who says only the courts should establish whether something is defamatory or not: “Against whom is it defamatory? The Archbishop? The children’s home? Herrera is incorrect, he is clutching at straws.”

Now that the float will still make it to the defilé after the reference to the children’s home was removed, it seems the official intervention did result in changes to an “artistic” exhibit – which begs the question, why would not the same reasoning lead to censorship of any satire on public figures linked to nefarious acts like corruption?

This is a test case for a new minister José Herrera

A test case for a new minister

Author Alex Vella Gera considers the controversy over the carnival float as a test case for these changes. “I have been asked a number of times on the impact of these legal changes and I have always answered that one has to wait for another case where the temptation to censor is too big for the authorities, perhaps to appease public opinion… and finally eight years after my case was concluded, we have a test case for the new law… And finally we have a good test case for the law. And what does the minister do… he censors… It just shows that this was a cosmetic change.”

Sure enough many in the artistic community did not feel there was much to defend in the carnival float itself. Vella Gera himself thinks it was done in “bad taste”, but then bad taste is no justification to censor.

“The more it is felt to be in bad taste, the greater the test case, because what makes a decision difficult is to accept the right of expression of someone you find irritating and who insults your own values.”

For, as happens the world over, it is often bizarre and distasteful cases often pose a test for case law. So how far can tolerance for the distasteful be extended? Would it be ok to exhibit a float mocking stranded asylum seekers? It such questions that could put us between a rock and a hard place.

One overlooked aspect of the controversy is the context: that of a float in an officially sanctioned carnival defile. MaltaToday editor Matthew Vella commented as much that the problem with the float was “its inappropriate place in the grand Defilé” – an aspect of carnival which unlike the spontaneity of counterparts in Nadur and Hal Ghaxaq “has always had a degree of sanitisation… there are expectations of certain levels of profanity which a carnival that has the ‘blessing’ of national authorities will never be able to go beyond”.

Moreover, it may well be unfortunate that the limits of institutional tolerance to free speech have been tested with what Vella calls “unsophisticated juxtaposition of images”, which many, including LGBTIQ activists and social workers, found offensive to their sensibilities.

But it’s songwriter and composer Alex Vella Gregory who made one of the most succinct points in a Facebook comment, where he identified the float’s most problematic aspect: the lack of social responsibility by its creators “to make sure that any satire is not made at the expense of the weak and vulnerable” – in this case, the St Joseph Home residents.

Further muddling the affair was the “inability of the artists to express a clear thought or position, and throwing in further unrelated elements including two men holding hands standing over a cake – what exactly are we satirising here? Same-sex couples? Confectionery?”.

For Vella Gregory the float controversy reflects a poor understanding of satire. “Satire should make us ask fundamental questions – and Carnival can be a superb platform for it. But if we reduce it to mere spectacle, that is precisely what we will get. In this case it’s a macabre spectacle of ignorance, anger, and frustration.

He contends that the ban on censorship has not “liberated” Carnival, which till some time ago was dominated by Disney characters. “Most of the floats are mere eye-candy, devoid of social commentary. Some have made efforts but the end result remains weak, precisely because they lack the depth of thought,” and warns that as long as we justify mediocrity with the excuse of freedom of expression, “the result will be situations like this.”

Subversion in carnival

Such an argument raises the question of how mature or sophisticated, carnival float craftsmen are to make use of full artistic freedom. It is an argument that can be accused of elitism, especially when one of the adult victims of the St Joseph sex abuse expressed his solidarity for the float-makers, seeing an opportunity to highlight the fact that no compensation has yet been offered to the abuse victims.

Still, should something as serious and painful as clerical sex abuse be even tackled in a carnival float? Would it not be healthier to mock those in power without caricaturing their victims too?

Carnival is historically associated with the subversion of the prevailing order, a day when bishops and kings could be mocked with a degree of impunity by town folk who become kings for a day.

Yet for the past decades carnival in Malta consisted mainly of a defilé attended by children in costumes, an environment which is far from conducive to subversion. Labour MEP and writer Alfred Sant, who firmly disagrees with censorship, but had disagreed with the lifting of the ban on political satire in carnival when the suggestion was first floated in 1998, feels vindicated.

“Back than I disagreed with this and many were scandalised…. They accused me that I was against freedom of speech…. But my point remains that we live in a small society where political satire easily degenerates into personal insult which serves to deepen partisan divide among others… The anger felt by different segments of society… is amplified by the country’s small size”.

What Sant finds striking is that it had to be “satire on the Catholic Church” to re-open the debate on satire in carnival.

On his part the Archbishop who himself felt aggrieved by the “malicious” float linking him to sex crimes, chimed in saying that he hopes to see floats featuring politicians linked to gifts from alleged Caruana Galizia murder mastermind Yorgen Fenech – an obvious dig at Joseph Muscat. “I have no objection to seeing that whoever occupies a public role is subjected to satire… hopefully there will be other floats on politicians who gave us a lot to talk about in recent times in terms of satire. I’ll be curious to see whether there’ll be any floats depicting specific watches and particular brands of wine,” he said, referring to the Bvlgari watch Muscat was gifted from Fenech.

The archbishop’s provocation smacks of gross inconsistency, simply because he himself objected to the ‘defamatory’ carnival. Is it a case of one law for himself and another for others?

But it does raise one important question: how can this year’s carnival not make any reference to the meltdown of the Muscat government, or is the Church an easier target to pick on for satire and ridicule?

In the wake of Tangentopoli in 1992, carnival floats in Italian cities like Acireale were replete with images of politicians like Bettino Craxi and Gulio Andreotti in hand-cuffs. More recently it was the turn of Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ orgies, even if their existence was contested in the law courts. And apart from the refreshing online presence of ‘Bis-Serjeta’, satire has been so far completely absent in commenting on recent political events in Malta.

And on this point Alex Vella Gera is in agreement with the archbishop. “I would also like to echo the Archbishop’s statement that the political class is incredibly ripe for satire right now. Will there be any in the carnival? I doubt not…. There’s self-censorship going on there which should be addressed as a cultural failing.”

READ MORE: ‘Our float should be a wake-up call to the Church’