Xarabankesque

Kafkaesque marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: ‘Kafkaesque bureaucracies’, and marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger.

Potteresque resembling or suggestive of scenes and situations described in the Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling

A couple of weeks ago, it dawned on me that Malta’s favourite television programme deserves its own adjective, or eponym if you will. Love it or hate it Xarabank, which glues people to their TV even when they know they’ll end up with cramps in their stomach, has developed into another Maltese phenomenon which looms large on this country’s cultural horizon. One might actually argue that Peppi Azzopardi has managed to pull off the most arduous of all Herculean tasks by building up his come-one-come-all Jerry Springer-Show-With-a-Conscience into something resembling an institution which can rival the three traditional behemoths on their home soil.

The fact that Xarabank has chosen to co-opt the Church, the PL and the PN, rather than challenging them, is another matter. But presumably, if Azzopardi and his crew wanted to give them a run for their money, his 15-year-old baby has become sufficiently institutionalised and popular to pull that off. In other words, behind its charitable pleas and cuddly smiles, Xarabank has become an enormously powerful machine.

And like every powerful institution, Xarabank has its own distinctive idiosyncrasies and tics, its own ethos and cultural imprint. Hence, the coining of the words Xarabankjan, Xarabankesk, Xarabankizzazzjoni which I was busy discussing on Facebook with a group of friends the other day. 

This is what people came up with:

Xarabankizmu: refers to an industry which transforms complex issues into a matter of ‘agree/disagree?, often in the service of an undeclared agenda and by means of which logical argumentation is reduced to soundbites or to a base appeal to emotion.

Xarabankata:refers to something uttered which is entirely banal. For example “I’ve got nothing against gays, but I don’t want my children to be exposed to gay obscenities in the street”. Or “I’ve got nothing against blacks but they can’t come to Malta and take our work, because that’s ours”. Or “A round of applause for all politicians because they all work very hard for us and deserve it.”

Xarabankizzazzjoni: many people have come to confuse this term with any other demonstration of vulgarity or uncouth behaviour. But it refers rather to something more specific, an attitude and process whose main thrust is the reduction of ideas to a simplistic conclusion bathed in a do-gooder feel. In its own right, the Xarabankization of Maltese society has brought about a form of benign populism.

And one shouldn’t ignore also:

Xarabankenfreude: the pleasure one gets from being critical of Xarabank.

Creating words and concepts like this is obviously great fun but behind the good humour there lies a truth which may be unpalatable for many people. And that is that Xarabank might well be the major cultural product to have emerged from Malta in the past 15 years. This should perhaps be a sobering thought for a country which likes to think of itself as something of a cultural destination.

My point is that if we want to talk about Malta in cultural terms we can’t simply ignore Xarabank and its clones by making a convenient distinction between art and entertainment. Xarabank and its attitudes have, like it or not, become part of the Maltese cultural landscape. In fact it is the dominant cultural voice, arguably rivaling the Church in its formulation of attitudes, manners of speech and mass consciousness. Mass culture, as Frédéric Martel and Alessandro Baricco have shown in Mainstream and I Barbari, should be taken seriously. Retreating into a snobbish and critical silence, as many have done in the face of all this dumbing down, may create an illusion of superiority. In reality though, Xarabank is winning the cultural war.