Abstract
Festa is what people in Malta call the annual celebration of town and village Catholic patron saints. Fireworks, including loud petards, are one of its ingredients. Anthropologists working in Malta have tended to think of them as a sort of aural backdrop to festa. The point of the article is to foreground the sound of fireworks as an anthropological object in its own right. It is correct to say that there is no festa without fireworks. They constitute part of its multisensory Gesamstkunstwerk: their penetrative power means that they purvey festa to individual bodies; their sound structures its temporality; there is much sonic rivalry between different festa groups; and they spatialize festa in a way that renders their location ambiguous. Fireworks are “sound” to some and “noise” to others. For the latter, they go against the (largely middle-class) expectations of a “proper” soundscape. The contest is played out in the form of discourses on gender as well as the notion of “moderation,” itself seen as a corollary of a European modernity.
The Mediterranean archipelago-state of Malta consists of three inhabited islands as well as a number of uninhabited islets. The total land area is 316 square kilometers and the population just over 400,000. The demographic and spatial context is therefore one of a very small and fairly densely populated place. Significantly for what follows, most of the country is visible from whichever place on the island one looks. Sound too tends to carry rather well.
Politically, Malta became independent from the United Kingdom in 1964 and has since functioned as a parliamentary democracy. In 2004, it joined the European Union as a full member state. The Roman Catholic religion accounts for a major share of formal religious affiliation and is also very present, physically in the form of thousands of churches, chapels, and shrines, and in the public sphere.
It is hardly surprising that this godly geography should have whetted the appetite of anthropology. Following an unpromising early start that attempted among other things to classify the Maltese as a “Mediterranean race” (Bradley, 1912; see also Sant Cassia, 1993), postwar fieldworkers turned their gaze to religion. Probably the best-known contribution is Jeremy Boissevain’s (1993) Saints and Fireworks, first published in 1965 and based on fieldwork in a small village. Jon Mitchell’s (2002) more recent Ambivalent Europeans drew on work carried out in the urban context of Valletta.
In both cases the starting point was what the Maltese call festa (pl. festi), the annual celebration of a patron saint(s). Every town and village in Malta has at least one festa. Festi typically take place in summer and are spread over a number of days. Every festa is made up of a composite of two related types. Festa interna (lit. “internal feast”) involves that part that is limited to the space of the church, which is draped in all its finery and where special ceremonies are held. Festa esterna (lit. “external feast”) is a more elaborate matter. The streets come alive with bunting, statues, confetti, and lights, and brass bands play marches and solemn anthems. The peak is reached when the statue of the patron, usually a Catholic saint or the Madonna, is carried along the streets in procession.
Festi involve an astonishing collective effort by “dilettanti,” groups of men and women who spend most of their spare time working away to produce the sounds and sights that they believe give a particular flavor to the event. Most places in Malta have more than one (usually two) major festi. An important element of festa is pika (roughly translated as “rivalry”), which sees different groups, each united under some or other patron saint, do their best to better their neighbors’ festive output. Pika is strongest between groups from the same locality and may involve rival clubs celebrating the same feast. It also occurs on a broader level between neighboring towns and villages. We might add that festi, and therefore pika (or is it the other way round?), have grown enormously in recent years.
The one ingredient of festa we are particularly interested in is fireworks, known in Maltese as “nar” (lit. “fire”). Many festa groups have their own fireworks factories and formal fireworks committees. There are presently around 35 licensed factories, and the list keeps getting longer. They range from isolated rooms to sprawling compounds in the countryside. It is here that fireworks enthusiasts produce the two types of display that characterize a festa. The first is called ġiġġifogu (from the Italian gioco di fuoco, “playing with fire”) and consists of street-level Catherine wheels and such. The second and the more striking is in-nar tal-ajru (“air display”). This is made up of petards called tal-bomba, literally “bombs,” that go off with tremendous bangs, and rockets called tal-kulur, which are usually choreographed into striking evening displays of color.
Both Boissevain (1993) and Mitchell (2002) mention fireworks in their analyses. Boissevain (1993) tends to locate them within his general anthropology of festa politics. He describes how festa goers from all over the island compare “the quantity and the rhythm of the exploding rockets . . . with those of their own and other feasts,” and argues that “the reputation of the village depends upon their judgement” (p. 58). Boissevain’s descriptions are rich and vivid and do much to convey the multisensory experience of festa. In one of his finer ethnographic moments, he links an encounter with festa fireworks to one of his “native’s point of view” moments. The epiphany is worth quoting.
The mixture of sacred and profane which results was shown to me very vividly during one of the first festas I attended. I was in the church during a particularly solemn moment in the service of worship. Suddenly there was a nerve-shattering burst of fireworks from the roof of the church. Then, slowly, the sharp smell of burning gunpowder began to drift in through the open doors and mingle with the pungent odour of candles and incense. After that I ceased to be aware of their separateness, and realized that both incense and gunpowder were ingredients basic to the celebration of a festa. (Boissevain, 1992, p. 59)
Yet even this “moment of realization” was not enough for Boissevain (1993) to take sound seriously. At one point in Saints and Fireworks he talks of the “immensity” of petards, “often made from half-gallon tins packed with gelignite that is either stolen or extracted from dud shells and bombs fished up from military target areas by festa enthusiasts . . . occasionally their explosions break windows” (p. 61). Military gelignite and shattered window panes are hardly footnote trivia, one might suppose, but that is exactly where Boissevain puts them.
On his part, Mitchell (2002) is ambivalent about the role of fireworks. On the one hand he relegates them to the minor function of “aural backdrop” to Maltese feasts. At the same time he does say that they are an “important,” nay “necessary, part of festa” in that they serve to “ritualize” it. It would be mean-spirited to say that Ambivalent Europeans is generally insensitive to the nuances of festa. And yet we still feel that Mitchell’s work ultimately fails systematically to explore the “importance” and “necessity” of fireworks. They are certainly present but not really as an anthropological object per se.
This is what we set out to fix in this article, which is based on several weeks of intensive research (mainly interviews and participant observation sessions at festi, fireworks factories, band clubs, and public spaces) in 2010 as well as an ongoing anthropological immersion, so to say, as permanent residents of Malta.
Our mission is both risky and arbitrary. The first because, like the enthusiasts who fish up unexploded bombs and give them a voice, we shall attempt to transport fireworks—by far the most significant sound of festa, we believe—from the alleyways of footnotes and aural backdrops to the main square of anthropological analysis. The second, because there is more to fireworks than sound; clearly, the visuals are just as important. Thus, although we subscribe to recent programmatic notions that urge the social sciences to move beyond an “ideology of the visual [that] has afforded an epistemological privilege to sight over hearing” (Smith, 1994, p. 232), we also think that it would be unwise to reverse the compliment. As Matless (2005, p. 747) puts it, “(W)hile geographies of sound should attend to the sensory and epistemological differences of ear and eye, claims of cultural, political and intellectual distinction or autonomy do not necessarily follow.” Our emphasis on bangs is simply practical-methodological—we choose to “make the cut” around sound.
Our work belongs within a burgeoning interest within the social sciences in sound as a cultural product. 1 With respect to anthropology, it is not as if ethnography has only just begun to prick up its ears. It is easy to see (both theoretically and with respect to actual outcomes) how the Malinowskian methodological paradigm set the stage for the transformation of multisensory experience into nuanced description and analysis. Rather, the point is that there is a growing sensitivity to sound as a signifier in its own right.
Consider, for example, the recent work of Oosterbaan (2009) on the politics of sound in a Brazilian favela. Drawing in part on Attali’s work on noise as power (Attali, 1985), Oosterbaan argues that sound and music are essential constituents of identities and powerful tools for different groups in the favela to exercise what he calls a “politics of presence”—a process by which sound becomes an essential marker of territoriality in the city: “The soundscape forms an important element of the public space of the favela and reveals many of its power relations” (Oosterbaan, 2009, p. 85).
Oosterbaan’s points about territoriality, identities, and power resonate with much of what follows. We will first talk about the ways in which sound generally and fireworks specifically are important components of festa. We then move on to discuss some aspects of the politics of sound with respect to fireworks, namely, their physical and social spatiality, modernity and moderation, and gender. Our contention throughout is that our object is full of sound and fury, signifying something.
No Festa Without Fireworks
In a recent editorial in a magazine issued by the Malta College of Parish Priests, the author (himself a priest) argued that it is not true that fireworks are a necessary part of festa; on the contrary, their inherent danger threatens to spoil the fun. 2 The piece, which went by the title “Killer Feasts,” did not go unnoticed among dilettanti and attracted a fair bit of flak in the media. That is because it flew in the face of a much-repeated mantra. The first thing that dilettanti and festa-goers generally will tell you is that M’hemmx festa bla nar (“There’s no feast without fireworks”). What they mean is not that fireworks “add something” to festa but that they are an intrinsic and inextricable part of it. We believe they are right, in at least five ways.
First, festa is a quintaphonic Gesamstkunstwerk in which acoustics play as important a part as the smell of incense and shows of church silver. It is not just fireworks that make up this soundscape. The music of brass bands, church bells in festive mood, and even the hubbub of crowds in the streets are all important ingredients. With respect to fireworks, the argument hinges on their obvious association with festa in the Maltese context. In vaguely synaesthetic terms one “hears” the sound of a festa rather than that of fireworks, to the extent that “out of season” bangs often cause puzzlement.
3
This relates to a contemporary puzzle in the philosophy of sounds and audition. The question is whether and, if so, how we hear anything but sounds. To quote O’Callaghan and Nudds (2009), When a door slams, I hear its sound. But I also seem to hear the slamming of the door . . . (s)o, while I hear the sound of a door slamming, is it also fair to say that I hear the door itself? If so, how do things other than sounds enter into the contents of auditory experiences? (p. 3)
With respect to fireworks our answer is: Yes, people hear a festa which enters the contents of auditory experience by means of a learned cultural process which is both active and agentive.
Feld (1990) has described how to a newcomer the rainforest of Papua New Guinea represents a wall of impenetrable and indiscernible noises. The Kaluli however learn to identify and locate individual species by the birds’ habit of “lifting up” their singing over the sonic background. On his part, Oostermaan explains that in the course of his fieldwork in the favela, what he first thought to be gunshots actually turned out to be fireworks set off strategically to warn locals of the presence of police in particular neighborhoods. In Malta one learns to “listen to” and “read” bangs for their cultural content. In a small aside, Falzon’s fieldwork (see Falzon, 2008) with bird trappers in Malta provides a useful parallel. Trapping requires the use of live decoys, which means that the trapper spends his day among a cacophony of sounds. And yet, a good trapper is able to pick up the slightest call of a migrating bird. The word used by trappers is tħoss, “to feel”; a good trapper is one who has learned, through practice and active instruction, to “feel” the avian soundscape.
The second link between festa and nar owes to the fact that fireworks resonate and have an infinitely greater penetrative power than, say, church bells. It really is quite impossible to shut out their sound. Particularly in the case of strong petards, they are “felt” rather than simply heard—the sound of petards jheżżek (“it shakes you to the foundations”). In this sense, therefore, fireworks purvey festa to individual bodies. The sound and vibrations slice through architectural and other collective elements and quite literally engage the individual body, physically. 4
Their production is equally embodied. It was common for our dilettanti informants sonically and physically (by means of hand and face gestures) to illustrate their narratives, making onomatopoeic sounds like “boom,” “shhhh,” “pah,” and so on. Recounting the use of a specific sequence in a display often entailed using an array of sounds and gestures to represent the different types of fireworks. In this sense, both the process of production and that of impact are intimately experienced by the body.
Third, because in any festa worth its salt, displays are structured (e.g., the taking out of the statue from the church is invariably accompanied by a kaxxa, a rapid burst of petards; the main display takes place on the eve of the day of the festa itself, etc.), and fireworks represent a structuring of festa time. People will hear a combination of sounds and link their type and volume to a specific moment of festa. They will hear the start of the Sunday band march, for example, without actually making out the sound of the band. Fireworks, therefore, provide the tempo to the festa choreography. “There’s no festa without fireworks” also means that a lack of fireworks makes for a temporally invertebrate festa.
Fourth, the production of fireworks is an essential aspect of the rivalry that energizes festi. Here, we are squarely in Boissevain’s and to some extent Mitchell’s territories. Put simply, since the production of fireworks is a collective effort (not least since it is financed by donations), 5 the product becomes a measure of the locality’s ability to work together toward a corporate aim. Dilettanti from other localities, as well as those from rival local clubs, will evaluate the fireworks displays quantitatively as well as qualitatively; the former signifies organization and corporacy and the ability of a locality to raise funds for its festa, the latter technical skill. The best dilettanti can draw on an impressive technical fluency; they will talk of murtal bl-imsielet (“rocket wearing earrings”) and such. Given a drink or ten, festa revelers will spend hours chanting songs that seek to wound their rivals—as they put it, magħna ma tagħmlu xejn (“nothing compares to us”). Web 2.0 (if readers will forgive the buzzword) has been put to good use by dilettanti who upload video clips of fireworks displays—usually accompanied by some background wounding song—on YouTube and other channels.
Fifth, fireworks spatialize festa in very particular ways. Although Boissevain’s and Mitchell’s ethnographies both talk in passing about the multiplicity of spaces within which festa is experienced (bounded spaces as in village squares, trajectories such as the decorated streets through which the processions pass, intimate spaces such as private homes done up specially for the occasion, etc.), there is so far no research that looks specifically at the intersection between festa and space. We would like to suggest that fireworks are tremendously significant in this respect. Because sound travels farther and is less easily contained than other sensory forms, and because of the association (discussed above) between the sound of fireworks and the sensation of festa, fireworks stretch out the space of festa to a circumference of several miles, as far as their sound carries.
This comes to mean two apparently rather contradictory things. On the one hand festa is implicitly localistic in scope—it celebrates the patron of a particular town or village, is held specifically in that place, and means something very profound to locals (not necessarily “residents” but rather people who recognize their family to be historically rooted in a place). At the same time, the festa experience overspills the boundedness of locality, not least through its breadth as a sonic event. Because Malta is so small, bangs tend to travel well enough to encompass virtually the whole island. When people hear fireworks, the first question that comes to mind is, “Which festa is this?” Visually, it is possible to look at the skyline and read locality and its events/experiences simply by matching fireworks displays to known bearings. We would add that “the whole island” also means that local festi also become, for the duration of the displays, “national” sonic events.
That said, nar is experienced best by neighboring localities, which by a happy coincidence also tend to be the ones that feel pika most strongly. The sound of fireworks therefore functions as part of the tissue connecting pika and festi, particularly pertinent since sound has often been described in terms of its territorial and militaristic connotations—two forms, one could say, of competition.
Anatomy of a Bang
We have so far described the acoustic experience of fireworks as “sound” (Malt. ħoss). This is misleading. For many people in Malta the word ought to be storbju (“noise”). The distinction is crucial. In a play on Douglas’s definition of dirt, Gurney (1999, as cited in Atkinson, 2007) has suggested that noise is “sound which is out of place.” The notion of the rightful place of sound, in conjunction with our point on fireworks and the space of festa, constitutes a useful point of departure. If the sound of fireworks is a type of “space” produced by a sonic event, one may reasonably expect it to be, in Doreen Massey’s (2005) terms, first, a product of interrelations, second, a possibility of multiplicity and politics, and third, permanently under construction. We would suggest it is all of these.
Fireworks are far from universally enjoyed in Malta; in fact they are one of the most contentious issues of public contestation. Particularly during the festa season in summer, or following some accident, the media come alive with energetic arguments about their legitimacy or lack of it. A letter to The Sunday Times (of Malta) sums up some of the thornier ones: I heartily support your campaign to “Stop the Blitzkrieg”. I live in an area surrounded by villages which all vie with each other as to who produces the loudest bangs. They all start the “blitzkrieg” about 15 days before the feast. Without any warning they start their barrage, assailing our ears with deafening bangs. Doors and windows have to be closed, despite the heat, to maybe lessen the dreadful barrage. I just cannot understand how some people like the primitive barbaric practice. No wonder total or partial deafness is affecting more people each year. Don’t they realize the harm they are doing to themselves?
6
In this section, we look (again somewhat selectively) at two aspects of fireworks: their gendering and their association with discourses of moderation and modernity. In both cases, fireworks are denounced by sections of the public as a form of “acoustic violence,” to use Miyara’s term (1999, as cited in Labelle, 2010). Miyara tends to universalize and essentialize the qualities of noise (as opposed to sound)—his ideas “shut down the political,” as Labelle (2010, p. 81) puts it. We hope to do the opposite.
A Moderate Modernity
The vast majority of debates surrounding the production and use of fireworks hinge on the notion of moderation (Malt. moderazzjoni). The broad consensus is that fireworks should not be banned altogether, since they are both a recognized part of the “traditional” feast (and therefore worth preserving as “national heritage”) and an effective weapon in the battle for the hearts, minds, and pockets of tourists. 7 Instead, they should be let off “in moderation.”
“Moderation” is very much about keeping sound in its place. The main sticking point is the heavy petards, the murtali tal-bomba. It is after all these petards that are the best example of the long-range spatialization of festa we mentioned earlier; presumably they were also the ones that shattered Boissevain’s window panes. Limiting them would effectively narrow the circumference of the space of festa and contain its sounds.
The idea that moderation is necessary is in itself quite uncontested. Not surprisingly, it is what exactly constitutes moderation that is so controversial. Politicians talk of finding the right compromise between “tradition” and “discipline.” The Church is currently involved in a major ruck with dilettanti following the publication of proposals intended to curb festa and limit it. “We never told anyone to stop making fireworks,” a church representative told us, “but there is use of fireworks and there is use of fireworks. Excessive use is not fair. We have obligations of respect towards others.” The most vociferous opposition tends to come from contributors to the press and especially the English-language newspapers (significant since English is a prestige language in Malta, and its use is class-based and broadly aspirational). Recent years have seen a constant stream of letters condemning the “excesses” of festa and specifically the noise generated by fireworks. Finally, dilettanti themselves talk about moderation, especially when representing their practices to the public (or inquisitive anthropologists). As one of our informants put it, “There needs to be more control. Definitely. It was all getting out of control, some people were doing whatever they wanted. But if there must be laws and enforcement, they must be fair.”
There are two main drifts to the discourse of moderation. The first has to do with morality. It is significant that in Maltese, the word kwiet (silence) has strong moral connotations when used to describe people as well as places. Raġel kwiet means a man of few words, reliable and not given to histrionics; post kwiet means a safe residential neighborhood that is pleasant to live in (real estate ads will often say, “in a quiet area of town”), and so on. With respect to fireworks, one would be hard pressed to call them kwiet. And yet they form part of festa, with its avowed moral aspirations of unifying communities and religious devotion. 8 This is where moderation matters, for it becomes a sort of rhetorical mediator between the lack of kwiet and the idealized moral uplift of festa. On the one hand the discourse of moderation condemns fireworks as “excesses,” but it can also be summoned, and very effectively so, to legitimate them by preserving their moral integrity, which is why lack of moderation is often described by the detractors of fireworks as a sonic threat, a form of acoustic violence against the sick, the infirm, and the elderly (who presumably need to rest longer hours and so on). It is by the same process that dilettanti themselves are so keen to appropriate the discourse of moderation. Put bluntly, no one wishes to appear so morally depraved as to ignore the suffering of the old, the dying, and other paradigmatic vulnerables.
Moderation evokes a second association, that of modernity. In November 2011, the European Commission let it be known that it would be referring Malta to the European Courts of Justice for failing to bring EU environmental legislation into full force. The culprit was noise—under EU law, strategic noise maps for Malta had to be drawn up by 2007. The Noise Directive 2002/49/EC is intended to “avoid, prevent or reduce the harmful effects of noise on human health, including annoyance and sleep disturbance due to environmental noise.” The Directive requires noise from road traffic, railways, major airports, and industry to be mapped and assessed. It does not cover noise by other activities, including “leisure.” 9
Which, if our argument about festa and space is right, is just as well. A map of the noise generated by fireworks would bear an uncanny resemblance to a map of the whole country. Bar some piece of draconian legislation on volume, there would be little chance of reducing the impact of nar on the body. (That impact is the whole idea behind its manufacture, it is worth recalling.) But maybe that is not the point. Rather, what we have here is EU legislation—which in the imagination of many Maltese represents the zenith of a moderate modernity—regulating noise.
There are two issues here. First, fireworks are perceived by some as a sort of soundtrack of primitiveness, a type of aboriginal Malteseness that is at odds with aspirations to being a modern European nation. On hearing a bang, people will often exclaim qisna qegħdin l-Afganistan (“it’s like being in Afghanistan,” the location usually updated to whichever perceived antithesis to civilization happens to be in the news); words like Blitzkrieg and such function to similar effect. In the words of one informant, “We know better now, with education, measuring sound levels and knowing what they do to us; we know it’s unacceptable to have that volume of noise going on so often. We must control it; existing regulations just aren’t adequate.”
The reference is to a lack of development, to a situation in which certain groups persist in “uncivilized” behavior that keeps the nation backward. One might be tempted to link this to postcolonial anxiety or to the endemic Maltese perception of being on the margins, European-but-not-quite. (The latter is ultimately the main storyline of Mitchell’s Ambivalent Europeans.) A safer berth would be the perennially thwarted (as in a chronically unfinished project) aspirations to European “standards.” Noise, in this sense sound that is neither spatially confined nor moderated, becomes a key signifier of underdevelopment, of a missed bus to civilization.
Two examples will help illustrate the point. As we write, the city of Valletta is the venue of major refurbishment works that include the construction of an open-air performance space designed by Renzo Piano. One of the arguments (and there have been many) brought against it is that a “roofless theatre” is no good for Malta and its festa-generated soundscape. The opposition between the rowdy Maltese soundscape and the civilized space of a theatre (with its “cultured” sounds of opera and classical music) could not be sharper in many people’s minds.
The second example is of a church recital of Bach’s cello suites. The Sunday Times’ music critic had no bones to pick about the quality of the playing. He did, however, lament about the heat and especially the “traditional hazards of a Maltese Sunday night at the height of the festa season.” He looked forward to the cellist’s return, “Hopefully not during a season when it sounds as if the rest of Malta is being blitzed.” 10 The finely crafted counterpoint between the noise of “traditional” Malta and the sound of the cello suites suits Bach, as well as our argument.
There are interesting parallels with the work of Thompson (2002), as well as that of Payer (2007). The former charts the making, in the period 1900 to 1933, of a “new sound” in American cities. This was in part the result of new possibilities of technological mediation (acoustic devices, materials, etc.) but also based on a fundamental shift in the “culture of listening,” as city dwellers felt the need to eliminate the unnecessary sounds of the modern city and replace them with an acceptable new sound that was deemed “modern” on at least three counts. First, it was efficient in that it did away with unnecessary elements; second, the fact that it could be produced and channeled to order made it essentially another commodity in a growing consumer culture; third, it was taken to represent a new and technical mastery over the physical environment.
Payer’s work looks at responses to “noise pollution” in Vienna between 1870 and 1914. The rapid social, economic, and technological changes that occurred during that period brought with them a new urban soundscape described as a Großstadtwirbel (“city whirl”). As happened in many large cities at the time (see also Bijsterveld, 2008) an “antinoise” campaign gained ground in Vienna; this was closely linked to an anti-urban discourse and a conservative critique of civilization. Middle classes, then characterized by growing power and influence, dealt with the noise issue in ways that reflected their attitudes toward social control, moral discipline, power, and political participation: “Noise, a by-product of technological and economic progress, put middle-class aspirations at risk . . . attitudes to noise also reveal an underlying ambivalence to the concept of modernity as such” (Payer, 2007, p. 780). The similarities to our case are telling. However, while Payer’s objectors equated noise with modernity and an intellectually and morally corrosive “civilization,” the detractors of festa bangs do quite the opposite. For them, it is the lack of modernity and civilization that is noisy.
The second association between fireworks and modernity has to do with the state as agent. The underlying theme of many diatribes against fireworks is that a state that cannot effectively section, control, and apportion the “national” soundscape (the space of the island, that is) is seriously dysfunctional. Unmoderated fireworks therefore become an indictment of government. Dilettanti seek to turn this on its head by pointing out that fireworks, as a form of traditional culture and therefore national heritage, belong squarely within state precincts and should be preserved as such. But the sleight does not always work. Especially not when accidents (there were five explosions and nine dead in 2010, a particularly bad year) cause death and injury to dilettanti and a threat of the same to the population at large.
We must at this stage go back to the third of Massey’s programmatic points, that of space as a political product that is permanently under construction (i.e., its production as an ongoing and unfinished project). It is not just the notion of moderation that is used to contest associations between bangs and a lack of civilized modernity. Since very recently, a type of dilettanti lobby has emerged that seeks to repackage nar as a respectable product. The prompts are at least three. First, there is a palpable and growing resistance in the public sphere to the noise and danger of fireworks; a recent television program involved journalists on location armed with sound-level meters and a commentary by a medical specialist explaining the permanent harm done to hearing. Second, the looming threat of EU legislation on noise pollution we referred to earlier. Third, and perhaps the most important, in 2010 the Church launched a campaign for the “restoration” of festi; this is the culmination of a series of circulars, pastoral letters, and such on the theme that go back a number of years. The idea as expressed in a landmark document is to “give festi their Christian dignity.” As far as nar is concerned this means “prudence and moderation with respect to quantity, power, and timing.” 11
Dilettanti are keenly aware of these currents. One of their responses has been to turn the rhetoric on its head and present their own restored selves to the public eye. Their main frontman is now a soft-spoken medical doctor (often in tandem with his dentist and politician wife—both are officially licensed fireworks manufacturers) who insists among other things that nar is not a pastime but rather both a science and an art and that dilettanti should properly be called mastri (“masters of their trade”). In early 2011, a leading fireworks club organized a “national seminar” with presentations by Jeremy Boissevain (who was flown in for the occasion), a University of Malta professor of theatre, and by ourselves. This event—as “professionally organized” as they can get—was a real departure in that it represented nar as respectable, genteel, and worthy of the attention of the academy.
These are a few of many examples. Our point is that the contents of a bang are not timeless cultural products. Rather, they are constantly being reworked by both their detractors and dilettanti (or mastri) as active and enterprising agents.
The Noises That Men Make
It is worth starting this section with a quote from one of our informants: “There are no women interested in making fireworks. Well, there are very few, and some don’t really make fireworks even if they have a license. It’s dangerous . . . and what about the family?” There are almost 1,500 registered fireworks manufacturers in Malta. Of these, 13 are women. 12 Nar is strongly male-gendered, in a number of ways.
In terms of actual practice, the manufacture and letting off of fireworks is one aspect of festa that is almost exclusively run by men. Fireworks factories and the open fields from where on the day of festa the rockets and petards are let off are male-gendered spaces (although they are experienced equally by both genders as auditors). We would suggest that, but for one caveat, so are the acoustic territories created by the actual explosions themselves.
Dilettanti talk of their namra (passion) for fireworks. Namra is a word used to describe a masculine passion for a number of practices in Malta but most notably hunting and trapping (see Falzon, 2008) and fireworks manufacture. Namra is said to run in the blood; it is passed on from fathers to sons or through complicated initiations overseen by avuncular figures. Namra seduces men into risking life and limb. It can be so powerful that, Siren-like, it overrides rationality and causes otherwise level-headed men to privilege fireworks over the interests of their families. “It’s in my blood,” one dilettant told us, I don’t know what I’d do if I stopped making fireworks. I did once, for a few months, but I had to take anti-depressants. I had to go to a doctor. I just couldn’t do it. I really meant to stop—I didn’t want to worry my wife – she always worries when I’m there and I’m late or lose track of time. I tried, but after four months I couldn’t stay away any longer and had to go back.
The caveat: The fact that women very rarely actually make fireworks does not mean that they do not have a role to play in the overall process. Statistics about fireworks manufacture are entirely oblivious to the fact that women are very much a part of it—in organizing fundraising activities, both individually and as appendages of the fireworks factories, as well as via the band clubs’ women’s committees. Fascinatingly we find that women also play the symbolic role of suffering wives and mothers. They do this, first, by staying at home and “worrying,” in our informant’s words, about their men’s safety and, second, by taking an active part in mourning when things go wrong. If the danger of handling fireworks is the basis of a type of performance of masculinity, the plot is only complete if one takes into account the essential aspect (which can and often does take shape and dimension in its own right) of suffering and sorrow.
Even so, the fact remains that the physicality of the production of nar pertains to men. It is the men who procure the dangerous chemicals, who take the physical risk of mixing them (the process known as tħallat il-kulur, “mixing colors,” is said to be particularly dangerous), and who finally spend the days of festa running across fields strewn with small fires and sparks and covered in acrid smoke. This is particularly relevant because the sound is ultimately the direct extension of that physicality. That is why we argue that fireworks are strongly and unequivocally male-gendered acoustic events.
Which is where it gets political. Discussing gender with dilettanti proved a tricky part of our fieldwork. We came across a general denial of gendering. Informants were usually keen to point out that women form part of the executive committees of clubs and that there are indeed some women who hold a license to make fireworks (the same names kept cropping up). This is because dilettanti are aware that gender segregation and asymmetry tend to be perceived negatively by outsiders. In the parlance of letter writers to The Times and such, practices (and therefore sounds—or are they noises?) that are the exclusive territory of men do not belong in a “modern” society. As the professor of theatre put it in her contribution to the seminar, “We can only be happy with women’s participation when there are equal numbers of men and women who are presidents of fireworks clubs.”
The heuristic context is one in which Malta is often seen as lagging behind modernity generally and a northern-European modernity specifically with respect to women’s participation in society. A detailed analysis is well beyond the scope of this article but suffice it to say that with respect, for example, to the labor force, Malta is at the bottom of the EU-27 rankings for women’s participation; as of June 2012, the gender gap stood at 34.4 percentage points. 13 The claims, by dilettanti, that nar is not particularly gender-segregated should therefore be understood as an attempt to locate it within a desire to become modern.
We have so far talked about the sound of men. What about their noise? What is the interface between gender, fireworks, and the politics of sound? To our minds, the best point of departure is the premise that masculinities are themselves differentiated, politicized, and hierarchized. In the popular imagination fireworks dilettanti represent a rather particular type of manhood. Because of their readiness to “play with fire” (the expression logħob tan-nar is in common use generically to refer to fireworks) and to engage with danger on an intimate level, they represent a specific brand of masculinity.
Sant Cassia (2002) has discussed what he called “popular authoritarianism” in Malta with reference to the archetypal figure of the kuntrattur, the building contractor who is also a developer. Kuntratturi, Sant Cassia argued, make effective use of Herzfeld’s “cultural intimacy” by building on an ethos of popular discontent and subverting state bureaucratic decisions through a skilful manipulation of intimate knowledge of the working practices of bureaucrats and their hidden connections with politicians. What sort of men are these kuntratturi? We quote, A typical image of a contractor is usually of a tough, foul mouthed, but popular and generous character, who is called locally in English, a “good boy,” with an occasional hint of irony. A kuntrattur may also have had experience in his youth working with explosives, either making the massive fireworks for the festas Boissevain studied, or in quarries. This gives him dangerous skills, and bombs are not unknown visiting cards in Malta. (p. 18)
This, then, is the type of masculinity embodied in the sound of a petard. It is one that wields a dangerous and potentially subversive, albeit ostensibly marginal, power. This power may be used to undermine development legislation, as in Sant Cassia’s study; equally, however, it may subvert fireworks regulations—by firing petards well past the 11 p.m. embargo, for example, or packing in more explosive than is healthy for the average ear drum. This explains the commonly heard complaint that fireworks dilettanti jagħmlu li jridu (“do as they please,” as in untouchability at law). (This is sometimes broadened to “f’Malta kulħadd jagħmel li jrid,” “it’s a free for all in Malta.”) This, then, is one element of the fickle and moody distinction between the sound and the noise of fireworks: a male-gendering that is not neutral but rather caught up in a system of hierarchized and politicized masculinities.
Conclusion
“Sound,” says Labelle, “is promiscuous” (2010, p. xvii). We would suggest that, as is often the case with promiscuity, it can turn out to be more complicated than one might initially hope. In the case of nar in contemporary Malta, the bang itself can be seen as the point of connection between a number of currents. In its incarnation as sound it tells us a lot about the ways in which festivities and the localities they pertain to are experienced and spatialized. As noise it raises issues of modernity and gender among others. With respect to the former, we agree with Thompson (2002) that “scholars who assume that consideration of the visual and textual is sufficient for understanding modernity seem, well, shortsighted to say the least” (p. 10). Nar, we hope to have shown, is an excellent example of the multisensory nature of experiences of modernity (or the lack of it). The mediatory link between noise (uncontrolled, primitive) and sound (controlled, modern) is the notion of moderation. It is thus that moderation and its various contested definitions become a stage for rival and competing representations of modernity. If, as Hirschkind (2004) puts it to describe the making of the “pious ear” in Egypt, modernity involves “a vast reorganization of sensory experience” (p. 131), the taming of Maltese nar is debatably a step toward a soundscape perceived by many as modern, acceptable, and European. Ideally it is also one that does away, if not with gendering altogether, at least with associations with a type of masculinity thought to be antithetical to a self-respecting and forward-looking state. Given such content-rich bangs we think Jeremy Boissevain would be happy to spare a window pane.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was read at the Senior Seminar at the Department of Social Anthropology in Cambridge on November 12, 2010. The authors wish to thank the participants and especially the Chair, Susan Bayly, for their many insightful comments. Thanks also go to Charles J. Farrugia for his help and to the two anonymous referees for their invaluable comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.