Many years ago, when Gozo was not even part of the Maltese tourism experience, a German friend who looked after foreign visitors on the south island told me he had a plan to promote the (then) ignored rock on which we both lived.
“Come, and see the living Gozitans!... See how this ancient community exists as it did in ancient times! See old ladies, sitting in doorways, making lace! See fishermen who use palm fronds to catch fish… Watch farmers, teaching their horses to swim… Travel along roads that are unchanged since the Stone Age...”
The magic, he explained, was in the word “Gozitan”. It sounded (he said) like a prehistoric animal: somehow (to his mind) like “dinosaur”.
Which, I suppose, was fair enough for someone who learnt his English in Bielefeld, who called the Maltese Maltesisch, the French Französisch and the Dutch Niederländisch (and Gozitans Gozitaner).
I thought it amusing, partly because the Gozo he was describing was the Gozo that I had grown to love. The problem, I told him, was that this was how the Maltese – in those days – saw the inhabitants of the island. As prehistoric. Maybe even as dinosaurs.
In the same week, a Maltese columnist on a Sunday newspaper (unrelated to this one) had told me, before going into Ta’ Frenċ to enjoy a free gourmet dinner: “I don’t understand what you like about Gozitans. To us, they are like animals!” (My exclamation mark – I think.)
Those conversations took place maybe 30 years ago, when Gozitans didn’t lock their cars and left their keys in the front door – “except at weekends, when the people come, from there”.
Since then, the rest of the people “from there” have discovered the beautiful island on their doorstep, have decided they own it, have realised it is so much more pleasant than the slum into which they have converted the place where they live and started to make a former “island of joy” more akin to the dump they desert for (usually long) weekends and holidays.
We call them “the people from there” because they are aware that they, too (as some boring readers of this newspaper are quick to point out), are “Maltese”: same passport. But a different people.
From the letters and online comments in this newspaper we learn that there is little or no service in Gozitan shops, that nobody here pays tax, that you never get a fiscal receipt, that everything is overpriced, that you get short-changed, that an illegally parked car will get a ticket because the warden (whatever that is, these days) will check on his computer to see where the driver lives.
Well yes… it is probably true that Gozitan shop assistants would rather talk to each other than to customers who make it obvious that they see them, at best, as rural country cousins – and distant cousins, at that. Village stores used to have three different prices – for locals, tourists and Maltese visitors, in ascending order – partly because of the amount of respect shown by each to the traders.
I remember being in a store in Għarb when two visitors, finding me already in it, decided to show off their English. The wife was noisily overturning boxes of fruit and vegetables so her husband asked what she was looking for.
“Pig lips.”
“Not pig lips, my dear…
You mean prick-clippers.”
He smiled with his confident command of a foreign language.
The shopkeeper also smiled and translated for me, sotto voce: “Prickly pears.”
Having run out of land on Malta, they are now importing their unique style to Gozo- Revel Barker
In another shop, the owner gave the “local tourist” the wrong change. When this was pointed out, he said: “Oh, please forgive me, sir. But, you see, I am Gozitan and therefore very stupid.”
Fast forward to the present day and we have ‘People From There’ pretending to be people from here, solely in order to get subsidised fares on the ferry. And we laugh at this (sometimes, like when they had to cross the channel, just to collect letters about their €100 vouchers and then found the post office was shut).
Chris Said wrote recently that Gozo needs a restart. It reminded me of a chum, visiting from London, who looked around the place and told me: “It’ll be nice when it’s finished.” And a Gozitan friend in our company said: “Better, if it had never been started.”
Malta’s decline dates back either to the surrender of the Knights or the departure of the British. From either point it has been comparatively rapid. The Knights had imported architects who introduced the baroque, theatrical, asymmetric artistry which, despite the best efforts of the Maltese, survives in some places today. The British brought in formula military architecture that best suited colonies in the tropics.
The Maltese substituted all this with… what? I don’t know what they teach at the university’s school of architecture, unless it’s Lego. But they are building in a fashion that I haven’t seen since I was in East Berlin. Naturally, having run out of land on Malta, they are now importing their unique style to Gozo.
And because this government-approved blank-wall building seems unstoppable here, it may not be long before tourists start coming to Gozo to stare at a pathetic place that the sun can’t penetrate, there are no green fields left and the only sounds are of stone-sawing and the doctored exhausts on Maltese motorbikes.
Then the place will be so ugly that even the People From There will notice.
Yes. Come see the living Gozitans – while you still can.
A long-time Gozo resident, Revel Barker is author of The First Gozitans: (... and Ġgantija)