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The little Gozitan village of Nadur, known for its high-spirited and macabre carnival, will today be celebrating a different kind of tradition, and one which is in fact, not Maltese.
Nadur villagers will today descend into a field close to Dahlet Qorrot Bay for a massive tomato fight, a Gozitan version of Spain’s famous Tomatina. The event is being organised by the Nadur Local Council and the Nadur Youngsters football club. For two hours, two teams will hurl huge amounts of ripe tomatoes at each other. Posters have been printed and the organisers are promising a “glieda bit-tadam fuq skala kbira” (a large-scale tomato war).
On the last Wednesday of August, at the peak of tomato season, the village of Buñol in Spain stages a tomato war. According to historians, the Tomatina was held in the Buñol town square in 1945 as young people gathered for the Gigantes y Cabezudos carnival parade. A skirmish developed throughout the parade between some participants and a tomato fight soon developed. The year after, on the same Wednesday in August, the youths of the town met again at the square, this time with their own tomatoes. In 1951, the Tomatina was temporarily banned and by 1959, the festival was given simple rules.
The Nadur version begs the question as to how ‘right’ is it for traditions to be borrowed? According to anthropologist Ranier Fsadni, imitation and modification is common, and the ‘sideways’ transmission of traditions often happens in times of cultural ferment.
“Borrowing is common, whether we are talking of traditions that are geographic, economic, political, aesthetic or religious. In Portuguese art of the Age of Discovery, we find Hindu symbols incorporated into representations of a Catholic Christian view of the cosmos. India had been recently ‘discovered’,” Fsadni says of the grand age of empires of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
“On a less grandiose level, you will find borrowings from Country & Western music in some performances of Maltese ghana. Several Maltese traditions incorporate borrowings from nearby societies and cultures.”
Fsadni, however, says that when practices are borrowed, they are transferred to a different context and form of life: “Do borrowed traditions keep the same meaning? Not necessarily. Quite often, no. It is quite likely that being borrowed, they will often change their meaning in the process. They might take on a new life, or seem dull, strained and lifeless because they just do not fit. Rather than focus on the borrowing, we might do better to focus on whether the borrowing is creative or dull. We will probably need to let some time pass before we can make up our minds.”
matthew@newsworksltd.com
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