Skizzi tal-Karnival published by Horizons

As the local Christian community prepares for the sacrificial ritual of Holy Week, poet and theatre director Mario Azzopardi conjures his own vision of the last moments in Christ’s life. Wounded pigeons are struggling to escape from Christ’s wounds and blood has a totally new significance.

The story of Jahwe, a street prophet is given a surrealist clarity in Azzopardi’s latest collection of prose poems, Skizzi tal-Karnival (Carnival Sketches), published this week by Horizons. It is a collection which pierces the essence of a harsh, violent, oppressive and deadly contemporary scenario laced with sexual imagery and eroticism. Professor Oliver Friggieri describes the collection as a parade “in Fellini style” which defies constrictions and censorship.

Steeped as always in an uncompromising context, Skizzi tal-Karnival takes a completely new format as Azzopardi invents “epistles” addressed to people whose lives are imbued with grotesque preoccupations, inner struggles and disintegrated visions. Azzopardi conveys all this “with a verbal and intellectual energy” which surprises readers over and over again, as they witness humanity struggling for survival and far-fetched redemptive attempts.

The effects can have sensorial shock waves as readers are seemingly led by a powerful seer to assist a systematic drama of what Professor Charles Briffa, in his introduction sees as a quasi-sadistic operation of “dehumanisation”. In his new work, writes Briffa, Azzopardi parades a series of “impotent anti-heroes” shown through the lens of a paradoxically grotesque camera. “We are faced with an assortment of eccentric losers who nevertheless, defy their own culture in a conflict which excites the intellect,” writes Briffa.

Sexuality is also given carnivalesque connotation in this anthology : erotic nudity is mixed with innocent but also criminal nakedness and Briffa elaborates on how Azzopardi counterpoints primordial sexuality with abnormal, inversed lust, “where the organ of fertility is adorned with destruction.”

The ultimate statement of the author seems to relate to how modern fragmentation has accelerated isolation. What remains is for the author to interpret aesthetically his parade of demons and their victims.