When your country is a theme park
A theme park is a place designed to engender the impression that it came out of a work of fantasy or that it exists in a time capsule. Visitors expect to meet their favourite characters or witness familiar exhibits take a life of their own; a life that would otherwise not be given to them. It is a highly curated experience. There is make-belief, everything is pretty, and everybody is happy.
Policy-makers and investors have gotten the memo: a theme park is good business, your country is a brand, ergo it is to be unscrupulously exploited. The country’s image towards visitors is to be packaged a certain way to appeal to those with a mere superficial interest in the local culture. In turn, the culture is to be moulded into a caricature of itself. The parts of it that are typical of the locality shall be exaggerated and offered in spades. Those who are participating in—and contributing to the continuous making of—the living culture will be pushed to the margins, forced away from the hotspots of tourist attraction, and blamed for breaking the immersion. Their land shall be appropriated by rapacious “foreign direct investment” as they themselves will become alienated from a world that no longer represents them.
Such is the reality of my part of the planet. The first time I got a hint of the demand for a theme park version of historical reality was a few years back when a British woman of Cypriot descent was asking to buy some handkerchief that was typical of marriages held over a century ago. I explained how Cypriots do not marry this way anymore. To no avail… For her, this item is the irreducible factor of a Cypriot marriage: that which adds the unmistakable Cypriotness to the event. What the contemporary people do is apparently not genuine. In truth, hers was but a kitsch, a misunderstanding of culture as gimmickry rather than a lived experience and a life form unto itself that changes with the times. I could still understand her though, as her ancestors took a snapshot of their local culture with them when they left for Great Britain. Yet the idea of some product encapsulating the quintessential local identity is exactly how the theme park is set up, as the simulacrum of what once was or the depiction of what should ever be.
There is a small village close to where I live that is undergoing large-scale renovations. The plan is to make the place more attractive to visitors. The central government has thus taken the initiative to draw the schematics and enforce its “quality standards”. This means that the built-up area is being turned into yet another gentrified milieu that is indistinguishable from other such “authentically Cypriot” places. The original character, which took form organically through the ages, is gone. At the local taverns, visitors are treated to ostensibly local dishes, only those are gourmet renditions of recipes that no real person here ever makes at home. To further insult our intelligence, servings consist of tiny portions presented in disproportionately large plates. Again, nobody actually eats this way outside the controlled environment. It does not matter. The theme park is all about reinforcing a belief in the verisimilitude of a product. The trick is to maintain a shadow play of consumerist cosmopolitanism in which there appears to be a unifying global culture that simply has its own cute little particularities from one locale to another.
This is the result of homogeneisation, of mass production, and of streamlined marketing. The true culture is threatened with extinction because its people are impoverished and pressured to move out of the way. There are no locals serving guests at those taverns, for example. Not one! The waiters have been imported for pennies from some unidentifiable place far away. The remaining residents who are still related to the old stock are already competing for shelter with more affluent “digital nomads” and those bent on finding a more favourable tax jurisdiction for their liquid assets. The time for the remaining locals to be priced out of the market beckons.
At some point, the authorities will approve of new zoning regulations to set up apartments for everyone. Not for locals, mind you. Accommodation shall be optimised to host short-term tourists at exorbitant rates. This is the twisted logic of profiteering: sell a cheap imitation of the local culture while actively undermining the longer-term wellness of the real thing.
The homeland thus becomes nothing but a glorified fiefdom with fancy flags, vacuous anthems, absurd military parades, and all the pompous paraphernalia of nation-statism; a fiefdom to which we pay ever-more taxes and get scorn in return. The authorities do not actually care about us, the preservation of our spaces, and the continuation of our ways of life. No! All they understand is easy money, much of which will circulate under the table and find its way to shadowy coffers.
Some apparatchiks in the capital are deciding for us in our absence how our communities should be refashioned based on some grand agenda to placate the investors and to woo travellers with the disposable income to realise their whimsy. What we get is contempt and smugness each time we happen to walk through our streets with our dogs at an inopportune time. Our new masters expect us to disappear, to slither in the dark so as not to ruin their curated experience. We present an inconvenience because we break the theme.
Too bad I have no manners and shall not apologise to anyone who thinks they own the place just because they organised some “authentically Cypriot wedding”.
Fuck you and your fairytales!