Sing your own song

"Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history."

So said Ben Okri, an award-winning writer of intensely beautiful and spiritual prose and poetry.  Okri's work is steeped in the myths and fables, and in the history of the Nigeria of his birth and formative years.  His voice, unique though it is to him and to his creative talent is also, in part at least, the voice, or one of the many voices, that make up the song that is Nigeria.

It is probably far too simplistic to say that the place where you live is the major influence on your writing - the landscape and the culture that surround you when you are young, growing up, or where you spend such a long time that it gets right into you.  There are all sorts of factors that give you the voice that is uniquely yours and these would include your education, your family make-up perhaps, your experiences at different points in your life, your health, your relationships with others.  

I'm particularly fascinated by how where you are - your location, the place that you physically inhabit in the world - influences your writing.  After my post last week about what being a local writer in Gibraltar might mean, this week I have been mulling over how being Gibraltarian or being in Gibraltar might affect a writer.

There has to be something, I pondered, in the fact that we are so many people crammed together in such a small space.  The noise of everyday, which rises quite a way up into the Upper Rock even when you try to escape it, carried on the breeze that whips up dull sounds of traffic or the sharper roar of an aeroplane taking off, or the boom of pile drivers cutting through the sizzling of the cicadas in the trees on a summer afternoon, must surely permeate all our thoughts.  The intensity of the blue of a winter's sunny morning out at Europa, one of the few spaces in Gibraltar where you can feel surrounded by light and open space is at once refreshing and soothing, inspirational perhaps.

I guess we find stories in our history, that mixed bag of events where cultures met and mixed and clashed and from which we are emerging, slowly, perhaps painfully, as our own nation with roots that are embedded in traditions from all over the world.  This means that our language is mixed - English and Spanish are entwined somehow.  Some of us prefer one language to the other, some of us write in one language for some purposes and in the other for different types of expression.  It is a reflection of how we use those languages day to day.  Still others of us speak in other languages: Moroccan, perhaps, Urdu, or Hindi and a host of others.

Some writers will be of one nation or other and have visited, lived in or near Gibraltar, and have found their inspiration here for a piece of work.  I think of Thomas Mogford's detective novels, for example.  Gibraltar's own contribution to world literature is still small, still very much developing, but even what there is has a fascinating story to tell of how place influences voice.  

Take Humbert Hernandez's short stories "El Accordeonista y otras historias". These are stories based on his young days in post-war Gibraltar and reflect a lost period which just about remains in our collective memory.  They are stories of his childhood, and fittingly, he writes them in the language of his childhood: Spanish.  

Gabriel Moreno writes in both languages, and uses language to explore that duality of identity that many Gibraltarians experience - a classical post-colonnial English education focusing largely on English rather than Gibraltarian history and literature - yet a day to day cultural existence that is predominantly Spanish - villancicos and polvorones at Christmas and torta de patata on the beach in the summer.  Speaking at the Gibraltar International Literary Festival last month, he fascinated me with his view on English and Spanish in writing; the former being presented as a precise language which cuts through emotion and positions meaning almost as if writing is a form of engineering, whereas Spanish flows in a wave of passion and emotion, carrying meaning like waves to the shore.    (Those are my words not his - he described what I am trying to convey much more succinctly and in a more learned fashion, but this is what I "heard".)

Sam Benady and Mary Chiappe, an older generation than Moreno's, use classical English language and writing techniques to create their historical whodunnits, and yet in so doing, they express a uniquely Gibraltarian world-view of a particular point in time and place.  Mark Sanchez' novels come from a Gibraltarian experience, not just in setting, but in "The Escape Artist" from the perspective of a Gibraltarian student in an English university. (Click the link below).  

The Escape Artist

Kailash Noguera writes from the depths of a hispanic passion that sometimes bursts full of light and sometimes broods darkly, harsh as the Rock that birthed it.  David Bentata and Levy Attias bring us works that are imbued with the spirituality that influences so many of the people that have their roots here. Sonia Golt displays the flamboyance that is the Mediterranean: sunshine and sea-spray and falling in love.  Rebecca Faller uses her native English in all its glorious, incisive fullness with the precision of a military operation to cut out a sharply-defined view of her adopted Gibraltar, warts and all and with a tinge of humour - because you cannot get away from laughter in this tiny city.

I could go on.  Gibraltar's writers and those writers in and around Gibraltar, are all writing  Gibraltar's song.  We are all writing our view from our place, our history and our emotions.

If it is true that there are only seven basic story plots, then there are as many ways of telling a story as there are people. Each of us has a unique view out of their own world, an individual experience which to a greater or lesser extent may be shared with some others, but the beauty of writing is that we each have our own very special voice, and each is as valid as the other.  

That last thought is rather comforting.  Rather than wondering if I ought to try to write like this or like that, I just have to write like...me.  I write my view of the world, for better or for worse, with my way of expressing things, with my experiences, influences, passions or my own brand of cold cynicism, shaping and colouring what and how I write.  So.....to sharpen yet another quill and write some more...I'll do it my way.

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