My Language and I

I was leafing through The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney again this morning over breakfast. Yes, I read poetry over breakfast sometimes and it beats checking my phone and getting caught up with emails and the utter rubbish spewed out on social media. 

Anyway, back to Heaney, I read A Peacock's Feather which Heaney wrote for his niece, Daisy Garnett, in 1972. In it he talks about her christening in Gloucestershire and ponders his background and hers being so different; hers orderly, almost courtly, and his, in another country, rougher, and he talks of how he has modified himself to fit into her world:

I come from scraggy farm and moss,

Old patchwork that the pitch and toss

Of history have left dishevelled.

But here, for your sake, I have levelled

My cart-track voice to garden tones,

Cobbled the bog with Cotswold stones.

(from The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber (London) 1987)

It is rare I read Heaney without something resonating and this passage has been hanging around in my head all day. In Gibraltar, we have just celebrated another National Day and the city and its people have been festooned in red and white - clothes, bunting, flag, banners, shop window displays, you name it, there's a red and white version of it - but this poem got me thinking: where do we come from, when we say we are from Gibraltar?

As a people, Gibraltarians talk proudly, and rightly so, of the Rock, of its centuries' old fame for impregnability in the face of conflict, of holding fast, physically and metaphorically, to its values. We are proud of much of our history although this is more often than not the white-washed version passed down to us by our British imperial masters, written in their language, using their terms, their memories. It has only been in relatively recent years, that a Gibraltarian culture and identity has begun to emerge. Even then, it is still seen by many people outside of Gibraltar as "Britain in the sun" because we cling onto our Britishness as if that was the only thing worth holding on to, or we are looked at as Spanish but trying to be British, or as nothing of any importance at all, some kind of mongrel race that is neither here nor there, or this or that.

So, having pondered that passage by Heaney and having spent a couple of days at the University of Basel immersed in matters of language and Gibraltarian literature with acadmics and writers from across Europe (link to information below), I took to thinking about what we do as Gibraltarians with our voices.

 Language and speech is how we communicate with others and how we speak, the sound of our words, the tone of voice, in fact, everything about speech is as revealing about us as individuals and as a culture as our flag and our British post boxes and our delight in churros in the morning and calamares fritos en el bar en Eastern Beach por la tarde. We know that regional accents tell us about where people are from in a country and if in England, then whether the person speaks with received pronunciation tells us a lot about their social class, or their aspirations to a higher class (this is a very British thing, class) or even their level of education.

Gibraltarians and their Language

Gibraltar International Conference 3 in Basel

Do we make changes when we speak when we encounter people from other cultures, I wonder? In Gibraltar, do we 'cobble the bog' of our speech? I think the answer is 'yes, we do.' I have listened to Gibraltarians in Spain trying to pronounce the ends of the words (we don't do that in Gib that much and nor do Andalucians). It sounds awkward. I find myself trying to do it, especially hardening the 'r' and putting the 'th' (I do not have a clue about phonetics, so any linguists reading this, please forgive me) in the right place in a word. I end up battling with my own tongue and giving up. Or not speaking at all, which is a poor option - every attempt at speaking someone's language is a sign of respect for them. Much better to speak in Llanito and explain the odd, errant word that is unique to Llanito (I spell it with a 'll" and am not going to argue about it!) than get into a muddle trying to be something that I'm not.

Same with the speaking of English. I have an English accent having lost my llanito accent as a child growing up in England. It was jolly handy because the racist bullies were mercilessly picking on me because I had a sing-song intonation to my voice and added 'bueno' at the start of most sentences and ended them with 'no'. I double-cobbled my own bog with south-east England tarmac.

Then there's also the matter of tone and pitch. I find Gibraltarians are loud. Seriously, if excited, we are endearingly but 'hurt-the-ears' loud. I missed that effervescence of speech when I lived in England but I made sure that I toned down my propensity to arm waving and volume increase when overly enthusiastic about a conversation; in a girls' grammar school of the seventies, all that continental passion simply 'would not do'. 

I wonder if I should have just been myself. I'm neither English in England, and, after over thirty years away, I am not particularly Gibraltarian in Gibraltar, and it is through language and the way I speak that my identity, or lack of it, generates assumptions in others. This is why I found the linguistic biographies collected in Gibraltarians and their Language published by the University of Vigo last year so enthralling and instructive. Language and how we use it in Gibraltar is fascinating, in particular the cultural and sociological connotations that are exposed when we speak it, and it is hugely reveealing about us as a people and about how we are evolving as a culture. 

These days, the attempt at rescuing our language from oblivion is gathering pace. There is a good deal of information online and the push for accepting greater use of llanito, of using it to write and produce literature is gathering pace. Just check out the work of poets Gabriel Moreno, Giordano Durante and Jonathan Teuma just for starters, and others, such as Rebecca Calderon with her landmark introduction of 'Bloomsday' in Gibraltar, are showing the world that small as we are, we do have a place in the world of literature. 

I do not come from a 'scraggy farm and moss', I come from a 'craggy land of rock, battlefield that the pitch and toss of stormy sea has left dishevelled, but here, for your sake, I have levelled my fish-wife voice to subtler tones, smothered the self, betrayed my bones'.

Not having a clear identity, not having a sense of complete belonging is odd. But perhaps it is ideal for creativity, for writing, for poetry.

Durante's essay on written Llanito

Calderon on Bloomsday

Gabriel Moreno

Jonathan Teuma

Pondering Poetry

Pondering Poetry

Pondering poetry is something I do from time to time: I like to read poetry, I like to read about poetry, think about it, play about with the sound and feel of poetry. I sometimes even have a go at writing poetry, but all too frequently emerge from my scribbling and pondering feeling at worst frustrated at my pathetic effort, and at best flat, staring at my attempt much as a fishing enthusiast will gaze at a tiddler with a sense of emptiness after an eight hour stint by the water.

This feeling of inadequacy at my own clumsy attempt at stringing words together was heightened this weekend, when, browsing my bookshelves, I found a copy of Seamus Heaney's The Haw Lantern and decided to indulge myself to an afternoon of poetry in a shady corner, away from the hullabaloo of the beaches and the scorch of the August sun. By the time I had read to page 3 and the closing line of the first poem, "Alphabets", I was close to tears: tears of joy at experiencing again the genius of Heaney, and of melancholy that try as I might, I know I will never have the skill to even come close to displaying a fraction of similar talent. What an imposter you are, Anderson, I chastised myself at the presumption that I, too, could even attempt to call myself a poet. Not even a modest writer of poetry (is that different to a poet? Does the reordering of those words add a subtle layer of meaning that distinguishes the true poet from the writer of poetry - something to be discussed at length over several bottles of fine wine, perhaps?).

Besides sheer pleasure, reading poetry also serves to help a poet learn; how to build an image, how to express emotion, how to use rhyme, rhythm, pace, line length, enjambement and other techniques. A good poem stops you in your tracks, gives you a hitherto unknown insight into the world, into humanity. It makes you question, it makes you think, it ignites emotion. A great poem will leave you breathless. It may even inspire you, which is how I felt at the close of The Haw Lantern.

Inspired, because, of course, my poetry will never equal Heaney's in standard. Nor will it reach the beauty of Lorca's images, the wisdom of Neruda, the poignancy of Yeats, the passion of Byron. But every clumsy attempt at shaping up a set of words, at moulding meaning into them, at distilling down an image, or an emotion or a moment in time into its pure essence and conveying it with precision and music and beauty, takes me a step closer to producing something that might be worth reading.

Knowing my shortcomings is what makes it so difficult to decide to submit a poem for publication, or for peer review, or to collect and publish my own work. Who do you think you are, Anderson, yells my imposter syndrome voice at me (she's far louder than the quiet muse of inspiration that gently nudges me into persisting).

This is why I was quietly delighted at reading The Crooked Timber by Giordano Durante and Gabriel Moreno, two writers whose poems I read, enjoy and admire. In this slim book, the two Gibraltarian poets discuss not just the craft of poetry, but what it means to be a poet in Gibraltar, a place where there is not yet a tradition of poetry, where the Gibraltarian poem has not quite emerged but is being birthed slowly, laboriously under the pens of those Gibraltarians who study and write it and who dare to consider themselves poets. There is a good deal of material in The Crooked Timber to spark discussion, but this section resonated with me. Moreno is writing about feelings of frustration at what he calls "the limitations of our genius" and how easy it is to feel diminished in the presence of the great poets and he says:

"It is on these occasions that I repeat to myself, like a mantra: they felt the same awkwardness in respect to their masters. The were equally ashamed and terrified even if they would not admit it!

"And it is with this exercise in self-delusion that I am enticed to continue to type and thread words on my computer screen hoping that, one day, they might reach someone who actually needs them." (Durante and Moreno, Pg 13).

En serio, Durante and Moreno, with their musings on poetry, have managed to rescue me from the depths of a despair so deep that I almost burned pages and pages of poetry that I deemed worthless. (Actually, that's a bit extreme; I probably would only have deleted them off my laptop, not actually chucked my MacBook on a bonfire).

And maybe, just maybe, when I get my breath back from the brilliance that is Heaney, I might just start pushing and pulling words around my computer screen to see if I can shape a half-decent poem out of them.

The Crooked Timber, annotated and tabulated and highly recommended

References:

Heaney, Seamus, The Haw Lantern (1987), Faber and Faber Limited, London.

Durante, Giordano and Moreno, Gabriel, The Crooked Timber: Letters between two Middle-Aged Poets (2025) Patuka Press.

Gibraltar's short stories 2025

I've been slowly (very slowly) reading the winning entries in this year's Gibraltar Spring Festival short story competition. No excuses, I am busy, but I also like to take my time with these matters, savour the stories slowly, a good while after the publicity machine has lauded the writers, the judges, the event, the government and everyone else that played a part in it. Taking my time and above all, ignoring commentary and social media, means that I can make my own mind up about the stories I read.

As in other years, this year's batch of entries was numerous and that is a positive; it shows that there is an eagerness in the local community to write, to read and to take part in this initiative. After over a decade either taking part myself or generally just enjoying the fruits of others' story telling, I still think that it is a good thing that there is a local competition that arouses in the community the will to write down their stories, whatever those might be. It is still the case that there are few stories in the world that are Gibraltarian stories, by Gibraltarian authors. By this, I don't mean stories about, or set in Gibraltar, but those works of fiction or poetry that open a window to a place, a time, a zeitgeist. 

What is encouraging, however, is that this small number of works is growing year on year. Not just because of the short story competition - a short story competition is a small element in helping focus attention on literature as part of a community's culture - but because every year there seems to be another flurry of publishing by local authors and therefore a greater number of works available to build up that picture of a place. Whether a thriller by a Gibraltarian author is set locally or set in a far off country, in another time, or place or galaxy or dimension, that novel will still say something about the writer and their provenance, about the place where it was written, or the place that influenced the write. That is one of the joys of indulging in reading; the discovery of the other: the other place, the other perspective, the other world of imagination. 

Back to this year's batch of winning entries, which I very much enjoyed reading. The link to the Gibraltar Cultural Services website page is below and I would encourage everyone to drop by and read at least some of them. Firstly, they are worth those five or ten minutes each, perfect coffee break reads. Secondly, it is wonderful for writers to know that their work is being read. Sometimes it doesn't even matter if the reader doesn't like it - just the knowledge that someone has taken the time to read your work and respond to it is good enough. No-one is going to like everything anyway.

2025 Gibraltar Spring Festival Short Story Competition Winners.pdf      

I love that these days there is a Llanito category. It is a difficult language to write. Given that it is mainly oral, there is a tendency to need to 'hear' it and so the written version must somehow 'sound' true. That is a tough call and I am not entirely sure that this year's winners quite mastered this aspect of it. But they gave it a good go and in many ways, that is good enough for me, because it means that there is more Llanito out there written and published and therefore skills in writing it will only improve. No apologies for being critical - criticism is much needed in the literary sphere - and no apologies for not writing in Llanito myself. I speak it but writing it is just not my bag. At least, not for now.

I also loved the variety of themes and settings. Sometimes writing to a theme is a great discipline and perhaps the competition organisers might give that some thought for a future competition, or create a themed competition for a special event. It helps focus writers and it makes them hone their writing far more carefully than an open theme. What I do like about an open theme is the variety of stories that it produces. This means that this year's batch included work on mental health, on memory and migration, on desire and danger, on family and loss among other themes, some are set in Gibraltar, in the present, in the past, in Tangiers, in La Linea, in the upper town, at the border...you get my point.

My favourite...so hard to choose. The overall winner, I think, was a great story: The Rock in my Tea Cup by Daniel Francis Brancato. It caught me up in the first sentence and held me to the end. Loved it. I also really enjoyed Stephen Perera's Shining a Light on the 70s...I loved the humour and the language and it took me right back to familiar days of the 70s (el gordito siempre acababa de portero...bueno, y la gordita igual!). But all the stories are worth a read and they open a window on Gibraltar and its writers in 2025. 

A brief word about the entries by the school children. This is a category that I particularly enjoy because it gives us a glimpse into the future. I haven't done any research but I do wonder if any of the finalists of previous competitions have gone on to be writers. I think Louis Emmitt-Stern stands out; I remember him winning at least one poetry competition and he may well have won more - Louis, if you read this, let us know in the comments! I hope this year's entrants keep writing; there is talent lurking there.

If you haven't already read this year's short stories, please do. It is not enough just to read Instagram and Facebook and what these say about who won with what story. It is important to support local writing and the best way this is done is by reading local writers.