Jackie Anderson
Symposium Address 13th October 2020
In the Shadow of the Rock: A Symposium on Literature in Gibraltar
Hi I’m delighted to join you and thank you for
inviting me to be part of this symposium. I’m Jackie Anderson and I am a writer
– for me a pretty dramatic statement, because, like so many artists, the
imposter syndrome is strong in me and sometimes I say I’m a writer and think –
who am I trying to kid?
But:
Writing, to me, perhaps
because I’ve spent so much of my life reading, seems to come as second nature.
It is compulsive, and I am delighted that one of my six children feels exactly
the same. My daughter, Ciara, is a forensic psychologist, and six years ago
said: Mum, let’s write a book together. I’ll do the nitty gritty of the
research, you help with some of the background reading, and I’ll write the
science bits and you add to it. I said, as any Mum would, of course, dear.
Five years later, and we
have a manuscript ready and are starting on our search for a publisher. The
theme: Jack the Ripper. The angle: the power of story and narrative to
communicate, shape, distort, create and mythologise. Here’s an extract, which
might go some way to explain my conviction of the power of story and how vital
it is for there to be a literary tradition in any culture, not least, in a
culture that is still lacking in definition, in part, perhaps, because its own,
native stories are still only just emerging and its literary tradition is still
nascent.
From the introduction of:
Jack the Ripper: Myth, Monster, Murderer by Jackie Anderson and Ciara Wild
The story of the Jack the Ripper murders is far more complex than a
linear tale of an unknown, murderous monster who revelled in hacking down
unfortunate women in the streets of Whitechapel, a monster who was never caught
and just suddenly stopped the murderous spree; there is no clear beginning,
middle or end to the Jack the Ripper story. There are victims, and there
are characters, there are settings and locations, but otherwise, what we know
about the murderer (or murderers, if you believe there were more than one) is
limited.
Stories inhabit our world in a way that is so pervasive that we are not
aware that the narrative of our lives is expressed as stories. A story is
a telling of a sequence of events either true or fictitious, although at times
those boundaries are not entirely clear, or can become blurred over time.
The Jack the Ripper story, at its most basic level, is a recounting of the
events that took place in Whitechapel, London in 1888. These events were
recorded in police reports, press reports and inquest reports. There are
clear facts and there are versions of events that differ from witness to
witness - such is the nature of crime that unless there is a full and truthful
confession, specific events are sometimes open to interpretation.
Through stories, we explore meaning in our lives. Narrative
meaning can be established by exploring the place that each event has within
the story and how these events, which usually include human action, are linked.
The meaning of each story can be found in analysing its part in the greater
whole. For example, the story of the Battle of Hastings can be better
understood when examined in its broader context as part of the whole conquest
of England by the Normans.
To uncover meaning in a story, we need to look at the links with all the
other things associated with the story: the people, the places, the time.
Of particular importance is the role of culture and society in deriving meaning
from a story - as individuals we interpret stories from the basis of a shared
understanding of our particular society. Groups, cultures, communities
and societies gather and preserve collections of narratives in their myths,
legends, folklore and histories - their own stories. These are used to
develop a sense of narrative meaning which can be applied by communities to
help make sense of their cultural origins and social rules. Over a period
of time, meanings can become blurred, obscured by the retelling and by the
countless interpretations that are added to it: stories are organic, they
change minutely with each telling, and as the stories are passed from one
generation to the next, they eventually evolve into myths, fairy tales, and
enter the lexicon of the narrative of a social group. Thus the Jack the
Ripper story can also be viewed as the start of what is evolving into an urban
myth, if indeed, it is not already so.
The meaning of the Jack the Ripper story needs to be interpreted by
understanding the society in which the events of that story took place.
Beyond this, we can use hindsight to explore the complex interconnections that
can be made between the Jack the Ripper narrative and the wider context in
which it was set.
Through this book, we explore how urban myths and legends arise and
develop and ask the question as to whether the Ripper story is one of these
legends, providing a way for communities to reflect upon and learn from the
past. We look at the power of story to illuminate facts and illustrate in
emotive and personal terms the darker and more easily hidden reaches of a
particular period in history, or particular events. From this story, we see
Jack the Ripper emerge as the extreme epitome of a society where the worst that
could possibly happen to a woman, happened to these victims. Thereafter, these
women, who had lost their lives and the reality of their true identities, were
then held by a prurient and manipulative media as examples of what not
to be like as a woman.
This book is a testament to those murdered women.
So, to me,
The power of story is
incalculably important, and particularly so in the shadowy areas of a frontier
or a border town as is Gibraltar, or one whose history is as part of a
contested land, where neither conquerors nor claimants appear to have any
regard for those who live there, for whose land it is. And since the identity
of those people has been disregarded by those more powerful than they, whose
voices clamour to claim justification for their view of history, it is all the
more important to ensure their voices and those of their evolving community are
heard, recorded and remembered. Literature is the most powerful way to achieve
this.
I always have more than
one project on the go at a time – concentration span of a goldfish – and with
the concept of the power of story mulling about in the back of my head
somewhere, I started to gather old urban legends about Gibraltar’s ghosts which
I am gathering into an anthology of themed short stories. I’m not going to go
into what it is that ghost stories actually say about a time and place and
people and their belief systems, except that the shadows of Gibraltar’s people
emerge from local ghost stories beautifully, and given our close proximity to
Halloween, I’ll share this little gem of a story with you –
Moorish
Castle in Gibraltar, otherwise known as the Tower of Homage, was built in
around 1165 and after many centuries of battles and sieges fell into the hands
of the British in 1704 after which it was duly absorbed into the Garrison and
used as a prison. In fact, there were so many prisoners and discipline in those
days was harsh, with summary executions taking place with unpleasant regularity
not to mention deaths through disease, so inevitably there were a rather large
number of corpses to dispose of. The British, ever pragmatic, found a
reasonably useful solution to the problem of corpses that were decomposing
rapidly. Using the lime that was extracted from the Upper Rock in the lime
kilns, the bodies were dissolved pretty much in the Walter White Breaking Bad method,
and the resulting sludge used to add render to the walls and mixed in the
mortar to reinforce existing walls. And the haunting of the walls of Moorish
Castle begins. Here’s a taster of the short story I wrote inspired by this
rather gruesome tale:
He holds onto the rough concrete of a wall at the
top of Castle Steps. The humidity makes his bones ache these days. They ache
even before he crawls out of bed, and his lungs swell like sponges dipped in
brine till every intake of breath sears at his chest. He needs to climb up to
the Castle today, even if he has to fight for breath, even if puddles of sweat
gather in the creases of his neck and in the hollow of his collar bones.
He wheezes, the air shoving its way into what is
left of his chest. It feels like he is sucking in soup. He aches for a long,
hard pull at a cigarette but the last time he smoked was thirty years ago, when
his father broke the news that the border with Spain was to open and perhaps
all the men’s jobs would be taken by younger, fitter, white, European men; men
from La Linea, with demanding young women waiting for them at home, hands on
swelling hips and lips pursed in permanent petulance, men desperate for work
with the strength born of that desperation.
Hammed pulls out of his trouser pocket a rag
torn from the worn out end of his bed sheet and mops at his head, rubbing the
sweat from his eyes before the salt makes them sting. He has to come to the
Castle today, however tough the toil. The Night Voices have told him to.
It has been years and years since he first heard
the Voices. He was just a child, not long arrived from Morocco. He told his
mother then that he could hear people talking to him even when the room was
empty. They were muffled voices, the words often unclear. “Shhh!” his mother
said, glancing around their room, the room where they all slept and ate and
washed together, he, his parents, his two brothers and his cousin. She was
always like that, looking around furtively, always nervous. She never could
relax, she said, living in a place where she was not meant to live, where she
didn’t really exist, where she was not wanted by anyone other than her husband.
“Don’t be a foolish boy,” she added, “you’re just imagining things. Don’t go
saying things like that.”
“I’m not imagining them, I can hear them,”
Hammed the boy insisted. He only heard the voices at night. Gibraltar has
always been a noisy city: hundreds of people living in a cluster of tiny homes
built one upon the other, walls so thin between apartments you could hear your
neighbour’s bowel movements in the stiller hours of the morning, just before
the church clocks began to chime, tolling the start of the working day, each
clock slightly out of time with the others so that all dreams shattered and
no-one could cling to sleep.
Hammed’s Voices were very real; male voices
mostly, sometimes mumbling in hushed rushes. Plots, Hammed thought, straining
his ears to hear and catching snippets that reminded him of how he and his
cousins would watch out for the adults so they would not get caught stealing
fruit from the neighbour’s fruit bowl. Even a wrinkled apple could be a treat
in those hard days.
Mostly, Hammed thought as a child, the Voices
were angry. “Don’t worry about hearing voices,” his grandmother said on the one
occasion she had been brought to visit Gibraltar on the ferry from Tangier. She
had a placid way of speaking, chins wobbling with generous smiles, fat fingers
twined with each other and cupped resting on a stomach so swollen the boy Hammed thought she would one day burst like an oversized balloon on a hot
stone. She leaned towards him like a conspirator and whispered, “It is just the
angels reminding you to pray.”
But the Night Voices did not sound anything like
Hammed thought angels might sound. “These are deep, angry voices,” he
confided in his grandmother, “they shout sometimes, and sometimes they growl,
like animals.” But the worst times, he thought, too scared to even speak the
words to tell her, were when they wailed. When the Voices set up their agonised
wailing, rising up towards the waxing crescent moon and falling away into the
ebbing tides to the west, their moans pleading over and over, weeping, then
Hammed would fall to shivering, even in the stifling August nights. His limbs
would go rigid, gripped with a terror that paralysed him so that his teeth
clenched and jaw stiffened and his throat closed in on itself and he could not
even cry out for the brave, comforting arms of his gently scoffing father. On
those long, terror-laden nights, all Hammed could do was lie stiffly in the
bed he shared with his younger brother and pray, mumbling recitations of
the Qur’an over and over to block out the sound. In the moonlight, looming,
casting a monolithic shadow into his bedroom, the walls of the Moorish Castle
stood black against the blackness of night. And the voices in the walls
screamed till dawn.
As some of my fellow
Gibraltarian writers will demonstrate, the power of poetry to communicate a
story as well as high concepts makes a particularly strong impact. It’s not
that poems need to relate events or descriptions of a place, but that the
writer’s experience of a place and its people or an event will permeate the
poetry and reveal something about that place or people, like a chink in a
curtain will cast a little light into a darkened room.
Here is a poem from my
forthcoming collection, The Blue Beyond, poems that have been somehow inspired
or formed through the most salient natural feature of my personal landscape, my
personal geography, and that is the sea. Not only is Gibraltar almost
completely surrounded by the sea, but I lived close to a wide estuary and the
North Kent coast in England, so the sea has always featured in my life.
The Wild West Wind
Is it my name that drifts
On the sea-laden air
When the west wind blows?
It plays, rustling the leaves
On the promenade trees
And scattering the remains
Of springtime petals at the
Coming of the sun, and
Teasingly calls to all my name;
That I should set sail
From this, the fringe of land,
Where, in face of endless
Rise and fall of blue-hued hills
And cresting waves –
Wild west mustangs roaring
In fearless, foaming race -
I, with the numbed mind
Of shallow ignorance,
In awe and loneliness stand.
And when the west wind blows
And curls its briny scent
Beyond the armour of the quay
And the ships by the harbour walls,
With their oil and soot and dirt
And stench of rust and sweat,
I pause; and hold my breath
In case it hears, and whirls and spins
To beckon me again,
Calling, summoning to the wild,
To the unknown,
To the world beyond
The walls of stone and guarded gates.
It sings and lures,
And tempts again:
To take to wings
When the wild west wind
Cries out my name.
This is quite a
personal poem, and I wrote it from the memory of the sense of frustration at
being ‘imprisoned’ on the Rock during the years of border closure in the 70s –
a sense that has returned quite strongly during Covid lockdown and the
resultant difficulties with travelling. There’s also a sense of timidity – not
everyone has the courage to follow their calling and I am as timid and fragile
as anyone else. I still wonder what more there is out there, beyond the blue.
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