Gibraltar - More Poetry from Gabriel Moreno

 

March blew in pretty wild and wet, but I have been on a roll with reading works by Gibraltarian writers and kept up the momentum with Gibraltar, a new collection of poems by Gabriel Moreno. I picked up my copy in person at his launch gig in El Kasbah in Gibraltar at the end of February, a vastly enjoyable night where we were treated to his poetry and music, and a special appearance was made by Morag  Butler, all the way from the folklore scene in Kent. An absolute treat.

Morag Butler at El Kasbah, February 2026

I read Gibraltar quickly, in one afternoon. Then I took it on my travels to UK and read it in a more leisurely way, indulging in the lines of poetry, reading the poems out loud in the three languages used and probing at the layers of meaning. These poems resonate. Perhaps it's because I'm a llanita, no se, but I think it's because good poetry is resonant anyway. 

Of course, before I read the poems, I'd heard many of them, read out loud both by Gabriel Moreno and by his translator and publisher, founder of Goat Star Publishing, Rafael Peñas Cruz. This is how poetry is at its most vibrant: read aloud in the voice of the author, with the accents, and intonations and emphases all in the right places, where they are meant to be. It is the llanito accent, the traces of andalusian, that I think bring these poems fully alive, that give them an authenticity that lingers with you long after the moment has moved on. The English language poems are strong, with powerful, lasting images, and the same can be said of the Spanish. In fact, I think I need to also point out that the translations into Spanish are worthy poems in themselves and nothing is lost in translation here. I particularly liked the tenth poem in the first section of the book, the reflections of Gibraltar:

"I favoured ones where you waltzed,

where the smell of bay leaves mixed

with English ale and Moroccan spices

wreathed the crest of our thinking."

"Preferí aquellos donde bailabas un vals,

donde el aroma a laurel se mezclaba

con cerveza inglesa y especies maroquíes

coronando las crestas de nuestro pensamiento."

My favourite were the Llanito sonnets. What began as a response to a challenge that llanito cannot be moulded into a formal poetic structure born of another language, has resulted in sonnets that have torn up the rule book of colonial control. English is the language that was foisted on our ancestors and which we had no real choice but to learn to speak, but we have developed from this and from the many tongues that our people have spoken in our past and grown our own language, on our own soil. They joy of these sonnets is not only in the games that the poet has played with language, but with the shaping of a Gibraltarian meaning, using Gibraltarian language from an English formal poetic structure. There is a beautiful rebellion in this that brought me utter joy.

And then, of course, there was the language of the sonnets, the contemplation of uniquely Gibraltarian themes and landscapes, like the smuggling of Marlboro Man, the walking through the border in La Frontera, the relationships of a youth spent in the Gibraltarian beaches and bars as in The Inheritance, and Fling del Verano. 

I imagine a particular challenge must have been how to write a language that has no standard written form. I stumbled over the word "vrada" until I said it out loud several times and the penny dropped. If this is the case, then Moreno's talent burgeons further, demonstrating a mastery of form and language that I think is probably born of his ear for music and how words sound together. The Llanito Sonnets in this selection work well and fall so easily from the lips that the talent and effort they took to write could easily be underestimated. I would ask the reader not to fall into that trap: what is easiest to read is often the hardest to write.

The book moves on to a selection of new poetry, pondering broader themes, such as relationships, humanity itself, and of course, poetry. Moreno is expressing his thinking processes, some of them complex, in his poems and this offers up to readers the chance to plunge into our own thinking. This is what poetry does best, I think, have us explore our own thinking. Or, as he says in Epistola ad Pistones:

 

"It's all butterflies

innit? Every song

is a chance 

for the dreamer 

in the cave

to imagine

a more benevolent

field."

This is not the place for an in-depth analysis of this collection of poems, nor am I one skilled enough to do justice to them anyway, but I do sense the literary import of this work and the valuable contribution it makes to Gibraltarian literature, or, as Rafael Peñas Cruz puts it in his prologue:

"But a culture is nothing without poets, for it is only they who ultimately give shape to that immaterial set of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and ways of life peculiar to a certain group of people in a certain space at a certain point in time."

If you haven't got a copy, click the link below and order one now. En serio, este libro hay que leerlo.

Gibraltar by Gabriel Moreno

Gabriel Moreno, troubadour, at El Kasbah, February 2026

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

Breaking the Language Barriers

One of the most fascinating things I have found working and living in Gibraltar, has been the capacity for speaking a variety of languages that people can have. Coming from a place where speaking anything other than Anglicised French raises eyebrows and might mark you out as an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant, and where school children can opt out of learning foreign languages at anything beyond very basic, this is refreshing, to say the least.

So far this week, I have encountered a Frenchman whose English is nearly perfect, Spanish sounds almost native and who has learnt a good smattering of Moroccan through his work in property development out in Tangiers. Then there was a man from the Czech. Republic whose English is pretty clear, whose German is superb and who can muster up some Russian when the occasion requires it, in addition to the Portuguese man whose English is excellent, Spanish flawless and can hold a conversation in French. And finally there was the German who speaks better English than the English-speaking locals, is married to a Moroccan and speaks her language fluently, who can get by with reasonably pronounced French and whose command of Spanish is pretty impressive for someone who has only lived here for a year or so. Some of the English I have met can muster up relatively good Spanish, but prefer to use English first, just in case they are understood, which, in most cases, they are. And then there are the Moroccans in the community, most of whom speak their own language as well as English, Spanish, French, and some I have met recently, can add German to this portfolio of tongues.

Some of these people have travelled far and are determined to communicate well wherever they live, and I admire them for this. It seems to be the locals who have a remarkably laid back attitude towards languages. This may be because the Gibraltarians learn from birth to speak English and Spanish, and combine the two to create their own, unique patois. The nearby Spaniards from La Linea can either speak very basic English, or don't bother, because in most employment situations, they can get away with speaking only Spanish anyway, which, for English visitors, can be hugely frustrating because there is an expectation that local people speak English, yet so many shop and restaurant staff don't!

While I love listening to the babble around me, and trying to decipher the languages I hear, it does concern me that local children don't seem to benefit much from this welter of natural communication that is going on around them. Unlike my own childhood, those of my children and their friends is being conducted almost exclusively in English, thanks, largely to Disney Channel, Nickleodeon and WWE. Spanish is used rarely, and generally only in its crudest forms for expletives. They learn little of Spanish literature, art and culture, except for a short burst in senior school at advanced leve, if they have so chosen, and popular culture, which is available to all tourists. And the adults who speak Spanish regularly speak it poorly, with a limited vocabulary. It's a shame, because Gibraltar could be considered as bilingual, lauds itself for so being, but falls short of it, because so many local people do not have a sufficient command of Spanish to speak it in any other way than as foreigners.

So I have no objection to the Instituto Cervantes setting up here, if it genuinely will help to expand local knowledge and use of Spanish and the Spanish culture. Just so long as it is kept outside politics. And, it should be joined by some kind of institution which expands local knowledge of Moroccan language and culture, as much to ensure that Arabic is retained by the younger generations of Moroccan children born here, as to expand this language much further into the local vocabulary. After all, if we had learnt Arabic at school, I would feel far more comfortable haggling at the souks only twenty miles or so away, than I do trying to do it in the English, Spanish or French that I speak.