Exiliado: A Dream of Olympia
The last time I visited Gibraltar, I walked the route I used to take to come home from Main Street. It’s easy to ignore the Old Town when you no longer live there. The tourists who don’t deviate from the norm of the Upper Rock by coach or taxi, or the shopping route that leads all the way to The Convent miss out on a labyrinthine series of alleys and steps, widening and narrowing in varying eras of architecture in colonial splendour and ruin.
In some ways, I prefer it this way. It feels mine somehow, like a secret tucked away for the eyes of those only in the know, despite Gibraltar being one of the most visited places on Earth. It’s sad perhaps, to think that tourists are only treated to some of this in Main Street and Irish Town, the rest being modern high rises and pleasant marinas. But then I see what happens in places like Sweden and Granada, overrun everywhere in search of a manufactured authenticity or old-charm. Gibraltar’s Old Town is much like the history of our people, a hidden jewel for the curious, passed down from an older generation.
My great-aunty Vicky lives in the Old Town. I love seeing how much areas like Calle Comedia have been cleaned up but managed to retain a sense of history, especially with the Gustavo Bacarisas murals. I love walking up there, then turning into the street with wooden shutters, pots of geraniums bursting out of windows. The smell of potaje or lentejas or sizzling meat at lunchtime, of fresh laundry. The blare of Telecinco with its marathon of journalists (or so they claim to be) shouting at each other every weekday afternoon for five hours. There’s always a cat in one of the doorways, eyeing you cautiously as it goes about its subterfuge.
Aunty Vicky is 92 years old, and lives in the house she grew up in. She refuses to move. Although her home is spotless and in good order, she has decided to clear out things she has collected through the years, and donate them or give them away. Since I moved to the UK sixteen years ago, I have come to rely on Aunty Vicky to provide me with a bounty of culture, religion and history during each of my visits. I receive books on theology, article clippings about Gibraltar, and old letters written by my ancestors.
This visit I received a small black notebook, held together by brown tape and hope. She tells me it belonged to her aunt Olympia, my great-grandmother’s sister who was a schoolteacher. The book is a sort of journal, a mix of lesson plans and diary entries, quotes and poetry, sections copied out of articles and prayers. It spans the years from 1943 to 1968, which for the formation of Gibraltar as a nation are crucial dates.
There’s a lot I could write about when it comes to this journal. There are whole pages devoted to various Lourdes pilgrimages, including one where the train my family and other Gibraltarians was derailed and let to deaths and injuries. What is most interesting to me however, is how the passing of time in the journal allows me to see how Olympia becomes increasingly political, and how great her desire is to see Gibraltar gain a right to self-determination and form itself as a nation.
She refers to Gibraltar in 1965 as being in its 15th siege, once again against Spain with Franco at the helm. She speaks lovingly of Sir Joshua Hassan as a leader for Gibraltar. She talks of sacrifice and faith, and the rights of the Gibraltarian people to have their own identity.
To stumble upon a document of history in this way always interests me. I think of the large history, the history written by superpowers in broad strokes, where the pyramids are built and the emperors of Rome rule and the wars are fought and won. Under that, I feel, is the history of Gibraltar: one of Moors and sieges and perhaps even the border closure. Much like the Old Town, what lays in deviated alleys in the shade of the Rock of Gibraltar is the history of the Gibraltarian as a person struggling for identity and nationhood, devoted to their heroes and longing for the idea of freedom and the right to choose their own destiny.
It is especially emotional to see it in the pages of a small notebook as everyday ephemera, in small cursive packed between lines. A preoccupation shared alongside Bible quotes and news of Kennedy’s assassination, or prayers by Santa Teresa de Avila. (And who would have thought I would have so much in common with a relative I never met, with my own notebooks full of stray thought and quotes, my ideas around identity, my interest in writing and my career path…).
I mentioned that on my last visit to Gibraltar, I also took the route to my old house from Main Street. I turned up into Hospital Hill and followed the steep road to where the old hospital and mortuary used to be. It was a shock to see everything gone, a hole in the landscape of my memory. My old house is there and not there, existing in both spaces at the same time. The old Patio Polícia now renamed and smartened up into luxury. What used to be a sunken patio now a raised plaza, my old doorway hidden behind a new building. On the opposite side of the road, a mural of commemorating the 1967 referendum is almost completely gone. I remember in particular the part with an English bulldog sporting a policeman’s hat, which you can now barely see.
And Olympia is gone, and my grandparents are gone, and my father is gone….as are many other Gibraltarians with their own stories and experiences. I wonder how many notebooks and documents there in cupboards and attics around houses in the Old Town. I think of the fast-changing landscape of Gibraltar and how exciting it is to greet this future, but how important it is to also preserve the past as written by ourselves.
One day I will no longer be exiliado. I often make lists around my homecoming. The Athenians believed that you should strive to leave your city, your society, your world better than when you left it. So I consider what responsibility I have to Gibraltar and how I could leave it a better place.
One of the things on my list (with the dream of some funding or a lottery win) is to take up a space prominently, somewhere like the top floors of Casemates so that tourists can walk through the old city gates and be presented with it. My idea is for a Museum of the Gibraltarian. I’m inspired by the row of museums on the mall in Washington DC, telling the stories of a particular people, their culture, history and struggle. A museum for Gibraltar that stands on the shoulders of all the great work that the Gibraltar Museum and places like the National Archives already does, and opens those stories out permanently to the public, locals and visitors alike.
Stories and documents and clothes and media relating to our nation, all those things kept in attics and cupboards, all those secret stories that may disappear with passing of generations. A place for us, where we are at the centre with that self-determination we hold so dearly. And somewhere in those rooms of artefacts, I hope to make a prominent space for Olympia’s journal.
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