Exiliado: El Peso

When I was at university studying English with Creative Writing, the rhythm of the week was marked by having to write at least one short story, usually based on a writing prompt. Gibraltar, or my Queerness, was not something I touched upon until my third year. My feeling was, who would be interested in either of those aspects of my life?

There’s unfortunately this feeling drummed into you that you must write to be published, and to be published you must write what sells. Gibraltar, often ignored by literature, seems on the one hand to be a place where not much happens, and on the other a place so complicated you would have to end up writing a historical academic textbook with plenty of footnotes rather than a novel.

And then, the question of Queerness. In my head something that had been done plenty before, and done better by people who have had far more interesting lives than mine. This thought once again only perpetuated by what I had been exposed to. Novels and television series and films about gay men in London or New York, for example. What space did a Queer story have for someone like me, other than as possibly the object of desire, a plot point for the extremely white Anglo main character to go through their own story arc.

I accepted this with some complacency. After all, I was receiving lectures by well-established writers who were telling me that if I didn’t read Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or Kafka I couldn’t consider myself a writer. That if English wasn’t my first language, I shouldn’t write in English. And none of this made me angry at first, because I had no basis, no platform, and no voice with which to fight with.

So I wrote science fiction set in New York, and horror based in rural America, because these were things that interested me and there were the things that sold. And yet, nobody published me and my stories came back with feedback saying I was a good writer with potential but…and the ‘but’ hung elusively in the air Until my tutor Bernardine.

Bernardine talked about writing authentically and honestly and about your experiences, which were probably experiences we weren’t seeing in fiction. I let all this pass me by because I thought I was writing authentically, when in a sense I had no idea what that meant. Nobody would be interested in my life or my experiences or my background, surely. ‘Authentically’ was for people who had something to say, and did I even think I was that kind of writer?

But halfway through the term, a writing prompt in Bernardine’s class came along, and the brief was a simple one: write about ‘home’. Through my frustration at my stories coming back full of lines and corrections and asking me to write more authentically, I thought I possibly didn’t have anything to lose. Through a thinly-veiled avatar of myself, I wrote about Gibraltar, and my grandmother’s dementia. I wrote about calentita and torta acelga. I wrote in Llanito. I described Main Street and the mercaillos in Spain, mangoes and spices and kitchen tables and the view across the Straits.

My story came back with the best feedback I’d ever received. So I infused everything I did with myself. I wrote Gothic horror stories for my dissertation, turning the idea of invasion on its head through a post-colonial eye. I wrote about secrecy and religion, teenage frustrations of living in a small town, and eventually what it felt like to move away and essentially be a British immigrant in mainland Britain.

What grew and grew and grew throughout those three years in my head was a story about two teenagers who live next door to each other in a Gibraltar where the border has maybe only just re-opened. How two people in what we like to call a ‘melting pot’ can have such different lives while being neighbours. And what if these boys suddenly fell for each other, defying all sorts of conventions regarding religion, class, ethnicity and masculinity? All set against the summer of 1995 that culminated in the speedboat riots.

I started thinking about that novel about three years ago. I went into my MA course with the intention to write that novel. My father’s death prevented me from finishing my MA, but even by then I had a novel’s worth of notes and plots and the stutters of opening chapters.

What kept me from writing that novel, and the weight of the Rock of Gibraltar above my head is almost a sense of responsibility. It’s probably the same sense I had when I thought about writing Exiliado and didn’t ever quite get started with it, until I was encouraged to do so by what I now like to call #gibraltartwitter.

And what was the fear? It’s still the fear, despite the overwhelmingly warm and positive response I’ve had to Exiliado. Nobody will care. People will tell you everything you got wrong. Some of those stories are not yours to tell. You got the way smuggling happened wrong. You got the street name wrong. You get the trainers one of the characters wears wrong.

So I researched and plotted and stuttered until today. It went from a slim novel about two boys to an enormous inter-generational family saga spanning from the Spanish Civil War, back to something smaller, changing in tone as it went. There was a moment when I ran to Bernardine’s office clutching a new 20 page plot, announcing that I couldn’t possibly write about a gay Gibraltarian of Moroccan descent because it wasn’t my story to tell. Bernardine told me somewhat colourfully that not writing that story was a stupid idea.

There’s this idea somehow that you’re responsible for your nation. You’re a writer but also ambassador, caretaker and teacher to the rest of the world. But I think maybe all that care and attention and worry gets in the way of your honesty, and you end up with a blank page.

I think then, of all those writers I’ve seen who have pitched stories about Gibraltar where the character is essentially ‘Britain in the sun’, an exotic location in which to frame a crime thriller. A place in the borderlands with drugs and money laundering and murder. Yet where are our people and our language, why are the main characters not from Gibraltar? Every time, we see that detectives or otherwise have to be shipped in from elsewhere in order to provide any sense of competence.

We’re relegated to shopkeepers and dockyard workers and cleaners, bumbling along in the background languidly awaiting our siestas with inauthentic voices. And we are grateful for these table scraps, and the writer seems to care very little about responsibility to a nation, and ends up with a published novel.

I looked at my notes the other day for my novel. I decided to experiment and write out my plot points, then compare them to the ones in my notes. I know them almost exactly by memory. I know what the characters are called and what they look like, and I know exactly where they live and eat and shop. Maybe I won’t get the specifics of the hierarchy of smuggling rings exactly right, and I might put Teumas in the wrong place on Main Street, but I hope what comes across is that authenticity and honesty and my story, which if I leave untold for long enough, will be told by someone else, where I’ll simply be somewhere in the background, having a siesta.