Exiliado: Entre Dos Aguas
Looking out of the window in our Wapping apartment, at the rain and the cold and the same view I’ve been staring at almost daily since mid-March, I had a revelation: I’m not starting a job until November, which means for everything else I could work remotely. So let’s go to Gibraltar.
Perhaps the real catalyst wasn’t the weather or the view, but Jeremy Black’s A Brief History of the Mediterranean which I am currently reading. I’ve felt very Mediterranean in the last few years. I’ve talked about the things that differentiate you when you’re an immigrant, but there are also things that join you. Everywhere I go in London, I bump into someone from Sardinia, Greece, or Morocco. We unite in our ‘Mediterranean-ness’, a glued-together family where we celebrate our distinct but somehow similar ways of life. The food, the body language, the music, and the above all the sea we miss so deeply.
When I worked in a tea shop whilst studying for my degree, a man came in with his daughter one quiet evening and fussed over new teas to display in his café. He talked about the importance of good green tea with mint. I mentioned I was from Gibraltar, and I understood. His eyes lit up. “Well my friend,” he exclaimed, “you are practically Moroccan!”
From our rented apartment in Gibraltar we can see the outline of Jebel Musa, levante permitting. Every afternoon we sit outside and watch the sun set, while mountains in the horizon get darker and the lights of the coastal towns light up. On a very good day of visibility, you can even see the electric windmills, like nails embedded into the landscape. My husband pulls out Google Maps and asks me what city I think it is right opposite us. I don’t have an answer, for a town only a few kilometres by sea I have looked at my entire life. We decide it’s probably Benzú. I don’t know a thing about Benzú.
Looking at Google Maps make me curious. I pull out and look South, measuring the distance between us and other places. It turns out Gibraltar is geographically closer to Mali than to London. A couple more thousand kilometres and you reach the border of Nigeria. How did I grow up knowing more about New York City than I still do about somewhere like Mali, let alone Morocco?
I think about a cultural milestone in my early life, the day we finally got Sky TV. A constant diet pumped into my infant brain of aspirational capitalism, with eyes focused solely on Britain and the Unites States. Magazines imported and at extra cost, across the air, telling me about places and things and moments from thousands of miles away. And yet, somehow a part of my culture as a British person. The islands of Great Britain as the Motherland, the main source, the disseminator of a way of life.
Morocco was not at a distance geographically, but certainly as a way of life. We enjoyed couscous and pastella and tajines at home. We enjoyed green tea. Shakira imported Arabic drum beats and trumpets. It was fashionable to make your home look like a kasbah. A sort of detached exoticism, a blurry hippy dream of beaches and tents, green tea with mint and the smoke of hashish.
But nothing of history, of the struggle of a nation close enough to touch. Nothing on my tongue except counting to three in Moroccan Arabic and a few other words here and there caught on the street and enveloped into our vernacular.
In his book, Jeremy Black discusses the threat of Persia for the Ancient Greeks, and how despite the greater army, it was the resources and intellectual strategy of the Greeks that vanquished the invading forces, and eventually the Persians themselves. The resulting dominant culture was formed on these lines, the Athenian ideals of a certain type of democracy and standards of beauty that continue to this day. Later still, the mythology of how Spain drove the Moors out and back to Africa. The lines then, are drawn across the water. The Mediterranean no longer a form of communication and trade entirely, but a border between North and South, Christian and Muslim, Brown and White.
A cultural hangover that continues, perpetuated by stereotypes of barbarism, repression, poverty and cleanliness. What would it take to break it?
Borders are drawn on the land too, and we dig our heels deep and say ‘there’s nothing on the other side I want’ while we watch The Simpsons and learn the minutiae of American presidents’ lives. I didn’t access flamenco music until I was sixteen, the electro-chill stylings of Chambao covering Entre Dos Aguas scratching my curiousity to discover Paco De Lucía, Camarón and Lola Flores. My shock to discover how close to Gibraltar they had been born, raised, and composed their music.
It’s not a stretch to consider the aguas of Paco’s song to mean the ones between Gibraltar and Spain, or Europe and Africa. My interest in flamenco led me to considering its origins and the influence that artists like Paco De Lucía and Tomatito tried to infuse into them, which were very obviously Arabic. I think then, of all the things I have missed that I can now make up for: literature, music, film, culture, people and travels to a land so close I can almost reach out and smack away that terrible invisible line we drew all those centuries ago.
When I look out at Jebel Musa and that small body of water between us and it, I consider all the stories that have happened in that space. The ships and nations rising and sinking to form the land we know today. I wonder what it looks like for someone on the opposite shore, looking out at the Rock of Gibraltar on the horizon as the sun goes down behind them.
