Exiliado: Through The Wire

At the start of a post-graduate French course I attended one summer, we are encouraged to walk around and introduce ourselves to each other. Most of the people in the room are teachers, or hoping to be teachers. They come from Spain, Italy, France, Albania, England. They have degrees and run their own businesses, they are well-travelled and speak several other languages already. There are small moments when it comes to walking around and speaking to people like this that I feel slightly intimidated.

I tell myself that I am bringing something to the table nobody else has. I am a Gibraltarian, natively bilingual and with a particular culture. Surely, this will be something of interest to attendees that seem so encompassed by the idea of language and culture.

I walk over to a woman, who tells me she is from the North of Spain. I start to talk to her in Spanish, and she teasingly makes fun of my Andalucian accent. She asks me where from the South I am from. I tell her Gibraltar. She laughs. “Ah sí, she says…Gibraltar Español.”

I look at her with a serious expression. I’ve navigated this question in different ways throughout my life and I never really know how to answer when assaulted by it. It is hurtful and deeply ignorant, and I wonder if she even knows what it truly means. So I ask her. She replies by telling me she doesn’t actually, that she’s just heard it her whole life. She hasn’t even been to Gibraltar. I tell her it’s nice to meet her and I move on to other people.

Another woman sits next to me at a table and introduces herself. She is French. I am relieved at the possibility of a non-political conversation. All I’ve had are questions about whether I feel more English or Spanish, if my parents were English or Spanish, and how I feel about Brexit.

She tells me about her village in France. I tell her I have fond memories of holidays in the Pyrenees. She asks me where I’m from, and I tell her I’m from Gibraltar. She tells me she’s never heard of it. I show her on a map.

“So it’s in Spain,” she says.

“Well no,” I reply. “It’s next to Spain.”

“But look” she says pointing at the map, “this is Spain.”

“Yes,” I say. “There’s a border though.”

“Okay,” she says. “So it’s a British territory in Spain.”

“No. It’s a British territory next to Spain.”

She laughs incredulously. “You speak Spanish though!”

“Mexicans speak Spanish,” I reply. “It doesn’t mean they’re Spanish.”

“But Mexico isn’t in Spain!”

I point at the map again. “Portugal is next to Spain. Would you say Portugal is a country in Spain?”

She angrily throws her hands up in the air. “This is ridiculous! You can’t compare Gibraltar with Portugal! Gibraltar is tiny, it’s a town.”

“It’s a nation,” I point out. “And when did size have anything to do with defining agency?”

“You are wrong,” she tells me. Confidently. Wrong about my own nation. Wrong about my people, my city, my flag, its place in the world and its right to exist. A woman who previously had no idea the place even existed is suddenly rabidly defending…what exactly? Imperalism? Borders? The right to nationhood? The definition of self? She doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the course, that’s how angry she gets about it. This woman will go on to teach children.

Defining yourself is a difficult and even dangerous proposition, when you have to define yourself while you live on the other side of a border, be that geographically, culturally or otherwise. The human brain seems wired sociologically to accept a binary way of thinking. You’re either with us or against us, good or bad. There’s no room for nuance. I often wonder how people are willing to accept that there are about 50 different flavours of crisps, but completely unwilling to accept that I am neither English nor Spanish.

I’m often also asked to define myself when it comes to sexuality. I’ve settled on Queer because I like the political overtones, the broad spectrum of being and existing, and the fluidity in which I can move through the world. But the world imposes itself on you anyway, and then you have to make choices that don’t even define you.

Those monitoring forms after applying for something feel more restricting than embracing. Is my ethnicity White British? British other? Other? I was on the phone the other day and I was asked what my first language was.

“Well, I have two,” I replied. “English and Spanish.”
“Ah,” the man replied. “I’m afraid the form only lets me put one in.”

“But I have two,” I said. “Can you not even put a note somewhere that I have two?”

“There’s nowhere on the form to write that kind of note, so you’re just going to have to choose.”

I thought about consequences, then. What did it mean to choose one over the other? Nevermind that I had to make this stupid choice in the first place. The man told me that if I chose English, I would be at a disadvantage with languages because I don’t have a Spanish qualification higher than an A Level. If I chose Spanish, it would open up a whole other form and I would be considered English As An Additional Language. It means I would have to do things like take an aptitude test for English.

I begrudgingly chose English. I didn’t feel like taking an aptitude test in English from a man who could clearly hear and realise I spoke perfect English. But ah, the forms need filling out.

I grew up never quite understanding where I fit into the world. I always felt like I was on the other side of the border. Too ‘English’ for Spain, too ‘Spanish’ for England, and too Queer for little old Gibraltar. My revelation came in the most unexpected place, a module at university called Lesbian Literature.

I was expecting a little bit of Sarah Waters, some Alice Walker, a couple of essays and a credit. What I got instead by a brilliant professor called William Spurlin (and if you ever get a chance to listen to him speak, do it) was the revelation of a place I could exist in, a place I could fight in, a place where I could confront the people in the world who told me Gibraltar is in Spain and that I need to fill in the stupid boxes the way they want them filled out.

This place is called the Third Space. it’s a borderland, somewhere that sexuality and ethnicity and gender intersect. When early Queer female writers like Gertrude Stein realised they were being erased and ignored, what it gave them was actually power to be able to express themselves however they wanted. They began to break the rules of what it meant to write a piece of text, what it meant to dress and how a woman should behave in 1920’s society.

In the finals weeks of the course, we looked at the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana writer who came up with the idea of ‘border people’, somewhere that is never fully one thing or the other but also a thing in its own right. This resonated deeply with me, because Gibraltar is so defined by its physical border, much like Mexico and the United States. And here were are, neither one or the other and something very much our own.

I have a dream about teaching Gloria Anzaldúa’s principles to young writers in Gibraltar. The freedom to exist in that Third Space and explore our language, our culture as something legitimate and powerful and unapologetic. An armour for when you’re greeted with a “Gibraltar Español, someone telling you that you’re not part of a nation, and something that should belong as an option as a damn form.