Gibraltar’s multicultural past inspires Bekkaoui’s Necklace and Pomegranates

By Sophie MacDonald

Professor Khalid Bekkaoui’s new book, Necklace and Pomegranates promises to re-write the manuscript.

In his talk for the Gibraltar Literary Festival, Professor Khalid made clear to his captivated audience that he was writing back to limiting narratives of Islamic identity and found Gibraltar to be the perfect multicultural imaginary in which to set his novel.

Necklace and Pomegranates is an enlightening tale of love, cultural heritage, memory and the multiplicities facets of identity set in Victorian Gibraltar. Prof Bekkaoui found Gibraltar by no coincidence: born in Fez, he detailed how he lived next to a “cinema Andaluz” and was told by his mother that his family were actually Andalusian. Naturally, he found Gibraltar to be the crossroads between all the cultures and borders that surrounded him.

Prof Bekkaoui noted how, inspired by his ancestry, he took to Granada to explore the Islamic influences on Spanish architecture and culture. However, what he found was a “systemic vilification of Islamic culture”: he remembered a film about a Muslim terrorist shown on a night bus and a poster stating “they are part of us”, with reference to multiculturalism. This spurred his desire to produce a counter-novel, to show how “a culture which produces beauty in foundations and architecture is not a terrorist culture”.

Within the multiculturalism of Victorian Gibraltar, Prof Bekkaoui found the space to curate his story. He drew from famous voices like Dryden, Conrad and Lawrence to situate his story within the colonial dynamics of Victorian culture and in a “place of cultures, histories, and of different nationalities” - a “meeting place between cultures”.

While researching, Prof Bekkaoui was especially fascinated by how this multiculturalism manifests in local names, noting the particular example of a Moroccan forename connected to a “foreign geography”, a Japanese surname. This, he said was the essence of his novel: exploring how cultures interact in a “complex and rich” place.

Prof Bekkaoui found that Gibraltar can “archive Islamic Spain from a different perspective”. His main character is a Gibraltarian man who looks at his Islamic history in Spain and finds out he was born on a boat from Gibraltar to Tangiers - in a space in-between territories. His protagonist meets his wife, who embodies the mythic idea of purity and is tormented by the idea that her marriage is a sin. This dynamic is what gave the novel its name: the protagonist’s wife was given a necklace by her mother to symbolise her dedication to racial purity whereas the pomegranate symbolises the seeds of plenty that multiculturalism offers. The necklace is encompassed by a chain, whereas the pomegranate is defined by multiplicities.

For this, Prof Bekkaoui drew from D.H. Lawrence’s power-dominance conflict, shifting the narrative to a racial conflict. He also cites Dickens for his attention to detail, explaining how every place mentioned in Necklace and Pomegranate is symbolic - the pomegranate is bought in a multicultural market. The narrative moves between these places, and its stories are manufactured through them.

Interestingly, Prof Bekkaoui also explained he wanted his story to be “deliberately independent from the author”, and, consequently, joked that he sometimes “doesn’t understand the story”. He described using magical realism, folk tales and proverbs to craft his story, and claimed was able to use them to distance himself from the narrative, leaving the novel as a completely immersed in the historical and cultural relationships that emanated from the plot.

Prof Bekkaoui successfully set out to create something new: a new perspective, a new voice. “How can you contribute to English literature if you simply reproduce the structure?”, he asks. In this way, he sees himself, the author, as a third space, swept within the imagination and craft of the novel - placed in the in-between.