Imaginary fences
The thing about absence is, that the emptiness of what has gone doesn’t stay that way for long. Memory rushes in to fill the gap. And what is memory, if not mostly a craft of imagination? We begin to shape the story of our conversations almost as soon as we have left the other person, with the anticipation that we’ll be performing the re-enactment of what was spoken, if not for others, then for ourselves in our own mind.
The story of the Gibraltar of my imagination, my Gibraltar, and the Gibraltar of anyone who has left for any period of time, has even more of a romance to it. It remains fixed in the haze of whatever it looked and felt like when you left. And then it grows from there. At times, a small place that is loud and suffocating and with nothing to do. And then other times a place of comfort, of community with the only people who will ever truly understand all that is upon your tongue, a place of home.
In its geography there is more of a shock. The Gibraltar of the imagination looks the way you remember, enhanced by the parts that struck you. How many times have you returned somewhere to find it was not as tall, or narrow, or as far away walking from Main Street as you remember? A few years ago I returned on a visit, and took my husband to see where I had grown up. The hill on the way to St Bernard’s Hospital was not as steep as in my memory. And now, where was the imposition of St Bernard’s at the top of the hill? When had that happened? By the time we got to what used to be Police Barracks, I almost had no interest. The general shape of the building was there, but it had been hollowed out and modernised into apartments. Apartments. Who could have imagined when we spent nights outside playing tablita in the summer heat, the building crumbing slowly around us, that anyone would be living in apartments?
It’s easy to put that place aside in my version of Gibraltar. Easier still, to not be greeted by the shock of the reality of Gibraltar’s daily news. As a Gibraltarian, I will happily educate anyone on the fact Gibraltar is the centre of the world. But America is America, in all its indulgence and exceptionalism, and we all play along. So Gibraltar is not on the news. Gibraltar here is a fleeting signifier. The Rock as the logo of an insurance company. The name of a type of glass. We recently bought a new mailbox, and my eyes were drawn to the company named Gibraltar Incorporated. A symbol for strength, for something unmoving. There is no news from over here, there, and if I don’t make a conscious effort to seek it out, I remain blissful ignorant.
My mother broke through the abstraction in her recent visit, complete with both recent issues of The Gibraltar Chronicle and all the news from home. This has been the summer of gold statues and ballrooms and reflecting pool debacles in Washington D.C., tedious local news on the national stage, and my instinct has been to turn everything off. The front page of the Chronicle like a slap, the sting of it took me a few days to process. What do you mean the border fence is no longer there?
When I think of the border, I mostly think about sitting in the back of our family car as a child. It was an exercise in patience, the tedium of hours spent crawling slowly towards getting to passport control and then rushing out at full speed into the world. Of the dismay on Sunday evenings after a day spent up the coast. Of making sure to have a book or a Gameboy or some form of entertainment, the only other highlight was the possibility of a fight a few cars up from someone trying to skip the queue, or the man who sold sugared almonds, wicker basket in the crook of his arm.
But I hated that fence. Even from a young age, I hated the implication of the curl of barbed wire on the top of it, and how it stretched all the way to the sea. I held the weight of what my parents and my grandparents had told me about it when it was closed. Their own versions of Gibraltar, scenes played out to me with all their dramatic flourish. Family members weeping from either side. Children help up to signify birthdays and communions. And the scarcity. I thought it was bad enough that films arrived at Queen’s Cinema months later than England, how could I begin to imagine a lack of fresh food, or even oxygen?
In my Gibraltar, that border fence is a scar on the land. The blade of a knife held by a man drunk on power and death, with the constant threat to inch ever closer. Franco said Gibraltar would fall like ripe fruit, and now Franco is long-dead and that hideous thing of metal and concrete is gone.
And now what?
I’ve been reading about the Berlin Wall falling. There’s a piece of it in Washington DC, housed inside the Ronald Reagan Building, I suppose appropriately. There’s a piece of it outside the Imperial War Museum in London too, I passed it every day on the way to and from work. I aways wondered what it felt like to someone who lived through those times, to see it standing there as a chunk of benign stone, separated from its power. It seems cliché perhaps, to consider the parallels between Gibraltar and East Berlin, but cliches are often overbearing because they are so obvious in their truth. It’s interesting to know that even after the Wall came down, people missed it. Even those who had hated living under those circumstances. You wake up the day after and the geopolitical landscape has changed in its physicality, so quickly. And now we adjust.
Everyone has a border in their Gibraltar now. It sits in their mind. For some, the way to cope was to lean into the perceived safety of that fence, keeping all the evils of the world out, and now it’s gone. Easy to dismiss that as provincial in its thinking, but there’s validity to that how that reckoning lingers. And then there are those, who think back to the anguish that border represented, all those years of closure and of selective punishment. What keeps the evils out also kept us in, whether we convinced ourselves we wanted it or not.
There are large questions now about what it means to be Gibraltarian. What we want to push forward with in our perceived bright future, and what we want to retain. The border remains, albeit it as an imaginary and agreed-upon line across the Earth. There are questions of culture and language and ways of life. Perhaps a larger question about what we truly value in ourselves, for those of us who claim to have no inherent culture. But questions maybe, for somewhere down the line, once the dust has settled.
One day, the luxury of life permitting, I will be one of the last living people to remember that once upon a time there was a fence there. It will reside inside my imaginary Gibraltar, in the same place as walking across the Piazzella and seeing the abandoned Theatre Royal and hearing from my grandmother how she used to go there. Or going to the Queens Cinema on Saturday nights and how Michael and Gina ran the concession stand. An Eastern Beach without high-rise blocks looming over it. A Main Street with traffic. A childhood of sitting in the back of the car, of boredom, of waiting, waiting, waiting. And how after we’d shown our passports to an uncaring border guard, my father would step on the accelerator and we’d speed out, into the rest of the open world.
