Jonathan Pizarro and the language you speak

By Sophie McDonald

There is a certain absurdity to being told that the language you speak does not exist. 

A linguist from a university once told Jonathan Pizarro that Llanito could not be a language because its grammar did not make sense. His response has the neatness of a small act of insubordination: “Well, it doesn’tmake sense to you. It makes sense to me. So, what now? Who is standing at the centre of the circle?” 

The circle is a useful metaphor for thinking about Gibraltar. There is the Rock, rising out of the Mediterranean with the improbable confidence of an object that has spent centuries being looked at, argued over, claimed, and interpreted. 

There are the borders, once physical and now imagined, and languages moving across them. 

There are the institutions that have attempted, in their various ways, to explain what Gibraltar is and how its people ought to sound. 

And then there is the less orderly thing happening inside the circle: people writing. 

Pizarro believes it is an “important time to preserve literature, which is the offspring of language” during what feels like a “moment of crossing the Rubicon”. He poses a question to every Gibraltarian: “what do you think is worth preserving?” 

At first, Pizarro “didn’t think anyone would want to read” about Gibraltar, highlighting the prevailing myth that small places produce small art that he “absorbed”. 

This “wasn’t a conscious effort” but a sentiment compounded by gaps in formal education and a quiet local indifference. 

Writing about Gibraltar, then, unveiled pieces of history unbeknownst to Pizarro and left out of formal settings. 

There was the Spanish Civil War and forgotten episodes of cultural life. There was William Burroughs, who had visited Gibraltar and kept a diary on the ferry from Morocco, taking in the landscape. Pizarro describes a strange intimacy arising from the discovery that someone from an apparently inaccessible literary world had been standing in a place once considered ordinary. 

As a teenager, Pizarro had hidden a copy of Burroughs’s The Wild Boys in a satchel, reading it privately at night “lest anyone discover the filth I was reading, which was just literature. And a way to feel free.” 

Llanito and its slipperiness is another way Pizarro feels free, finding freedom in its refusal to be categorised. 

Llanito, however, is just one of the ways that Pizarro reacts to the physical landscape; Gibraltar, for him, provides a “sense of home [he] can’t get from writing about anywhere else”. 

“I haven't quite worked out what it means when I am inspired,” he says, “but the feeling I get thinking about one of the pasillos in Upper Town in a late afternoon, with the smell of something on the stove and the Spanish news crackling through the radio coming out of a window with the shutters wide open, the flowers in terracotta pots and the washing hanging between the slim gap between the buildings, and the shade from the sun.”  

He hopes these feelings “translate into someone wanting to read the work that comes out of me when I think about spaces like that”. 

Pizarro laments the stories we have lost already, from “generations that have passed [away] that maybe told those stories orally, which is such a prized tradition in Gibraltar, but nobody ever thought to write them down.” 

He also highlights “the people who were never granted any form of platform,” noting that while he mentioned Llanito, “there are many other languages in Gibraltar, and in turn many stories. I hope someone younger down the line feels empowered to write more. Fiction especially. There's so much truth you can tell in fiction that you can't otherwise.” 

Fiction can often be a lens through which writers communicate various truths. This can, in turn, sometimes be constraining when fidelity to an imagined version of a place becomes its own kind of fiction. 

Pizarro describes a feeling of “needing to get everything exactly right”. There is always somebody who knows that the shop was on a different street, that the wall was painted another colour, that the chronology is wrong. “Someone will always complain about something,” the writer says. “I am writing about memory; I am using imagination.” This concession is important: “there is no one Gibraltar, there are many Gibraltars”. 

The distance between those Gibraltars is where some of the more difficult stories appear. Pizarro is particularly interested in smuggling in Gibraltar during the 1990s, “growing up with it as a backdrop”, yet it became somewhat of an unspoken fact, “how if we didn’t talk about it openly then maybe it wasn’t happening”.  

As a queer writer, Pizarro also suspects that some of his work remains “at best an inconvenience to many people.” 

However, “art can force you to look, or perhaps look away, but at least the truth is out in the open and how you react as a member of the audience is up to you”. 

In this vein, Pizarro would “love to see more perspectives coming from Gibraltar”. After all, “what’s more important than saying ‘I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, too bad”. 

This applies to language, too. There is a familiar hierarchy in which certain forms of speech arrive already dressed for literary occasions, while others are asked to justify their presence. But Pizarro’s response is to question the premise itself: “What even is serious literary writing? Moby-Dick practically starts with a fart joke. Shakespeare invented words all the time. Don’t tell me Joyce didn’t have a sense of playfulness in his work”. 

He believes one of the problems that exists in publishing is the “persistent preoccupation with the idea that it somehow must sell” but Pizarro “disagrees with being put inside that box”. And perhaps that is what Gibraltarian literature needs most: not a definition, but permission to be difficult. 

The writer imagines an online journal, or a cheap print edition; workshops and meetings; writers looking outward toward the Mediterranean: “what does Gibraltar look like from Tangier? From Algeciras? What does it look like from Castle Road, looking back toward the mountains?”.  

The hope is not simply to preserve what already exists as a form of embalming. Pizarro wants “more dirt, more meatiness in writing, and more discernment.” 

For a place so accustomed to being defined from outside, perhaps the most radical literary act is to keep producing its own versions.