MEDITERRANEAN GOTHIC: M. G. SANCHEZ'S GIBRALTAR FICTION IN ITS CONTEXTS

Abstract

Crucially, he concurs with Seruya's suggestion when he states that the relative absence of a local Gibraltarian literary culture has been the result of its having become "lost within itself or moving in circles", (ibid) That Seruya's reading - which I would regard as largely accurate - dates back to as recent a date as 2004 underlines the apparent significance of more recent literary activity in the colony, where since 2005 a growing number of fiction titles by native Gibraltarians have been published - not only by Sanchez, but also Sam Benady and Mary Chiappe (who, in addition to individual titles, collaborated in 2010-2015 on their seven-volume "Bresciano" crime series set around 1800), and Francisco Javier Oliva (with his short story collection titled The Night Gibraltar Disappeared and Other Stories, 2008). [...]Solitude House may be more than a simple adherent to a literary convention of some two centuries' standing. In turn, this quasi-colonialist mind-set enables him to search for a solitude that will permit him to isolate himself from the evolving dual community of Gibraltar/La Línea that he has stalked/haunted throughout his working life. [...]when, after retirement, he eventually acquires Solitude Flouse, a colonial bungalow constructed in the early years of the 20th century on an almost inaccessible, precipitous site, alongside its ruined "twin" structure, an abandoned religious building in the grounds that functions as a shrine memorialising a long-forgotten Roman Catholic community, Seracino assumes the role of a ghost inhabiting a lost Empire, abandoning his womanising and shunning the living, transforming community of Gibraltar. The narrative has turned full circle: the metafictional struggles confessed by the narrator, concerning his "postmodern" quest to escape modernity, still require an appropriate conclusion - or none at all. [...]with the doctor encircled by the recognizable faces and figures of his dead patients, the reader - on Seracino's behalf - is confronted by the unpredictability of the final request uttered by one of them in Llanito, the domestic dialect of authentic Gibraltarians: "'Can you gih'me something for my hemorroides, doctor, plis, que they're all swollen y picanque no veaT" (original italics).3 4.

Headnote

Abstract: Until the present millennium, very little creative literary writing in either English or Spanish had been published in the British colonial enclave of Gibraltar. In the course of the past decade, however, an expatriate Gibraltarian, M. G. [Mark Gerard] Sanchez, has produced a growing body of fiction and non-fiction aimed at constructing the foundations of a new literary tradition. The present article explores the connections between two significant aspects of his fiction: a located identity and the post/colonial gothic.

Keywords: gothic, hybrid, late-colonial, mashup, unbelonging

1. Introduction

The resilience of Gibraltar as a self-ruling economic and political entity has been demonstrated on a number of occasions in recent times, when referenda in 1967 and 2002 (and, more controversially, in 2006, on the new Constitution Order) demonstrated the reluctance of its multi-ethnic population of some 30,000 to dilute its political and economic difference from Spain. Despite their self-evident interdependence, Gibraltarians and their immediate neighbours in the considerably larger Spanish communities of La Línea de la Concepción, across the land-frontier to the north, and Algeciras, to the west, a few kilometres across the Bahía de Algeciras/Bay of Gibraltar, remain separated by a common history that extends well beyond the formal acquisition of the colony by Britain as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. An even older significant aspect of that shared difference (as I have remarked elsewhere; see Stotesbury 2014) has been the proliferation of sieges of the Rock, including an iconic series of some fourteen blockades that commenced in the early 14th century and culminated in the Great Siege of the British military colony from June 1779 to February 1783. The prominence and geopolitical location of Gibraltar and its Rock have evidently endowed it with a susceptibility to besiegement, and it can well be argued that the full and partial economic blockades that have continued into recent times1 have paid more than lip-service to that communal experience of hardship and suffering.

Given its three centuries of exposure to British influence of all kinds, it would appear to be inevitable that literary expression of local cultural identity would have emerged, especially in the now 70 years of the post-Second World War period, with the return of most of Gibraltar's wartime civilian evacuees and the entrenchment of an education system founded on the metropolitan English model (its two main secondary schools are based on the UK comprehensive model of the 1970s) and on the English language2 as the principal medium of instruction. This has not, however, been the case. Writing in 2010, albeit with somewhat dated references, the Spanish scholar César Domínguez (2010: 114) refers to the opinion of the poet Trino Cruz Seruya that "Gibraltarian literature is a literature nonata (not yet born)". Crucially, he concurs with Seruya's suggestion when he states that the relative absence of a local Gibraltarian literary culture has been the result of its having become "lost within itself or moving in circles", (ibid)

That Seruya's reading - which I would regard as largely accurate - dates back to as recent a date as 2004 underlines the apparent significance of more recent literary activity in the colony, where since 2005 a growing number of fiction titles by native Gibraltarians have been published - not only by Sanchez, but also Sam Benady and Mary Chiappe (who, in addition to individual titles, collaborated in 2010-2015 on their seven-volume "Bresciano" crime series set around 1800), and Francisco Javier Oliva (with his short story collection titled The Night Gibraltar Disappeared and Other Stories, 2008). Even now, it would be difficult to argue that a "national" Gibraltarian literature has been established: it is simply too sparse. Nevertheless, a tiny handful of writers has started - as one of them, Mark Sanchez, has asserted in interview with the Italian scholar Esterino Adami - to respond to the challenge that Gibraltarians "need to have our own representative voice - and not just let ourselves be represented by outsiders" (Adami 2014). Elsewhere, Sanchez (2015a) has suggested that his writing is primarily concerned with "giving Gibraltarians a linguistic and cultural space for themselves. [...] [I]f we don't start writing about ourselves, we run the risk of being presented to the world solely through the prism of others' perceptions". It is this literary-cultural ideal that I plan to explore in this overview of Sanchez's own writing.

2. Writing the Rock: Sanchez's exploration of a colonial past

Since 2006, Sanchez's writing, most of it self-published, has become both substantial and varied, consisting of two volumes of short fiction, several novels, an anthology of allusions to Gibraltar made by literary "outsiders", and an array of cultural and historical essays; in brief, Sanchez's endeavour is self-evidently to supply a solid foundation for both his own and other Gibraltarians' literary work, an assertion of place, language, history: rootedness. Sanchez is, then, an undoubtedly ambitious writer. His vision and style can be readily defined as "literary" rather than "popular," "commercial," or "mass-market." His writing could even be said to strive for literary "effect"; for example, his first (self-)published fiction, Rock Black 0-10 (2006), consists of eleven more or less interconnected fictional vignettes of various length, largely realist in style, set within the Gibraltarian community as it was in his own youth in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Subtitled A Gibraltar Fiction, and described in the cover blurb as a "debut novel", the volume is presented as an experimentally composite "fiction" that attempts to construct a view of the community, whose constraints, by the time of its writing, Sanchez himself had left behind, having lived for some time in India and settling in the East of England.

By 2008, however, Sanchez had shifted to a more constrained approach to the craft of fiction, and re-published the volume under the title and format of Rock Black: Ten Gibraltarian Stories. In either of the two versions, which differ from each other in relatively minor ways, the stories depict the British colony in transition, its military and naval importance in fast decline, and its younger native inhabitants in particular suffering from the "boredom" of not knowing, or comprehending, their own identity. The story "Timeshare", for example, presents the dialogue of two young local men as they attempt to make sense of their violent exclusion from a members-only night-club - the symbolism of their outsider status is obvious, but their dialogue functions effectively as a vehicle to convey their teenage Gibraltarian status:

"Do you know," Taffy rasped out as soon as we sat down, "three weeks ago we'd have been arrested just for being here" [Taffy and his friend Peter Rodriguez have climbed at night into the Trafalgar Cemetery].

"No, I didn't know - why's that?"

"We were in 'Rock Red' back then because of all those Royal Navy ships," he replied, taking a sip of brandy. "The highest security state laid out by Gibraltar Fortress HQ. When that happens, there's all sorts of intelligence guys checking out places like this. You know, just in case of a terrorist bomb. [...]

I raised an eyebrow in amusement - not only because some of the worst acts of drunken hooliganism I had ever seen had been perpetrated by Royal Nay sailors during this "Rock Red" period, but also because of the secretive, almost film noir tone Taffy had used to relate his anecdote. To stop myself laughing out loud, I quickly asked him how many different security states there were.

"Three, of course," he answered with an extremely deadpan expression. "Rock Red - which means maximum alert, Rock Yellow - which means a state of increased vigilance, and Rock Black - which means the same old shit as always."

"And in which one are we now?"

"Now?" he paused for a second with the flask against his lips. "Rock Black, I'd imagine." ("Timeshare", 50-51)

Taffy and the narrator, Peter Rodriguez, sense that they are not Spanish, nor do they accept post-Franco Spanishness, but at the same time they are unaccepted by the English as "English" or "British," and display no clear comprehension of their amorphous ("post-colonial"?) Gibraltarian-ness. The outcomes, in Sanchez's literary vision, are varied.

Also in 2008, Sanchez published a new collection, Diary of a Victorian Colonial, and Other Tales, whose title story, a novella in form and focus, chronicles the suffering of Charles Bestman, a colonial Gibraltarian whose existence is seemingly shaped entirely by the inequities of his parents' diverse origins in the early 19" century:

My father was a case in point. The son of a low-born Tetouanese Jew who made his way over to Gibraltar after the infamous pogrom of 1822, Jamiel Chaviv had spent had spent all his youthful energies trying to get rich, and then, having reached this last objective, trying to dissociate himself from his humble origins. (21)

To improve his proto-Gibraltarian fortunes, Jamiel firstly "changed his name from Jamiel Chaviv Benyunes to John Charles Bestman. Then about a year later, he disowned the faith of his fathers and converted to the Anglican Church" (22) - to which the dying narrator, his son Charles Bestman, adds the ironizing coda: "(Catholicism, for all its attractions, was simply too Spanish an option)" (22). Thirdly - perhaps with intentional literary irony, given the name and national background that Charles's mother shares with Molly Bloom - his father succeeds in marrying into the Empire:

his eye fell upon Molly O'Callaghan, the daughter of a hard-up Irish ex-police sergeant who had been discharged from his duties for embezzling colonial government funds. Molly may not have been a true daughter of Albion and her religion may have been only of the papistical variety, but [...] she looked, for all intents and purposes, Anglo-Saxon; she had an English-sounding name; [...] and more important than any of all that, she spoke that brand of rough, cockneyfied English so beloved by obsessively anglophilic colonials like my father. (23)

Significant, too, apart from the inexorable progress of the narrator to his own death from starvation, disease, and rejection by both England also his native Gibraltarian community, is a two-page "Editor's note", appended as an epilogue to the novella by a (fictional) 21st century researcher at the University of Strathclyde, who, with commendable scholarly caution, in turn cites a fictionalised publisher to suggest: "Isn't it about time that we Gibraltarians, who celebrate a version of Gibraltarian history in which our ancestors seldom appear, should start to acknowledge and read about our own past instead?" (124).

To summarize at this point: Sanchez's literary writing represents a complex attempt to tell the Gibraltarian story from an authentically Gibraltarian perspective. His dissatisfaction with his earliest attempt at writing a novel is interesting as it appears to be symptomatic of a parallel preoccupation with the (re-)construction of a colonial past that happens - in the case of Gibraltar - to extend to the present moment. Evidently, this has led Sanchez to experiment with narrative forms capable of conveying his sense of the conflicted colonial subject, located within a setting that has undergone repeated transformations. Typically, Sanchez's second and third novels, The Escape Artist (2013) and Solitude House (2015), narrativize an environment populated by intensely isolated individuals characterized by their ability to form manipulative relationships, undertake amoral decision-making, indulge their sexual appetites, and suffer the apparent consequences of social failure, all set within the diminutive geopolitical context of the "British Overseas Territory" of Gibraltar in the present and recent past.(At the moment of writing this, it remains to be seen whether a fourth novel, Jonathan Gallardo (forthcoming) will continue in similar vein.)

3. Solitude House

As a reader of Solitude House prior to its publication in early 2015, I was struck by its potential relationship with the familiar trope in colonial and postcolonial writing of the house and home. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (1969) was an immediate point of reference, succeeded by many others. In a relatively modest article concerned with V. S. Naipaul's deployment of the trope in several of his novels, Robert Balfour (2010: 18) suggests that "[i]n literary forms the house is most often a function of home [or vice-versa, rather?], and it is for this reason that houses abandoned, ruined, or destroyed have come to stand in the literature as markers of the absence of civilisation, or its decay". More persuasively, Julie Hakim Azzam, in her 2007 doctoral dissertation, points out that

[p]ostcolonial gothic is interested in home as a concept (notions of kinship, belonging, and the idea of home) and dwelling (houses, other habitations, and localities) but doubles the signification of home to function as both a cipher for the private sphere and an allegory for a nation as "home country" [...] or territory [...]. In the postcolonial gothic, homes and dwellings are the geographic sites in which larger political, historical, and national allegories are cast. [...] In the postcolonial gothic, homes, territories, and nations are represented as heimlich sites that screen the unhomely, foreign, and threatening nature from sight. (4)

Further, Azzam suggests that gothic fiction "engages with 'old' modes of narrative (the romance), displaces its distinctly historical concerns in a geographic in a geographic locality elsewhere, dwells in the historical past, and identifies the presence of the past in the present" (7). As Tabish Khair (2009: 22) also suggests, "literary criticism has been rather blind to the presence of these ghosts from the empire in Gothic fiction" - it could, indeed, be argued, as I will attempt here, that Sanchez's Solitude House represents a concerted effort to deploy this familiar range of conventions present in colonial and postcolonial gothic fiction, but at the same time the novel seeks to interrogate and subvert their very nature.

Thus, Solitude House may be more than a simple adherent to a literary convention of some two centuries' standing. As Esterino Adami has emphasised in an initial draft of his online review of the novel, the story opens with the "autodiegetic narrator", John Seracino, a Maltese general practitioner working for the Gibraltar health service, who describes his presentation with a pen as a retirement gift. Seracino's reaction to the presentation pen, which is tellingly "engraved in cursive gothic script along the barrel" (p. 1, my italics), is initially one of contempt. Towards the end of this increasingly gothic narrative, however, Seracino, in acute fear of losing his life at the hands of long-dead, zombified patients, whose treatment over the years he has apparently skimped and neglected, takes up the self-same pen to produce a chronicle of the life that he has ledprior to this dire moment. When he does so, his narratorial role assumes a metafictional dimension: where will he, this doomed gothic protagonist, start his life-narrative? The alternatives are innumerable, but his choice is decisive: "there was [he tells his putative readers - us?] something rather clever about starting a story by describing the pen that will go on to write the actual thing, wasn't there? Something apt and really fitting. Postmodern, almost.(Or whatever word one uses when one is trying to be clever about something)" (270, original italics).

This tale told by Sanchez/Seracino aspires to be read as more than the postcolonial allegory that it might at times appear to be. Rather, it consists not only of formal metafictional devices, but also of bawdy comedy, resembling a latter-day comical pastiche of sexual farce movies, such as Carry on Doctor (1967) or Doctor in the House (1954). Seracino's comedy is, however, a precisely located post-colonial one, in which the womanising non-Gibraltarian doctor - in traditional literary terms, very much a "lothario" - exploits a perceived contrast between the women of the colony and those inhabiting the cross-border city of La Línea de la Concepción:

La Línea's women were much freer and more sexually liberated than their notoriously abstemious and prudish Gibraltarian sisters. To the untrained foreign eye, yes, they both shared a range of quintessentially Latin feminine attributes. Coquettish demeanour, a love of fashion and make-up, a slightly standoffish way of holding themselves in public. But there is, I believe, a fundamental difference between them: the Uneme woman dolls herself up to please her admirers first and to flatter her own vanity second; with the Gibraltarian dames, I'm afraid, it is usually the other way around. (35)

The first half of the novel consists not only of Seracino's description of his misogynistic sexual pursuits, but also of his search on both sides of the frontier for a house - a home (echoing the postcolonial fictional motif) - in which he might pursue his solitary womanising in peace. It is this aspect of the novel that permits the reader to engage in a shifting, amoral "discussion" with the protagonist concerning the contemporary cross-border dualities of Gibraltar/La Línea and late-imperial Britain/post-Franco Spain. The impact of Seracino's perspective on the reader is seductive, persuasive, "postmodern". Depending on the success or failure of his sexual exploits, he shifts from dissatisfaction with Gibraltar (despite its Britishness, which he admires) to the brash declaration that he "overcame many of my initial apprehensions about Castilian culture and slowly grew to love Spain" (44) - but reverting later to the assertion that "[t]he more Gibraltarian women I went through, the more anti-Spanish my outlook became" (87).

A major motivation for Seracino's original migration from Malta to Gibraltar has been his perception that, in the wake of its independence in 1964, Malta had started on a process that he abhorred: a visible process of decolonisation. Gibraltar, in contrast, bore - and still bears - numerous remnants of its colonial Britishness that enable Seracino to construct a fossilized image of the UK - "Old-style pubs. Fish and chip shops. Bobbies in black helmets. Red pillar boxes. Good old-fashioned sterling. A natural respect for traffic lights and queues and zebra crossings" (21). In turn, this quasi-colonialist mind-set enables him to search for a solitude that will permit him to isolate himself from the evolving dual community of Gibraltar/La Línea that he has stalked/haunted throughout his working life. Thus, when, after retirement, he eventually acquires Solitude Flouse, a colonial bungalow constructed in the early years of the 20th century on an almost inaccessible, precipitous site, alongside its ruined "twin" structure, an abandoned religious building in the grounds that functions as a shrine memorialising a long-forgotten Roman Catholic community, Seracino assumes the role of a ghost inhabiting a lost Empire, abandoning his womanising and shunning the living, transforming community of Gibraltar.

At this stage of the narrative, we are persuaded - as logical and presumably sane readers of Seracino's narrative - to regard his solitude with concern. Seracino, as narrator, involves us intimately in his increasingly desperate quest for a diagnosis of his dilemma. Is his physical and psychological solitude, in which he begins to perceive his besiegement by a growing number of "angry zombies" (257),a "by-product of de decolonisation" (179)? Perhaps he is merely suffering from the symptoms of sexual deprivation: "You can't expect a man to go without sex for almost three months without some kind of craziness occurring, can you?" (181). Or "[i]f the faces had no otherworldly aetiology, then clearly I was losing my marbles[...]. Maybe, come to think of it, maybe I was suffering from the first stages of dementia": in sum, a constructed "diagnosis of exclusion" that he permits himself to make as a medical practitioner (184). Alternatively, in contemplating the shrine that stands a short distance from his renovated house, he considers two possibilities: "either the ruin was haunted or I was going stark raving mad" (186); or perhaps his "madness" is a "psychosis" stimulated by alcohol abuse, with his recurrent vision of zombie-like faces in the windows of the shrine produced by "no more than some kind of extériorisation of the feelings of persecution which I, as an adopted Gibraltarian, carried inside?" (200). In his despair, Seracino, although a lapsed believer, even persuades the Roman Catholic Bishop of Gibraltar - an amusingly rational sceptic, who doubts both the reality of any haunting and also the efficacy of exorcism - to perform a perfunctory ritualistic purging of the site, although at this moment Seracino himself senses that "[sjimply put, there was nothing there. The place was empty and bare." (243-244, original italics). All to no avail: after the Bishop's departure for the sanity of the city and its community, the zombies reappear in increased numbers and commence their slow, shuffling march on Seracino's home. Facing probable death, he resolves, in the remaining hours of the night, to "write your story and hide the pages somewhere, [...] so that one day your tragic tale will be known to the world" (269).

The narrative has turned full circle: the metafictional struggles confessed by the narrator, concerning his "postmodern" quest to escape modernity, still require an appropriate conclusion - or none at all. Thus, with the doctor encircled by the recognizable faces and figures of his dead patients, the reader - on Seracino's behalf - is confronted by the unpredictability of the final request uttered by one of them in Llanito, the domestic dialect of authentic Gibraltarians: "'Can you gih'me something for my hemorroides, doctor, plis, que they're all swollen y picanque no veaT" (original italics).3

4. Conclusion: contexts and subtexts

The ostensible banality of the concluding lines of Solitude House is somewhat bewildering. The tension of the zombie gothic in the preceding narrative has all tended towards a standard, if incomplete, conclusion where the fate of the narrating protagonist would be determined primarily by the reader's familiarity with the run of the standard tale of horror. Flere, however, Seracino, is unexpectedly permitted to revert to his original character role, that of medical practitioner - albeit in relation to a character identifiable within the scope of a cinematic or literary fantasy tale. The impact is indeterminate.

At the same time, Solitude House resembles in certain respects the short-lived popular subgenre of "mashup" classic British and American novels that appeared a few years ago, such as Seth Graham-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and W. Bill Czolgosz's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (2009), where comical effect is achieved by the juxtaposition and interweaving of the classic text with identifiable features of a typical zombie narrative. A significant aspect of the mashup novel is its reliance on the disjunctive linking of discrete narrative types that we "normally" relate to their own chronological periods: in a sense, the classic realist novel of the 19th century and the zombie horror movie of the first half of the 20th century have time-travelled into the 21st century, where their collision in the hybrid mashup both horrifies and entertains its readers.

In the case of Sanchez's narrative, however, the subversive collision is that of the familiar zombie tale not with anequally familiar classic novel, but with the familiar modern tale of post-colonial deracination and homelessness. In the course of the novel, the heimlich realism of the post-colonial protagonist is subverted by a culturally familiar - and hence "credible" - focus on the unheimlich collision of a traditionally realist protagonist (Seracino) and the high fantasy of the zombie modern gothic. Not content with this, however, Sanchez then stages the auto-destruction of his subversive hybrid model by restoring a parody of the original relationship between doctor and patient. The narrative impact is devastatingly banal; the author's message appears to demand that the reader trust nothing of the preceding narrative of the novel in its entirety. The thing, we as readers must assume, is a fantasy, a literary construct, and one that requires reassessment from start to finish. The thing has all the illogical absurdity of a nightmare!

As I have already indicated, a constant trope in Sanchez's writing is that of exclusion. On a simple, diurnal level, in the story "Timeshare", Taffy and Peter Rodriguez have been excluded by their youthfulness from a members-only nightclub that they have been confident of entering as a result of their local, Gibraltarian identity. But they fail to gain admittance and resort instead to intruding into an icon of the imperial past of the colony, the Trafalgar Cemetery, where they speculate on the unpredictable security of their home territory.

Far more devastatingly, in Diary of a Victorian Colonial, Charles Bestman suffers from the existential exclusion occasioned by his concealed Jewishness and his unconcealable colonial identity, and he does so within the very confines of the territory within which he has been born and raised: colonial Gibraltar. His account of the final period of his terminal physical and psychological suffering is relentlessly brutal, and utterly credible.

It remains, then, to suggest that, in most respects, Solitude House matches this exploration of the power of exclusion within a colonial/postcolonial context. John Seracino's post-Maltese, post-colonial life has been barren, containing an extensive series of seductions and copulations that have borne no fruit, other than the idiosyncratic desire for solitude, or self-exclusion. His home, a domestic "island", like Robinson Crusoe's, becomes a constructed territory of fear that paradoxically acquires a population of its own - in Crusoe's case, the Western fantasy of the cannibal; in Seracino's case, the relentless march of the "undead", the zombies.

Indeed, it may be thought that Sanchez's authorial intention has been to subvert the very notion of the narrative of Gibraltar as a Mediterranean late-colony on the cusp of post-coloniality: the colonial past will, perhaps, always remain to haunt the brave new world of a free territory, where exclusion - from the Iberian hinterland, the Mediterranean, (post-)modernity - will no longer constitute the primary dilemma of the Gibraltarian. One might, indeed, suggest that Sanchez's writing is motivated and permeated by a sense of exclusion - unbelonging - as a Gibraltarian that is overwhelmingly colonial in its historically and culturally constructed narrative origins. The Gibraltarian present is haunted by the constructed gothicness of its colonial past, a tale (to borrow from Macbeth) that can perhaps be told best by a man in a state of idiocy (as Seracino becomes), full of sound and fury, but ultimately signifying "nothing".

Footnote

1 In 1969, the Franco régime in Spain imposed a total blockade of Gibraltar that was not lifted in its entirety until 1985, ten years after Franco's death.

2 For a detailed historical and contemporary linguistic account of the language situation in Gibraltar, see, e.g., David Levey (2008).Greater attention is nowadays also placed educationally on Castilian Spanish, although the largely oral Llanito dialect (consisting of frequent code-switching between Andalusian Spanish, English, and other constituent Mediterranean languages) is widely used domestically and in informal street communications.

3 "Can you please give me something for my haemorrhoids, doctor, please, 'cos they're all swollen and itchy as hell.'T must boast that I had a minor influence on this final utterance in the novel, since Sanchez's original intention was to have a slightly different version expressed entirely in Llanito.

References

References

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Adami, E.2015. 'Sanchez, M. G. (2015). Solitude House. Huntingdon: Rock Scorpion Books.' Draft review in manuscript. Forthcoming, online, II Tolomeo, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy.

Azzam, J. H. 2007. 'The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Pittsburgh. Available: d-scholarship.pitt.edu/ 9521/1/J-Azzam.pdf. [Accessed 2015, September 15].

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Benady, S. and M.Chiappe. no date [2011b]. The Pearls of Tangier. Huntingdon, UK: Rock Scorpion Books.

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Sanchez, M. G. 2015a. 'If you don't write your own stories, others will' in New Statesman, 17 Feb. Available: http: //www.newstatesman.com/gibraltar/ newstatesman-gibraltar/2015/02/if-you-don-t-write-your-own-stories-others-will. [Accessed 2015, March 5].

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Stotesbury, J. A. 2014. 'The Rock and the barbary macaque in 21st-century Gibraltarian fiction in English' in The European English Messenger 23.2, pp. 34-39.