Elio Cruz: poems about Gibraltar, Gibraltarians, and Catholicism

This article presents a selection of unpublished multilingual poems written by Elio Cruz (1931-2019), a Gibraltarian Londoner well-known in Gibraltar for his plays, his lyrics and his paintings, but less so for his poetry.1 Section 2 presents a brief biography. Cruz wrote poetry in English and Gibraltar’s Spanish contact-variety known nowadays as Llanito, which Section 3 discusses. Gibraltar’s linguistic situation was dynamic over Cruz’s lifetime, with Llanito changing and falling into ever greater disuse as commensurate codeswitching with English increased. As an expatriate, Cruz’s own Llanito usage remained relatively static over the years, meaning that he did not participate in new grammatical developments or the elevated ratios of codeswitching prevalent in Gibraltar in recent decades. Nevertheless codeswitching formed part of his literary repertoire, expressed in both his poems and in his plays, and in two of his plays, codeswitching ratios vary according to age (the younger the character, the greater the codeswitching), so this dynamism was something he was sensitive to (see Wright in press a.). Section 4 presents a selection of Cruz’s poems, interspersed with extracts taken from an unpublished typescript memoire of Cruz’s childhood, Once Upon Some Wars Ago, and Section 5 concludes.