Nigeria/ Scotland:
Poet Jackie Kay
on her
"Dad's Awful Poetry"
Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay's birth mother is the Scot while her father's Nigerian, but she was adopted by a couple of Glaswegian communists "who threw the kind of parties where everybody ended up singing Cole Porter and Rabbie Burns songs." Above, she talks about the perceived contradiction of being black and Scottish and how her mother gets asked about her daughter's tan. Here she talks on BBC's Strand about her memoir Red Dust Road and finally meeting her birth parents. Bernardine Evaristo's review in the Independent retells Kay, also a lesbian and a single mom, meeting her "dad":
...The book opens with Kay, now in her forties, waiting for the Nigerian father she has never met to turn up at a hotel in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. Yet as soon as he arrives he whisks her off to her room and spends two hours trying to convert her to Christianity amid much "clapping and foot-tapping and spinning and reciting and shouting to God Almighty". It turns out that her father, a born-again Christian and preacher, wants to cleanse her of his past sin. "I realise with fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin, me as impure, me the bastard, illegitimate." With characteristic humour, Kay quips, "He's like a bad poet who doesn't know when to quit, reading one poem after another to a comatose audience".But she does meet one of Johnathan's sons for a beer, finding with her half-brother the recognition she sought: "I could happily sniff his ears and lick his forehead." It's also interesting to note that on meeting her birth mother in '91, now "... a divorced Mormon with Alzheimer’s, clutching plastic bag," it struck her that "both her parents had become extremely religious – and both came to meet her holding carrier bags."
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Red Dust Road, By Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay burst onto the literary scene in 1991 with her much-praised first poetry collection The Adoption Papers, at the heart of which were poems about her adoption by white Scottish parents in 1961. Nearly 20 years later, her memoir Red Dust Road covers similar terrain, except that in the intervening years the mystery about her origins has been replaced with unforgettable scenes of her encounters with her birth parents.
The book opens with Kay, now in her forties, waiting for the Nigerian father she has never met to turn up at a hotel in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. Yet as soon as he arrives he whisks her off to her room and spends two hours trying to convert her to Christianity amid much "clapping and foot-tapping and spinning and reciting and shouting to God Almighty". It turns out that her father, a born-again Christian and preacher, wants to cleanse her of his past sin. "I realise with fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin, me as impure, me the bastard, illegitimate." With characteristic humour, Kay quips, "He's like a bad poet who doesn't know when to quit, reading one poem after another to a comatose audience".
Kay's encounters with her fragile Scottish birth mother, Elizabeth, are less theatrical but no less poignant. It transpires that she too is born-again, a Mormon, who believes "that adopted people cry out to be adopted while they are still in the womb". At their first awkward meeting her mother spends an hour talking about a neighbour's heart condition and Kay is unable to ask all the questions she's been harbouring for decades because "it seems ill-mannered... to drag Elizabeth back to a painful time in her past".
One of Kay's great skills as a writer is the way in which she explores the nebulous territory of the emotions. She never judges or oversimplifies, and displays no rage or rancour at birth parents who are secretive about their pasts and who want her to remain the secret she has always been.
While there is compassion for her birth parents, Kay writes with tremendous warmth, love and devotion for the adoptive parents who raised her. Active in the Communist Party, outspoken, principled, protective, Helen and John Kay come across as colourful characters who filled their home with party guests, songs and visitors from abroad. Kay is emphatic that this couple are her parents, in all but genetics. They stopped her from seeing herself as someone who was rejected as a child. Helen would tell her, "We chose you: you are special. Other people had to take what they got, but we chose you."
Red Dust Road is an incredibly brave endeavour. In her quest to know her birth parents Kay is not afraid to lay bare her vulnerabilities and dashed expectations. The book is filled with questions about inheritance and belonging: the child who wants to fit in but who is made to feel her racial difference by the society at large through both casual, caustic and institutional racism; the child who knows that "part of me came from Africa, part of me was foreign to myself". Yet the Africa that formed in her imagination was fed by the myths and stereotypes of colonial Britain. The adult tries to convince herself it shouldn't matter who her birth parents are because she has the wonderful parents who raised her – but she knows it does.
Kay excels at any literary genre she turns her hand to – poetry, fiction, drama and now memoir. Yet, like the best memoirs, this one is written with novelistic and poetic flair. Characters come alive with pitch-perfect speech, language is lyrically and imaginatively rendered, there is page-turning suspense. Even the structure defies expectation, criss-crossing the decades back and forth, from Kay's childhood voice through to middle-age.
Red Dust Road is a fantastic, probing and heart-warming read. It opens up the conversation around adoption beyond Kay's own personal narrative. She questions things many of us might take for granted: assumptions about love and family - and the right to know our parents.
Bernardine Evaristo's 'Lara' is published by Bloodaxe
>via: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/red-dust-road-b...