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."
Poem of the month - March 2005
Late Love
How they strut about, people in love,
How tall they grow, pleased with themselves,
Their hair, glossy, their skin shining.
They don't remember who they have been.
How filmic they are just for this time.
How important they've become - secret, above
The order of things, the dreary mundane.
Every church bell ringing, a fresh sign.
How dull the lot that are not in love.
Their clothes shabby, their skin lustreless;
How clueless they are, hair a mess; how they trudge
Up and down the streets in the rain,
remembering one kiss in a dark alley,
A touch in a changing room, if lucky, a lovely wait
For the phone to ring, maybe, baby.
The past with its rush of velvet, its secret hush
Already miles away, dimming now, in the late day.
By Jackie Kay
About the poet
Jackie's first novel, Trumpet (Picador, 1998), won the Guardian Fiction Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and The Author's Club First Novel Award. It was also on the shortlist for the IMPAC award. She has written for stage and television, and a libretto of hers, Twice Through the Heart, was performed at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with composer Mark Anthony Turnage. Jackie's new collection of short stories, Why Don't You Stop Talking (Picador) was published to great acclaim, and she has also written a book about the blues singer, Bessie Smith. This book is entitled Bessie and is published by Absolute Press. Her forthcoming collection of poems, Life Mask, will by published by Bloodaxe in April. Jackie lives in Manchester with her son, and is Lead Advisor to the Literature Department at the Arts Council of Great Britain. She also teaches Creative Writing at Newcastle University. |
>via:http://www.scottisharts.org.uk/1/artsinscotland/literature/features/archive/poemmarch2005.aspx