Jackie Kay

0:13Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the poet and novelist Jackie Kay. Having served as MACA, the name for Scotland's Poet Laureate, for five years from 2016, Jackie's one of the best-known and most popular Scottish literary figures. Since her debut poetry collection, The Adoption Papers, in 1991, she's published 20 works of fiction and verse for adults and children, and in 2011, a memoir about meeting her biological parents, a book called Red Dust Road.

0:52Jackie Kay was made a CBE for services to literature in 2020.

1:00Jackie Kay, welcome to This Cultural Life. Hello. You were born in Edinburgh and you were put up for adoption by your birth mother, who we'll talk about later. But let's start with the people who you always called your parents, a Glaswegian couple called John and Helen Kay. How did they come to adopt you? They adopted my brother first and they had real trouble getting accepted by adoption agency in the first place because they were political. You say political, they were communist. Yeah, they were communist. They wanted religious people to adopt and they wanted to know how close you live to a church and all of that kind of stuff.

1:33And they wouldn't lie about things like that, even though one of the social workers said just put anything down, you know, because they obviously could see that they would be great parents, but they wouldn't lie. It took them five years to get accepted by an adoption agency. and they said there was no babies. And my mum said, just as she was going out the door, by the way, we don't mind what colour the child is. And that was my brother and he was in a baby home down the road. So then my mum said she would like to have another baby, his colour, to keep him company. So a few years later they phoned up and said, we've got a woman coming down from the Highlands, my birth mother.

2:08And she said the father of that baby is Nigerian. My mum just said, I'll have that one. And she didn't know if I'd be a girl or a boy. well or healthy so she always said it was she didn't even you weren't born no she adopted me before I was born yeah I think I'm I'm the only person I've ever met that was adopted before they were born that's brilliant because that means she was your mother before you were born exactly she said it's the closest she could get to giving birth herself and actually when I was born I was quite ill and she was told to come and pick another baby because I was born with forceps and they left this gash down my face and they thought it injured my brain.

2:45She was told to pick another baby, but she wouldn't. So she spent four months going back and forth from Edinburgh to Glasgow visiting me and she was the only one that was allowed in. She sounds absolutely remarkable. Yeah, she really was totally remarkable. What are your earliest memories of home life with your mum and dad? They really loved to sing a lot and so they communicated through song all the time. So they either sang or they read poems to you. I just remember just being read to and being sung to. That's probably my very earliest memories. But I remember there being a lot of people in the house.

3:19They often had people to stay, comrades from other places. You'd wake up in the morning and there'd be somebody lying on the floor. And they'd have a lot of parties, which is probably my very earliest memories, I think, because they had a story that they told me that I was kind of crawling or toddling about it too with a long straw and putting it into different people's drinks. You say people get me from other places, from other countries? Other countries, yeah, Vietnam, Nigeria. Is this through a communist network? Yes, yeah. You would have Chilean people in your house, all sorts of different people.

3:54And that was quite exciting for me because the part of Glasgow that I grew up in was completely suburban and completely white. I want to ask you more about those parties shortly, but just tell me, when did you first know you were adopted? I didn't know I was adopted until I was seven. I've since read that that's the age that you can understand it. So I was probably told it before then, but I just didn't take in the concept. I was watching a Western and I couldn't understand why it was never the Indians that won. And I asked my mum, why did they never win? And then I asked her, why was I the same colour as them?

4:28And she wasn't the same colour as me. And she said, because you're adopted. And I said, what does adopted mean? And she said, it means I'm not your real mother. and I found that quite distressing at the time because I thought that meant that she wasn't real and that something was going to happen to her. But I didn't like the idea of there being some other person because I loved her so much. I found it quite disturbing. So how did she reassure you then? She told me that I was picked and I was a chosen one. She told you that story you've just told us. Yes, yes. And she told me a lot about my other mother.

5:00She always liked talking about her. She'd say that she loved you and she wanted to keep you. They both loved you. And I think she was quite an imaginative person. So I think a lot of it she actually made up, you know, because she said that my Nigerian father was betrothed and he had to return. I think she loved the word betrothed in her mouth. She luxuriated over it, betrothed. She had quite a fanciful imagination as well. So after she revealed this to you and reassured you, did you, even at the age of seven, have a different sense of identity? Did it change your outlook in any way? I think I just got on with things after that.

5:37I don't think I don't remember really thinking about it too much until a bit later. But children at school would often say, she's adopted, you're adopted. What was school like? What was growing up in Glasgow in the 1960s like? It was quite tough growing up in Glasgow in lots of ways because there weren't many people my colour of skin or my brother's colour of skin. So we did, you know, we got beaten up quite a bit. A boy was expelled from my school for him and a couple of others. And they would hold you down and shove things in your mouth and like mud into your mouth and say, this is what you should eat because you're from a mud hut.

6:09And, you know, quite violent things. So one of them was actually expelled. And the other two, I was brought down to the headmaster's office to watch them getting the belt. I think the headmaster thought I'd find that comforting but I didn't at all It was quite traumatising Traumatising But they had held me down and done all this for about three weeks before I ever told my parents because I didn't really like to tell my parents about things like that because I didn't want to hurt them And what was their reaction when they found out? When they went straight down to the school Very angry My mum always taught me to raise my head high and to not let people like that change the way you think of yourself So she's reassuring you constantly then, because that's really difficult when you're facing that sort of abuse at school.

6:54I think the interesting thing, you know, about racism is that racism hurts white people who love black people. And racism hurts people that have all sorts of different family relationships. And we tend to kind of focus on racism being something that hurts people of my colour. But actually racism hurt my mum. You know, she was always writing letters to the prisoners of South Africa and she'd get me to help write Christmas cards, write 50 cards a time to all these, not just Nelson, you know. And she'd be out on anti-apartheid marches. And so she had a really instinctive sense that racism was wrong and prejudiced, as they called it then in the 60s, being prejudiced then.

7:34What about your cultural upbringing at school? What sort of, you know, artistic or creative encouragement did you get in the classroom? Well, I loved it the older I got. By the time I went to secondary school, I had a really wonderful English teacher who, when I was 16, sent me along to meet Alistair Gray and take my poems to him. And so I had this kind of encouragement from... A great Scottish novelist. He wrote Poor Things, of course, didn't he? Yes, he did, yeah, he did. He wrote Poor Things and Lanark and, yeah. And he was just a, you know, a maverick, a really interesting man. What age had you started writing poetry?

8:11Really young, probably when I was 10 or 11. And was it poetry primarily, rather than short stories? It was poetry mainly, yeah. But I did write a novel as well called One Person, Two Names. What was the novel about? It was about a girl who was on the run and she was trying to hide what colour she was, so she was trying to pass this fight and she went to America. How much of your own experience in the classroom of that bullying were you channelling into that story, do you think? Probably quite a lot. And probably the idea that you could be two people at once. It was called One Person, Two Names.

8:42And probably that idea of being two people at once or having two possible lives rolled into the one is something that's kind of run through most of what I write in one way or another. But does that narrative of that novel written at a young age, does that reflect a sense of kind of why do I have to go through this kind of awful trauma? I did feel a kind of, you know, you were on the edge as to what kind of things might happen next. and later there was a bunch of fascists at university that put up posters with my name on it and razor blades behind them. Then another time when I was in London, I was attacked by fascists at the Angel.

9:16So I did have this sense of things could turn on a pin. But at that age, I guess, you knew this was wrong and you could fight back. But when you're seven or eight years old, that must have been really confusing that people had such hate for you. Very confusing. I think actually it's still confusing at 63. it's still confusing to understand the idea that people could want to hurt you because of the colour of your skin or want to blame you for things because of the colour of your skin or want to exclude you because of the colour of your skin and I remember one little girl when I was eight saying that she'd wanted to invite me to a birthday party but her mum wouldn't allow me and so she was coming to say sorry everyone else is coming to a party Jackie but you can't come and I remember things like that being really devastating.

10:08Your first choice for this cultural life, Jackie Kay, a major influence on your creativity, are what you called in your notes to us, the party socials. And these were fundraising events for the Communist Party. What are your earliest memories of these party parties? I loved watching people sing. So I loved the idea that people would be gathered around, and there would be a bucket at the door. My dad would go, a fiver in the bucket, come with. And then before the party even started, I'd help my mum with the buffet. And so there'd be these zigzaggy tomatoes, and there'd be cheese and pineapples and sticks and all of that.

10:44And there was this sense of excitement in the air. And then all these people would arrive. That's quite a small living room. And then before long, people would be up, and they would be like, one singer, one song. And they'd be doing their party piece. and I just remember finding it utterly fascinating the different personalities that people took on when they were singing a song. And these were all party activists? Yeah, they were all members of the Communist Party but the Communist Party was a really cultural party to me. The people were interested in theatre, they were interested in song, they were interested in literature.

11:17They're often not characterised in that way which kind of frustrates me because I learnt lots and lots of different poets, all sorts of different things through people that were involved in the party. And it was like having this big extended family. But my dad would be up and he'd sing Bessie Smith, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out, or he'd sing Brush Up Your Shakespeare, or he'd sing all these Scottish folk songs. So he had a wide repertoire. But they're not specifically communist songs or kind of party songs? No, none of them were, really. They're all songs that people loved. Was there a sense of having talked to your mum and dad about them, that it was like, leave the politics at the door, because we're just going to have a good time.

11:56Yeah, exactly. People were just having a good time. I mean, sometimes people would have heated discussions and disagreements, which I liked. I loved the idea that people could disagree and still like each other. I wish we had that now. There was just a real sense of excitement and of sharing, really, different people sharing a song. Me and my dad used to do one together as we got older. It's just like, well, all right, OK, you win. I'm in love with you. We used to kind of dance about the floor doing it together, but I couldn't really sing like he could. He had a very tuneful voice and he had a whole repertoire of songs from his father.

12:28He had one of those minds that retained the lyrics to every song. We'd play a game in the car when we were going on holiday and you had to say a word, any word at all. And my dad had to think of a song with that word in it. And one time I said to him, oil can, thinking I'm going to catch him out there. And he just went into the sunshine, he's bright in my oil Kentucky home. But the idea of communal singing seems very important as well. The fact that, or even if it's one person, one song, there's an audience. How significant is that? How much has that fed in to your later work as a performing poet?

13:04Oh, that's an interesting question. I think probably it has. That kind of like, you know, the kind of love of the showbiz in the living room or the idea that you can be dramatic even to yourself or that there's a sense of performance that goes along with all of us to some way or another, you know, that we have a kind of different masks, but that that doesn't mean that we're not being our true selves. To me, I really love performing. I love the idea that something is never exactly the same thing twice. I love that people can be affected or moved to tears or to laughter by a performance. And generally speaking, how does a poem start?

13:39Is it an image, a visual image or a line? It can be any number of things. They often don't start in the same way, but it's often to do with something oral. but it could be landscape, it could be music, it could be trying to capture somebody like Nina Simone or I quite like trying to write poems that capture people. And you've done that a lot, haven't you, written about Nina Simone or Bessie Smith. How much does that go back to those evenings, those party socials and that love of music? Is that where it's all rooted, do you think? I think so. For me, it all goes back and that's why it probably seems a funny choice to pick as a party social but it really does all go back because that's where I learnt a love of music and a real keen listening to the lyrics.

14:19But there's a musicality to so much of your verse though, isn't there? Yes, I think I've been influenced by music just as much as I have by other poetry.

14:33Your next choice of formative, creative inspiration, Jackie Kay, are the Poems and Pints Nights at the Highland Institute on Socky Hall Street in Glasgow. What were the Poems and Pints Nights? There were really great poetry readings. I was taken along there by my mum and dad as well. And you would hear a writer like Tom Leonard read in Broad Glaswegian. And you would start to think about the poetry could be written in your own tongue. I heard Liz Lockhead there. And her book Memo for Spring came out around about the same time. And that was a huge, exciting influence on me. What year are we talking about then?

15:11How old? 1976, that kind of time. So I'm like 14. 15, 16, yeah. I could hear in her patterns and in her rhythms that she was actually sticking quite closely to a speech pattern and the language that she used in her poetry was the language that I spoke. So that was very exciting. We were first equal, Mary and I, with same coloured ribbons and mouse-coloured hair and with equal shyness. we curtsied to the Lady Councillor for copies of Colin's children's classics. First equal, equally proud. I also remember there being pints there and wine, and later on there would be kind of cheese and wine poetry nights.

15:54But often the drink was more dominant than the... or became more dominant than the poetry. But again, it's a sense of communal joy, isn't it? And everybody mucking in and having a good time, rather than it being about something that's good for you. Exactly. And there's a sense of a real listening, of people actually really being able to listen and focus. I remember going to hear Hugh McDermott read. A flower bed like hearing the bagpipes. The fine black earth has clotted into sharp masses, as if the frost and not the sun had come. It holds many lines of flowers. First faint rose peony... These are great names, though, Norman McCaig and Liz Lockhead and Tom Lennon and all these people who you were hearing reading their own verse.

16:40Was that very inspiring for you as a young wannabe poet? Oh, it was massively inspiring. It made things possible, actually. It opened doors. I think you can only sometimes be what you've had a chance to see. And if you've never had a chance to see it or hear it, it's actually quite difficult to fashion on your own. So I think they provided me with a little magic key. Were you always in the audience at the Institute or did you ever get up on stage and share your own poetry? I was always in the audience then. Although I started to, I think I won a poetry competition when I was 16 and then suddenly I was in the Third Eye Institute, which was another wonderful place in Glasgow and Suckey Hall Street.

17:17And then I had to read my poem out loud and I was the only young person that was picked. All the rest were adults. So that was quite exciting. That was the first poem that you ever performed? Yes, it was. Yeah, although I used to perform in my house at the party socials. My mum would get me to read a poem that I wrote called, it's called Adoption, which was like, my mummy bought me a shop. My mummy says I was a lovely baby. You and mummy had to take you. She'd no choice. My mummy picked me. I was the best. And it went on like that. And then my mummy's the best mummy in the world. OK, ended with.

17:49So she'd always get me to eat this and go, lovely, isn't it? Which was quite funny. And what about the first time you were there at the Highland Institute then? What was that poem? Could you remember? Yeah, it was a poem about hiding. It wasn't particularly autobiographical, but it was a poem about somebody who was in a domestic situation that had to hide so much from herself that she just became a she even to herself. But we don't know what the situation was that she was hiding from. No, no, you don't know in the poem. I think I liked writing poems that were mysterious to me in some way or poems that were about big events that happened that had changed me that I wanted to understand better.

18:27I wrote a big long poem about this motorbike accident I had and I took that to Alastair Gray and it was three pages long, that poem And this is a really awful accident You were, what, 16, 17 or something? Yeah, yes I was, yeah In 1978 What happened? I went into the back of a car that wasn't indicating and then I kind of tried to swerve to miss it and hit another one in the oncoming direction and then apparently, by this time I'm unconscious but apparently I went over a third one right over the roof of it and I rolled hundreds of yards and landed right outside the graveyard on Kirkentillough Road.

19:01My mum said we could have just thrown you over the wall, but it was a changing thing. Changed you in what way? Well, before that I'd done a lot of running. I was a Scottish Go Girl Championship runner and I used to train five days a week and I was really obsessed with... It just made me, because it was a year and a half before I walked again. And you broke your leg? Yes, broke the leg, compounded to be amphibia. and it was a year and a half before I walked again so it gave me an awful lot of time to read and to write. A lot of people who have those sort of life-changing accidents that are so physically painful sometimes don't want to even think about them but you actually memorialise it.

19:40What, to make sense of what happened? I think that's what I do. I mean, I think a lot of writers do that, that to make sense of things, they go right in for the jugular, as it were. You don't really shy away from things And in the telling of it, in the writing of it, there's some release from it. Because otherwise, if you have something that you just can't go there, you can't look at, you can't revisit, it can actually start to rule you. So I think the writing of something, anything difficult, manages to cut through it in some way. So that process of recovery and recuperation, it gave you a lot of time to read, but also to write.

20:17What about your parents? Were they very encouraging of your poetic ambitions? I think they were. They loved the fact that I wrote, but I don't think they ever thought I would be a poet. They always used to say that and they were always surprised by it. I think they thought I might be an English teacher and that's probably the most that they thought I could be. It surprised them. What does poetry offer you as the primary means of creative expression? I think it's such a complex form. I think the beauty of a poem is that it can seem to be very, very personal. It can have lots and lots of different voices, but that that personal experience that you might write about, whether it's grief or whatever, love, then becomes something that other people take on as theirs.

21:02And the initial mystery of it is you can never quite tell how a poem is going to end. It always has to surprise you in some way. You don't know if it's going to be any good. You don't know if you're going to be able to finish it. Having written one poem doesn't help you write another. so you're constantly asking yourself can you do this which is probably the thing that I dislike the most about being a writer the fact that you don't just go into your job and think you can do it like other people if you're an open heart surgeon you presumably go in there and know that you're going to be able to do that Do you have self-doubt then as a poet?

21:36Yeah I think you do, I think you have to have as much self-doubt as you have self-confidence I think most writers do In 2016 you were appointed as Macca, the Scottish Poet Laureate succeeding one of your heroes, Liz Lockhead, I think. What did that role mean to you and the appointment? It's difficult to put into words exactly what it meant to me because it was such a big honour, probably the greatest honour of my life and I don't expect to get another one like that. But also beyond that, it meant that rather than go from somebody where people are always asking you where you're from, even in your own country, it meant that I finally, in my 50s, felt like I belonged to my country and it felt like an extraordinarily long journey to have been on but I finally felt that I did belong.

22:19You know, I'd go to places like the Isle of Uist or Sky or wherever and people would know that you were the macker and they'd stop you and they'd go, it's the macker! And so there was quite a lot of excitement about being the macker. It was quite a public role. But that validation is what I guess the role did for you. What did you feel you could do for the role of macker? What was, as you saw it, the prime responsibility that you had? I felt that I could take poetry out to the people. I could take it to unexpected places and I could just try and cover the length and the breadth of the country and that I could write poems about subjects that might make an impact.

22:55So I wrote a poem for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. I wrote one for the opening of the Queensbury Bridge. But really, I just wanted to be able to, the macker is a role where you just share your enthusiasm for poetry and help nurture other people's opportunities and potential. You were appointed in 2016 during a very turbulent political time. How did the times affect the poetry that you were writing, bearing in mind the Brexit vote was 2016 and you were serving, I think, for five years, weren't you? So that took you right into the kind of Covid period and everything. I think it changed a lot because the country suddenly felt very different.

23:33It felt very different actually going from England to Scotland, crossing the border. I mean, in Scotland, 62 % of people voted to remain. So the two countries suddenly felt very much more different than they'd ever felt to me. But I started to write a lot of poems that were in my last book, Mayday, and they were poems about protest and about all the different ways that there have been of protesting over all the different years. That Mayday march was a long march. You said you wanted to go behind the YCL. You chanted all the way down the Brumelaw to Queen's Park in a green dress, brown shoes.