Inspired by IBARW: in praise of Jackie Kay
I was trying to attempt some kind of post about local, American and transnational manifestations of racism and antiracist practice, but my typing fingers want me to tell you about one of my favourite writers first. I'm not sure whether this could count as a proper ibarw post, but it's a great bundle of fangirl squee for a poet of colour and has some discussion of racism in it, so... maybe it can at least be loosely affiliated?
***
Jackie Kay grew up just over the Glasgow city limit from where I did. She's a lesbian and a woman of colour, neither of which are exactly commonplace in Bishopbriggs, and there were no blue plaques on the walls to celebrate her there; I didn't find out who she was until I had moved away from Glasgow and entered feminist and queer circles, and I can still feel the thrill of astonished joy I experienced when I realised exactly where she was from.
She's not your typical Scottish poet. And yet she is vehemently, almost defiantly Scottish.Scotland is having a heart attack
Scotland is having a heart attack
Scotland is having a heart attack
The Broons' Bairn's black. ("a skipping rhyme" from the collection Off Colour, published by Bloodaxe in 1998)
The Broons, fact fans, is a comic strip about a couthy salt-of-the-earth Scots family which appears in The Sunday Post every week along with Oor Wullie. Most Scottish children receive the annuals from an aunt, uncle or grandparent for Christmas every year; they are icons of Scottish culture. This is the Bairn (meaning child, or baby; the character doesn't ever actually get named, as I recall):
She doesn't look terribly white, does she? Kay places herself as the Broons' Bairn, in this poem; she was a black bairn adopted into a white Scots family, writes often in Scots, and likes to give Scotland a heart attack by playing fast and loose with the bairns' comics heritage. In Off Colour there are poems about Ma Broon visiting a therapist and about Ma and Paw Broon's sex life; it's not just great poetry, it's critical fanfic on the comic characters I grew up with, and I don't get to see much of that.
I grew up near where Kay grew up, 20 or so years later, and I don't recall a single African- or Caribbean-descended schoolmate or neighbour. Kay's poetry, particularly in the book The Adoption Papers, speaks beautifully and profoundly to the isolating experience that growing into a queer woman of colour in that environment must have been. I'm not sure how fictional the voice in The Adoption Papers is, but the seemingly autobiographical speaker in the poetic narrative collected there tells of radical leftist parents who introduced her to the work of Angela Davis and of the blank looks her "free Angela Davis" badge got her at school, as well as to the overt and covert workings of racism and homophobia in that white, heteronormative world, not excluding her loving and tenderly portrayed adoptive parents who meant only the best. I brought her up as my own
As I would any other child
Colour matters to the nutters
But she says my daughter says
It matters to her. ("Mother Poem")
Kay's most famous work is the novel Trumpet, which is well known as a queer and/or transgender novel. It's a marvellous, lyrical book which rewrites the story of American jazz trumpet player Billy Tipton (who was 'discovered' after his death to have been female-bodied, and whose wife claimed that she 'never knew') into a black Scottish trumpet player named Joss Moody, telling his story after his death through his wife's grief and his son's angry search for racial and familial origins as he seeks Oedipal confrontation with a father who had no penis. At an academic conference I attended recently I was excited to be on a panel with someone who was giving a paper on Trumpet, and deeply disappointed when it turned out that all she could see in the novel was a masculinist Oedipal narrative, with no room for the complexity of nonnormative masculinity or the search for a black Scottishness which too many would still consider to be an oxymoron.
Kay writes about politics and intimacy, and in her work one invariably shines through the other. Many of her stories and narrative poems, about mothers, daughters, sons, lovers, bring tears to my eyes, and if I weren't about to fall asleep I'd give detailed accounts of more of them. Her work pulls me back to my hometown, the place I left behind as soon as I could; to the broad Glaswegian I'll always understand but which I can barely speak or write, having left it as far behind as I could in my first attempts to escape from my own (white) queer geeky alienation. I find myself over and over in her work, sometimes to my surprise; Kay, like very few other Scottish writers, shows me the good as well as the bad in what I -- more petulant and privileged than I could see at the time -- ran away from as a young adult. If I was not myself, I would be somebody else.
But actually I am somebody else.
I have been somebody else all my life.
It's no laughing matter going about the place
all the time being somebody else:
people mistake you; you mistake yourself. ("Somebody Else")
When I began writing this post, I planned to quote Kay only as a brief illustration of a larger point. Somehow I have ended up with this post instead, and I'm still not totally sure what my larger point was. I'll try to get to it tomorrow.
***
Jackie Kay grew up just over the Glasgow city limit from where I did. She's a lesbian and a woman of colour, neither of which are exactly commonplace in Bishopbriggs, and there were no blue plaques on the walls to celebrate her there; I didn't find out who she was until I had moved away from Glasgow and entered feminist and queer circles, and I can still feel the thrill of astonished joy I experienced when I realised exactly where she was from.
She's not your typical Scottish poet. And yet she is vehemently, almost defiantly Scottish.Scotland is having a heart attack
Scotland is having a heart attack
Scotland is having a heart attack
The Broons' Bairn's black. ("a skipping rhyme" from the collection Off Colour, published by Bloodaxe in 1998)
The Broons, fact fans, is a comic strip about a couthy salt-of-the-earth Scots family which appears in The Sunday Post every week along with Oor Wullie. Most Scottish children receive the annuals from an aunt, uncle or grandparent for Christmas every year; they are icons of Scottish culture. This is the Bairn (meaning child, or baby; the character doesn't ever actually get named, as I recall):
She doesn't look terribly white, does she? Kay places herself as the Broons' Bairn, in this poem; she was a black bairn adopted into a white Scots family, writes often in Scots, and likes to give Scotland a heart attack by playing fast and loose with the bairns' comics heritage. In Off Colour there are poems about Ma Broon visiting a therapist and about Ma and Paw Broon's sex life; it's not just great poetry, it's critical fanfic on the comic characters I grew up with, and I don't get to see much of that.
I grew up near where Kay grew up, 20 or so years later, and I don't recall a single African- or Caribbean-descended schoolmate or neighbour. Kay's poetry, particularly in the book The Adoption Papers, speaks beautifully and profoundly to the isolating experience that growing into a queer woman of colour in that environment must have been. I'm not sure how fictional the voice in The Adoption Papers is, but the seemingly autobiographical speaker in the poetic narrative collected there tells of radical leftist parents who introduced her to the work of Angela Davis and of the blank looks her "free Angela Davis" badge got her at school, as well as to the overt and covert workings of racism and homophobia in that white, heteronormative world, not excluding her loving and tenderly portrayed adoptive parents who meant only the best. I brought her up as my own
As I would any other child
Colour matters to the nutters
But she says my daughter says
It matters to her. ("Mother Poem")
Kay's most famous work is the novel Trumpet, which is well known as a queer and/or transgender novel. It's a marvellous, lyrical book which rewrites the story of American jazz trumpet player Billy Tipton (who was 'discovered' after his death to have been female-bodied, and whose wife claimed that she 'never knew') into a black Scottish trumpet player named Joss Moody, telling his story after his death through his wife's grief and his son's angry search for racial and familial origins as he seeks Oedipal confrontation with a father who had no penis. At an academic conference I attended recently I was excited to be on a panel with someone who was giving a paper on Trumpet, and deeply disappointed when it turned out that all she could see in the novel was a masculinist Oedipal narrative, with no room for the complexity of nonnormative masculinity or the search for a black Scottishness which too many would still consider to be an oxymoron.
Kay writes about politics and intimacy, and in her work one invariably shines through the other. Many of her stories and narrative poems, about mothers, daughters, sons, lovers, bring tears to my eyes, and if I weren't about to fall asleep I'd give detailed accounts of more of them. Her work pulls me back to my hometown, the place I left behind as soon as I could; to the broad Glaswegian I'll always understand but which I can barely speak or write, having left it as far behind as I could in my first attempts to escape from my own (white) queer geeky alienation. I find myself over and over in her work, sometimes to my surprise; Kay, like very few other Scottish writers, shows me the good as well as the bad in what I -- more petulant and privileged than I could see at the time -- ran away from as a young adult. If I was not myself, I would be somebody else.
But actually I am somebody else.
I have been somebody else all my life.
It's no laughing matter going about the place
all the time being somebody else:
people mistake you; you mistake yourself. ("Somebody Else")
When I began writing this post, I planned to quote Kay only as a brief illustration of a larger point. Somehow I have ended up with this post instead, and I'm still not totally sure what my larger point was. I'll try to get to it tomorrow.