Soul Search |
The Post
Cork, Ireland
2010-09-05
Nadine O’Regan
When poet and novelist Jackie Kay started the search for her birth parents, she didn’t realise how traumatic a journey it would be, though she doesn’t regret doing it.
Jackie Kay met her birth father for the first time in a hotel room in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2003. Then in her early 40s,Kay was expectant, excited and nervous. She had brought him a present, an expensive watch.
However, before they could talk, her father, a born-again Christian, said there was something he had to do. For more than an hour, he prayed, frantically whirling, wild-eyed, like a dervish around the room, asking the Lord to cleanse the sin before him.
In her new memoir, Red Dust Road, which paints a vivid portrait of her search for her birth parents, Kay, an atheist, describes how her tears began to flood down her face as she understood that the sin being referred to was herself. ‘‘I realise with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin, me as impure, me the bastard, illegitimate.”…
…Assembled in a kind of jigsaw manner – with events nipping back and forth across the years – Red Dust Road combines a compelling search story with a vivid portrait of struggling to deal with issues of race and roots. Long-term fans of Kay’s work will spy occasional references to her break-up with her lover of 15 years, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and get a sense of her current life: living in a terraced house in Chorlton, Manchester, teaching part time at the University of Newcastle and bringing up a university-age son…
…Born in 1961 to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Kay was adopted at the age of five months, and grew up as the daughter of two colourful, outspoken, lifelong socialists: her adoptive father was a member of the Communist Party and her mother was the Scottish secretary of CND…
…Absorbing the fact of her adoption wasn’t the only issue Kay had to face during her childhood. She was also mixed race in 1970s Glasgow – ‘‘Being black in a white country makes you a stranger to yourself’’ – and gay at a time when nobody was allowed to be.
‘‘We live in a society where people have civil partnerships and people understand what the word ‘homophobia’ means and gay people have children openly,” she says. ‘‘But when I told my mum, that was really unusual, and she was really quite shocked.”
Kay began writing poetry at the age of 12, as a response to the racist names she was called and the beatings she received. ‘‘I found writing to be a sanctuary. I’d write a little poem as revenge.”…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: adoption, Jackie Kay, Nadine O’Regan